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Pandemics and Epidemiology (COVID-19, monkeypox, etc.)

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Moderator notice: Please do not ask for medical advice in this forum!

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    Suggestions for self-isolation/quarantine activities 
A list of things you can do if you are feeling cabin fever. Feel free to add to this.

    Information 
First of all, wiki has an article under "2019–20 coronavirus pandemic".

While the outbreak started around New Year's Day (12/31), it's picking up steam around the Asia-Pacific region especially since Mainland Chinese people tend to travel a lot.

For reference, the BNO Newsroom twitter has a special feed for any info on the coronavirus:

https://twitter.com/bnodesk?lang=en


The WHO has page about COVID-19 and any other concerns people may have. I suggest peeps go to the Q&A page to check for official details.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses

Edited by nombretomado on Jun 3rd 2020 at 3:21:48 AM

Redmess Redmess from Netherlands Since: Feb, 2014
Redmess
#25626: Feb 25th 2024 at 4:55:35 AM

And, lets face it, a lot of people work better when there is some amount of oversight of their work. It's a lot easier to allow yourself to slack off when your manager doesn't occasionally check in on you in person.

Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#25627: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:10:46 AM

Management failure to check in on people is a failure of management. If your managers are unable to monitor staff they aren’t physically overlooking them they’re bad managers.

I’ve had this discussion at work with other union reps and one pointed out that she knows plenty of people perfectly capable of sitting on their arse doing nothing in the office the same as from home.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25628: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:20:26 AM

At work, if someone walks by your desk you can see you’re not working. (Also, doing nothing at work is way more boring than doing something you enjoy at home.) What I found us that, at home I could still focus on a specific task, but when I finished the obvious stuff I would incline to feeling like I was done, and get distracted. At work, there’s nothing else to do, so I find something else to start, some other project to do prep work for.

One of the things people liked about WFH was that they hoped it would lead to more results-based rather than time-based evaluation. The flip side of that is that if someone working from says “this will take me two days”, and it actually takes one day and they spend the other day watching Netflix, the manager has no way of knowing. If someone has a wide rante of tasks, the manager isn’t going to know what’s a normal time for every single one of them.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 25th 2024 at 5:25:47 AM

Redmess Redmess from Netherlands Since: Feb, 2014
Redmess
#25629: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:21:09 AM

My manager did kind of lose track of me during the lockdown summer, so there's that.

Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25630: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:28:19 AM

I became a supervisor in the middle of the pandemic, and I had no idea what I was doing and had trouble keeping track even of the couple of people who reported to me, esp. when my supervising duties got swamped by other work. Like the person equivalence of object impermanence. I’m aware that doesn’t say much for me as a supervisor, but if we were working next to each other I think it would have been easier.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25631: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:52:13 AM

You'd be surprised how easy it is to not notice what people are doing when they're right next to you or across from you.

It's even easier if the manager has their own office and spends most of their time holed up in it.

One advantage of WFH is the lack of a commute. Who the fuck enjoys traffic?

Edited by M84 on Feb 25th 2024 at 9:53:13 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised
Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25632: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:55:11 AM

Only the high-level managers get their own enclosed (i.e., with walls and a door) offices in my workplace, most managers don’t.

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25633: Feb 25th 2024 at 5:59:10 AM

You want to know what the actual reason behind companies so desperately trying to reverse work from home policies is? Here’s a hint: it’s got absolutely fuck all to do with quality of work. Like, to the degree that executives occasionally say outright that they’d rather take a hit to productivity than let people work from home.

It’s because office rents are extremely expensive and extremely long term and it’s nearly impossible to get out of an office rental agreement without going bankrupt first. If a company has 8 years left on their 20 million a year office space rent, going work from home leaves them with a 20 million a year bill they can’t get out of. So they try and pressure everyone into working in the office so they can feel like the money is going into something, instead of like, trying to do something about the rent itself.

And that’s before stuff like middle managers being really against wfh because they don’t actually do anything and wfh makes it much more obvious or executives being completely mentally inflexible about what counts as work.

Some jobs can’t be done wfh, which is fine, but believing executives with a financial incentive completely unrelated to the actual work to make people come to the office that wfh is always inferior is unbearably naive.

The truth is that different people have different priorities and needs and that, if possible, letting people decide for themselves tends to have the best outcome. But no one does that because they assume everyone will just pick wfh. Which…if they do that, it might be worth looking into why everyone hates the office that much.

Redmess Redmess from Netherlands Since: Feb, 2014
Redmess
#25634: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:33:41 AM

I don't thin people should just get to decide for themselves, it should always be discussed with your employer first.

And maintaining office culture is a fairly legitimate reason to limit wfh.

Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25635: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:35:57 AM

And what exactly is so great about "office culture"?

As was pointed out, it's more about not wanting to waste the money you spent on the office space. It's a Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Edited by M84 on Feb 25th 2024 at 10:36:37 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25636: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:37:15 AM

Companies that allow their own employees to choose their wfh frequency tend to have much better productivity.

And honestly, tell me you don’t have much experience with office culture without telling me that you don’t have much experience with office culture.

It’s a thing that American office culture and places that directly copy it tend to be extremely soul destroying. It’s a lot of “how dare you think you’re a unique individual, you’re just a cog in our machine”, it’s a lot of the commute making you want to die because it’s too long and it eats up the precious time you have outside of work, it’s a lot of managers not caring about your wellbeing and just getting mad that you’re having health issues and need some time off.

