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| {{a|devil| | | {{freeessay|design|bring your own premises|{{image|Home office|jpg|The [[JC]]’s [[home office]] yesterday}}}} |
| [[File:Home office.jpg|450px|thumb|center|The [[JC]]’s [[home office]] yesterday]]
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| }}The ''reductio ad absurdam'' — sorry, my mistake: I mean ''logical conclusion'' — of [[middle management]]’s generational headlong stampede towards [[outsourcing]] all those messy externalities that are a by-product of needing [[meatware]] to carry out your business objectives.
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| For all the — well, ''chat'' — [[chatbot]]s haven’t yet managed to supplant those cretinous lumps who are needed push whatever buttons must be pushed to propel the great steampunk corporation forward. But now they’re in danger of infecting each other with fatal illness, we must find a safe remove at which these oafs can operate without accidentally murdering each other. ''Eureka''! They can stay in their own homes!
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| Now there was a time where employment in the professions afforded status in society, and one had the accoutrements to match: an office with a mahogany desk, an elephant’s foot umbrella-stand in the corner, a minute secretary, an executive model ''Dictaphone'', and so on.
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| As management [[dogma]] has systematically eroded these privileges in the name of cost reduction, the poor professional has been denuded of her status. Increasingly, she has been expected to supply her ''own'' accoutrements: do-it-yourself typing; [[bring your own device]] — and the same time that once commodious office became communal, then lost its door, then its walls, diminished to a dedicated space along a row, and most recently has become a conditional promise of a sanitised space at a [[telescreen]] somewhere in the building, assuming enough people are out sick or on holiday.
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| While these progressions undoubtedly looked magnificent on that [[PowerPoint]] deck the [[COO]] presents to the [[steerco]], from the [[meatware]]’s eye view, living them out in person has been less edifying.
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| Something important might have been lost among the winking green [[RAG status]] signals on the workstream update [[dashboard]]. But — the [[pragmatist’s prayer]],<ref>[[Pragmatist’s prayer|Andrew Dice Clay]] version.</ref> and all that.
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| But then, from ''nowhere'', [[Coronavirus]] bounced us all into a step further: now employees don’t get an office ''at all'', but have to ''supply their own''.
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| As as aside, pity the poor, perma-prepared cub scouts from the [[business continuity management]] team — who have been waiting for literally decades for just such a catastrophe to spring into action and finally reveal their worth, but whom [[coronavirus]] has largely ''snookered''. Just when you need it, their magisterium — aka some grimy, sprawling warehouse near Luton Airport — was no more suitable for disaster recovery than the premises in EC4!
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| Instead, employees were sent ''home''. By and large, and to their great surprise, they found this rather agreeable. Suddenly the privacy, the space, the peace & quiet, the Elephant’s foot and the mahogany desk were back from nowhere.
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| The question now: is there any going back?
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| {{sa}}
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| *[[The new normal]]
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| {{ref}}
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