The year is 1996. My dad “works from home” for a very small company, but that means that he doesn’t go to his boss’s office (or home), it means that he does paperwork from home. Most of the time, he is visiting client sites. I am at home two half-days per week, so if a delivery or IT site visit is needed, I will usually be the one scheduling it and answering the door. I also answer the phones on those two half-days.

The phone rings.

Me: “Hello?”

Boss’s Wife: “Oh, hello, [My Name], I didn’t know you’d be there. I expected the voicemail. I wanted to leave a message for your dad.”

Me: “Okay, I’ll hang up and you can call back, then.”

Boss’s Wife: “But how will you know if it’s me?”

Me: “Well, if it isn’t you, I’ll answer.”

Boss’s Wife: “…”

During the global health crisis, my boyfriend’s job goes fully remote (as many jobs did). One day, he’s presenting in a meeting when he sees that his grandma is calling him. He ignores it since he’s not just IN the meeting but leading it. His dad calls, and he ignores it. Then, his sister calls. She is a serial texter, and he doesn’t know the last time she called him.

Boyfriend: “I’m sorry. Can you excuse me for a minute? My phone has been blowing up and now my sister is calling me; I think there may be a family emergency going on.”

He quickly mutes his meeting and answers the phone.

Sister: “Where are you?”

Boyfriend: “Uh, at home? Working? Actually, in the middle of leading an important meeting?”

Sister: “So, just to confirm, you were not just in a car accident because you were driving drunk?”

Boyfriend: “What?!”

It turned out that his grandparents got a quintessential scam call: a “lawyer” was calling because [Boyfriend] “had been arrested and needed bail before they’d let him go to the hospital”. They had someone crying in the background pretending to be him; it was apparently pretty scary.

Luckily, his grandma was already skeptical because the person pretending to be [Boyfriend] said something about, “Dad is in a meeting so he can’t help me,” and [Boyfriend]’s dad had just been furloughed. As soon as his grandma said one of her sons was a lawyer, they hung up right away. They all were 99% sure it was a scam, but they couldn’t relax until they heard from [Boyfriend].

I teach high school in a district where cheating is rampant. Thanks to a year of hybrid learning, where half of the students were in the class at a time, we have built up a large collection of online worksheets. These are Google Docs where students copy the templates and then fill them in with their own answers. The students share their online versions with the teacher and submit them via our web-based Learning Management System (LMS). 

As I’ve gotten older, I find it easier to read documents online rather than in student’s handwriting on paper. This method is also great for students who constantly lose homework papers. However, the downside is that students find it easier than ever to copy online homework. 

The typical shortcut is to ask a friend to share their worksheet. Clever students will view it, write their own answers in their own words on their own worksheets, and then have their friends un-share the original. (These students are not as clever as they think, though, because the worksheets do not count for much and their lack of preparation shows on their tests.)

One time, [Student #1] asked [Student #2] to share his work. [Student #2], of course, shared with his friend, but [Student #1] did not fulfill his part of the social contract. He simply copied and pasted the answers in the same exact words. Our school gives all participants the same penalties for academic integrity violations. The look of consternation and surprise on [Student #2]’s face when he realized that his friend’s laziness had gotten them both zeroes on the work he did was priceless. 

An even less careful student turned in a complete copy of her friend’s worksheet — which I had already graded. I’m sure she meant to remove the grade marks… and her friend’s name from the top of the page. 

The most memorable effort from last year involved a trio of students who were assigned a group worksheet in class. They spent class socializing, and then one student went home and did the work, slapped everyone’s name on it, and turned it in. This might have worked… had he remembered to share it with his partners. The students claimed they had done the work together over FaceTime. Google Docs records the times that documents are edited. Two out of three sets of parents found it easier to believe their kids cheated than to believe they were FaceTiming physics with each other at 11:00 pm on a Wednesday night.

Related:
If You’re Gonna Cheat, You Gotta Cheat Smart

There are certain jobs that you simply cannot do working from home. Managing the actual computer hardware and cables so that everyone else can work from home is one of those.

Fortunately, the woman who manages the servers and equipment for my workplace actually volunteered to keep working from the office. When lockdown ended and we moved to a part-work-from-home-by-agreement model, she opted for “ad-hoc”, which means that she continued to work in the office.

A few people commented that [Hardware Worker] should work from home at least one day a week, but she brushed them off saying that her neck hurt when she did so.

I didn’t think anything of this comment until the day came that [Hardware Worker] was sick and chose to work from home. She video-called into our meeting with the executive directors with a beautiful white fur scarf around her neck.

And when the chief information officer opened the meeting, the fur scarf lifted its head to meow at us.

I was in close to a dozen meetings for the week or so [Hardware Worker] was at home. Her cat — who is an absolutely enormous boy that I swear must be part Maine Coon — never once moved from her shoulders the entire time.

Allow me to tell you a story about a big (well, big in my country) company that decided, during a very well-known worldwide event that had it scrambling to send its workers to home offices that, hey, our offices are empty, and we don’t need them. Let’s sell them!

That part was the smart part of the whole deal.

But since no good things last forever, that global event eventually ended, and that company decided that it would be awesome to push their workers back into the offices. Not that any workers were too fond of that idea, mind you, but apparently, the remaining offices were losing value and the C-Levels didn’t like that, so let’s stuff the workers back into the offices so we can pretend these offices still have value!

Alas: we only had about 60% of our office floor space left.

So, the bigwigs hatched a great idea: 40% home office for everyone! This was announced with much fanfare at an all-hands meeting at the office. (Yes, the obvious irony was lost on them.) Why we should celebrate 40% home office when we had 100% before was also not exactly something anyone below C-Level understood, but hey, free food and drinks, so let’s humor the dorks — I mean, the C-Levels.

At this point, I already knew I was leaving the company for one that offered 80% home office. (And I was by far not the only one… but I get ahead of myself.) And nobody is more free to voice their opinion than someone who you hold no sway over. So, I had zero problem expressing myself, albeit presumably originally only to a coworker.

Me: “This is probably the stupidest idea in the history of this company.”

The CEO speaks up from behind me. He’s very obviously the source of the idea, judging by his reaction.

CEO: “What? Who are you to say that?”

Me: “You’ll see in a week. Two, tops.”

It didn’t even take two weeks. Ponder this: you get to work from home two days a week. Which days would those be? Take into account that there were many people who were “week-commuters”, i.e., they had an apartment in town where they stayed during the week and returned home to their family for the weekend.

The predictable outcome was that Monday and Friday, the place didn’t look much different than it (probably) looked during The Event, but Tuesday through Thursday, you had better come before 7:30 am, or you were hard-pressed to find a desk. And yes, of course, they were “hot desking”, the desk-equivalent to the previous torture for employees, i.e., open floor plan Hell.

C-Level’s response when asked for a solution: “You’ll figure something out among yourself to make this work.”

Well, we did. About 25% of the employees quit within a month. Another 25% quit when they noticed that they were supposed to pick up the slack with no extra pay and the demand for unannounced overtime. 

So, that company is now hobbling along with about 50% of the staff they’d need, and even back when I was still there, we were working on a skeleton crew, so I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like now. They’re pretty desperate to hire, but with a 60% office mandate, this isn’t going to fly in an industry that has a hard time attracting any talent with less than 80% work-from-home.

They could technically now demand 100% return-to-office; they sure have the office space for that. But I guess if they do, they will find that the rest of their staff will desert them.