Office culture fucking sucks. It’s like companies going “but we’re a family!” No, it’s not a family, it’s a bunch of people being paid to do the work for other people with more money.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25637: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:38:35 AM

Office culture is just a way of tricking you into thinking you owe your employer more than the actual work they hired you to do.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25638: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:47:09 AM

[up][up] Apart from the commute, that sounds like a problem with the culture of a company, regardless of work location, not a consequence of working in an office.

[up] How is that? I would think it would be the opposite, in that the amount of time you are supposed to be working (e.g, 8hr/day, 5 days/week) is at least clear and cleanly demarcated, making it identifiable if you are doing more than that. Work-from-home removes the boundary in a way that can make it hard to get away from work.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 25th 2024 at 6:50:09 AM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25639: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:48:55 AM

Thing is, the good employers are the ones who allow WFH in the first place.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25640: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:49:05 AM

Yep. One of my managers loves it when people are in the office, because he can corner them and badger them into working overtime without good cause. He usually tries to bully people into agreeing before revealing what the actual task is. He hates the wfh days because it’s a lot easier to ignore a chat and just keep saying “So, what’s the task?” And a lot of people just shutting off their computers at precisely 5pm because he’s not physically there to follow them around and distract them.

And yeah, a good company will be like “okay, so what works best for the employees and productivity, because happy employees are productive employees.” A bad company will be like “we have to pay rent, force everyone back to the office regardless of productivity. Fire anyone who is unable to. We do not care about the morale impact this will have.”

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 25th 2024 at 9:53:25 AM

Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25641: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:55:12 AM

That’s a bad setup.

I don’t like people being requiered to come into the office when it’s not necessary - and my workplace is currently doing that and it’s frustrating - but I didn’t feel any difference in terms of how my supervisors treated me as a person between WFH and office work, so I question the idea that being in an office creates an inherently worse culture. I’m in the public sector, though.

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25642: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:56:43 AM

Yeah, public and private sectors tend to handle things differently. The public sector can absolutely have toxic work culture, but a lot of the normal tricks bad private sector employers use don’t apply in the public sector.

Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25643: Feb 25th 2024 at 6:59:26 AM

The frustrating parts about work in the public sector, in my experience at least, are less about ill-treatment than about absolute mountains of red tape and consultation between different groups that can make it very hard to get things done efficiently.

Being able to show up at someone’s desk and say, “hey, how is this thing I sent you for review three weeks ago going?” was a benefit, IMO.

Redmess Redmess from Netherlands Since: Feb, 2014
Redmess
#25644: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:00:32 AM

Okay, I'm not talking about toxic US office culture here. And just because you guys are cynical about US office culture doesn't mean office culture can't be a good thing. We have a great office culture at my place of work.

Also, don't just write off all companies just because yours sucks.

Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25645: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:02:38 AM

Reminder that Zendervai is Canadian and Silasw is from the UK. Don't just assume we're all from the USA here.

Edited by M84 on Feb 25th 2024 at 11:03:51 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25646: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:04:18 AM

[up][up]Great, then you’re extremely lucky and you should recognize that your office culture being good means absolutely nothing about every single other company on the planet. Your personal experience is that one company is good. Do not tell people off for saying their experience is bad.

And letting people choose how to handle wfh for themselves (when possible) really does seem to be the best approach. Because a lot of people really don’t do well in office environments and other people really don’t do well working at home. So instead of forcing one option on everyone, let everyone choose between them. (Again, when possible, a lot of jobs cannot be done from home and that’s fine, as long as the company puts in at least a bare minimum of effort to avoid the work culture being unpleasant.)

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 25th 2024 at 10:05:57 AM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#25647: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:06:07 AM

And my personal experience working at a place with an office building has actually been pretty good. I don't need to personally suffer a problem to acknowledge that the problem exists.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#25648: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:20:40 AM

The “force working in the office regardless of the hit to productivity and morale because of the rent” thing is also like, actually really common in the US and Canada too? And in the UK, to a lesser degree.

Any company with a mindset like that is likely to have a work culture that isn’t that great, because it means the executives aren’t paying attention to what makes for the best productivity.

On top of that, the management never admit that it’s the reason. If my bosses were like “yeah, we do this because of the rent”, I wouldn’t be happy with it, but I’d at least respect that they’re telling the truth. A bunch of gibberish about “axiomatic work praxis” (actual phrase they used) and telling people that no one is allowed to say the WFH policy needs fixing when they’re taking suggestions (that they never follow anyway) means that they’re clearly lying or trying to bury that it’s just the rent and they get that they don’t want to look greedy but don’t get that they need to actually try to make things work better.

And this is *common*. There’s a reason “corporate speak” is a thing and it’s companies trying to use misleading words and phrasing and near gibberish to distract employees from realizing how much they’re being exploited.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 25th 2024 at 10:22:03 AM

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#25649: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:24:00 AM

For places that have bad transportation systems (Africa and some Asian countries for instance), WFH is a god send.

The two persons in fam do acknowledge this problem.

Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#25650: Feb 25th 2024 at 7:31:33 AM

[up][up]Oh yeah, we get the meaningless jargon too, it’s incredibly annoying.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 25th 2024 at 7:32:29 AM


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