Throughout the pandemic, there have been occasional days here and there where for various reasons I had to go into the office to do something or get something. These always felt like lively events. Any valid non-grocery reason to leave the house was basically a field trip during quarantine. Yesterday though, I spent a full 8+ hours in the building working with people and around students (everyone is vaccinated and everyone was masked up) and it felt less like an exciting non-standard event and more like a preview of the kind of work life I will likely be returning to in the next few months and I have some mixed feelings about it.
This whole time in quarantine I have said that I am eager to (responsibly) get back to something that isn’t working from home. I have not really enjoyed it, but I guess I have become accustomed to it. It felt weird yesterday. It felt abnormal, because, of course, it was not normal.
Get this: I had to leave the house early because I had to GET GAS. I had to use my own time and my own money so that I could put gasoline into my little car SPECIFICALLY so that I could then spend MORE of my own free time driving TO WORK. I had to use MY OWN time and money in the service of a job that was not compensating me for any of that.
Now I know that I am simply describing the basic functioning of a capitalist society (ie: the exploitation of labor in every way that is still legal), but it felt unreasonable.
I already understand that I’m not going to get the system to change on this point, but I am describing how it FELT.
After 15 months of having to commit a lot of energy to drawing lines between what is work and what is life, only to have work consistently fail to respect those lines, it seems that as we begin to return to something like “normal”, all the little things from the Before Times are going to be thrown into a sharp focus as they start to return to our lives. I work to make money and then have to spend that money on a car and gas so that I can get to work so I can make money to pay for the car and the gas to get to work … etc.. That all seems like a pretty silly self-reinforcing behavior, doesn’t it?
I recognize that I’m not breaking any new intellectual ground here, and it isn’t even like I didn’t know any of this (I’ve read Adorno and Althusser, thank you very much), but it was just funny to LIVE it yesterday and — this is the important part — to be AWARE that I was living it as I was watching the gas pump tell me how much it was going to cost to get to work.
It gets even stranger when you zoom out to see the whole picture of the whole quarantine work-from-home situation. I have had two work computers plugged in and running for the last 15 months and I have used them both extensively in my work, but I don’t get a stipend in my paycheck to cover that additional cost of electricity. Meanwhile my actual office has been sitting empty with the lights off that whole time. The entire cost burden of what it takes to get my job done has been shifted from my institution to me. Multiply that amount of money against the number of people like me who have been paying it and I imagine you’ll end up with a staggering sum. An operational cost that has been forced onto the employee to ensure the continued operation of the institution. That just seems bonkers, right?
I want to be clear, I recognize how lucky I am to have kept a job this whole time and one that can be done from my apartment, but that being said, I still think these are worthwhile things to ponder.
Don’t even get me started on the amount of additional work people have been doing either because working from home is less efficient (so they need to work more to stay on top of workloads that were never reduced or even properly adjusted) or because the complete collapse of the work/life barrier has made it easier (ie: basically guaranteed) that work will flood out beyond its confines and drown people’s lives. This is PART of what has happened to me, but only part. I do know anecdotally from others though, that when you’re “home office” is a laptop on your living room couch, then you’re never really “off work” because while you’re supposed to be eating dinner and winding down, it is just SO EASY to check your email, then respond to some emails, and then do some research for some emails, and then before you know it you have accidentally worked an extra three hours when you were supposed to be sleeping. All the things that were sold to use as improvements in connectivity — that were supposed to improve our lives — have made existing just terrible. Where is the stipend in our paychecks for that?
I didn’t intend to go off on a Marxist rant or anything this morning, I’m just beginning to do the math on what it will mean to return to something like a normal work life. This is a calculation that many of us are going to have to do as we emerge from our quarantine caves into the blinding sunlight of the world we haven’t experienced in a very long time.
I really do hope that some changes come out of everything we have been through and everything we have learned about ourselves, our systems and each other. I hope that happens, I don’t know that I have faith it will.
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