Work-at-home habits of the lazy and soon-to-be unemployed: Pt. 2

More coping mechanisms until La Revolution:
- Hide: Shut off the video camera. There’s no way they’ll know if you’re listening or napping. Avoid engaging in conversations or sharing any ideas.
- Eat during important calls. Don’t worry, it won’t distract anyone.
- Instill a “micro-meeting” culture by taking breaks between online meetings. (5-minute meeting, 55-minute break to reset for the next meeting.)
- Reduce meeting attendees to one person: you. Meetings held under the tree in a lawn chair, looking at the clouds.
- Go from video conferences to old fashioned phone calls to no calls. Ignore your phone for a few hours.

But if you wish to prevent the revolution:
- Promote the “mostly off” work culture as an antidote to the “always on” spirit subtly condoned by management as necessary to be competitive.
- Reduce multi-tasking to single-tasking, specifically strategic snoozing.
- Reduce distraction. Compartmentalize work tasks and focus attention by ignoring everything but Ken Burns documentaries, binge watching “The Boys” on Amazon, and periodic viewing of squirrels riding surfboards on YouTube.
- Recover some of your pre-COVID work routine. Go into the office (if there still is one) sometimes if you can. During the inbound commute, laugh aloud to jokes heard on your favorite podcast and then collect the alarmed reactions of other passengers amid the eerie silence. When homeward bound, grunt for no reason at periodic internals and energetically scratch the same spot on your lower back each time. From the train station, drive homeward recklessly to burn off your day’s accumulated exasperation. Relieve stress and feelings of inadequacy by yelling at your family for no reason at the dinner table. It’s a taste of the good ol’ days. 

So what’s the point? COVID prompted the massive shift to work-at-home that is creating some new work culture twists. Let me restate that I LOVE working at home, it’s a jim-dandy way to earn a living. What’s not to like about it? But let’s see if the virtual workers opt for a velvet revolution after all.

Hello, holodeck!

Work-at-home habits of the lazy and soon-to-be unemployed: Pt. 1

The revolution cometh, people!

I just love working at home!
It’s fan~~tastic and has dramatically improved everything in my working life!
But, some folks…feel there is no joy in Virtualville.

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Characters, places and professed work-related anecdotes either are products of the author's limited imagination or are described mostly fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual, very dutiful company employees (such as the author), places or persons, living or dead, is, again, mostly coincidental. Especially if anyone in the company I work for actually reads this. 

At first, exclusively working from home sounded ideal: no commute, no traditional work attire, and a break from office intrigue and people politics. However, the COVID pandemic lingers with waves of new variants. So there’s no definitive end in sight to this massive shift from working in an office space to rocking it in a spare bedroom. Instead of in-person interactions or conversations, at-home workers constantly rely on computers and phones to stay connected. Many are hitting the wall of technology fatigue, too, because we’re all using tech in every aspect of our lives now. Thanks very much, Silicon Valley.

“Remotely working” is the appropriate description of productivity for many these days. The pandemic continues and business has decreed work-at-home to be “the new normal” for white-collar workers. But growing numbers of them are bored as shit by it all, and have embraced stealthy rebellion. It’s becoming a growing insurrection of the virtual class.

Why are NeoLuddites growing in number?
- You know the bean counters see cost savings so work-at-home will be continued with some flimsy justifications.

- When the highlight of the week is changing your background to try and amuse your co-workers, or you’re sending never-ending salvos of cheap emotion-laden GIFs…somethings gotta give.
- Too many, WAY too many eye-draining, soul-killing online meetings.
- People miss office pranks.

Some coping mechanisms until the revolution arrives:
- Secure your own dedicated office area at home with good ventilation and a beer fridge. Ignore spouse and kids’ claims for private space…this is w-o-r-k.
- Wear shorts not skivvies for Zoom conferences when it’s hot. Exception: if forced to attend a virtual Happy Hour, skivvies OK and, indeed, recommended.
- If in a Zoom meeting with only audio: make faces at the co-workers or external collaborators you despise without making a noise. They can still feel it.
- If in a Zoom meeting with video: randomly mute others claiming a bad line creates feedback. Click mute with imperceptible hand movements, but continue nodding with the conversation flow.

Courtesy of themarketoonist.com by Tom Fishburne

- Schedule a meeting, kick off the meeting by asking another attendee why they requested the meeting and topic, savor his or her baffled look and fumbling response, then with a patronizing tone re-schedule “so people can do their prep.” At the next meeting, check the result of the meeting with another meeting. All these meetings = no paper trail.

More to come...

Scenes from the sanctum

Two months left until the Tokyo Olympics! Yet Yokohama, Tokyo, Osaka and seven other densely populated prefectures are still under the government’s coronavirus “state of emergency.” In effect, it means people refrain from pleasure travel, restaurants and bars are told to close by 8 pm and not serve alcohol or offer karaoke. The measures are intended to prevent a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections. I predict a fifth wave of aggravated boredom soon. (It’s the lack of karaoke that may kill me. Kidding.)

Like the rest of the world the Rising Family™ has adjusted. We’ve been doing what we can to get out, stay active, and have fun. So in this post I’ll share a few photos from the first half of the year that give you a taste.

January: stayed home over the Christmas and New Year holidays. We were reacquainted with the delights of downtown such as Yokohama Harbor at night.

Our Yokohama life (Phase 2) is flavored with discovering new things about the city. We went to hatsumode -- the first Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine visit of the Japanese New Year – at an ancient shrine not far from our neighborhood. It just felt right to kick off the year that way. There were fewer people there than we expected.

Lady E. celebrated her birthday at home with a homemade cake. She’s in a down-to-earth mood these days. “Just family, please!"

Warm winters mean you can trek or hike trails year round. Jumping bean Marina was so full of energy she bounced down the trail to the car.

Every month my bud James Shalikashvili and I take off for day hike somewhere in the Tokyo-Yokohama-Chiba area. Here we are at the Miura peninsula; Mt. Fuji is across the bay on the right.

When I’ve had enough and need to get away, I take off for a day drive on my trusty 125cc scooter which magically enables me to skirt traffic jams. I find serene spots for downtime. This is the view I get from one of my favorite escape destinations: staring at the cedar tree boughs, sea salt in the air....