blogcutter

Isn't it odd how language, vocabulary and terminology evolve, often over a relatively short time span? Like a generation or two. Or maybe just three years.

In March of 2020, most federal public servants were sent home to carry out their work. They didn't choose to go home, although many eventually decided that they preferred the new arrangement. Their offices were shut down and deemed unsafe. Suddenly we started using a whole bunch of new words, old words used in different ways, new phrases, and so on. Bubble. Pivot. Social distancing. Self-isolation. Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE. Remote work.

What IS remote work, anyway? The term is used these days to denote work done off the Employer's premises, but still on the Employer's dime. Except that when the Employer is not providing and maintaining those premises, that work is, willy-nilly, to some extent on the EMPLOYEE'S dime.

I find that there are some interesting subtexts to the term. There's this hint that "remote work" is somehow not REAL work, not proper adult work, or not really a component of the labour force. You know, like back in the day when "Does your wife work?" was still considered a politically correct question and "No, she's just a housewife" was considered an adequate and even a self-explanatory answer. Besides, a married woman in the paid workforce, especially if she were also a mother, would be taking work away from men!

Doesn't it make more sense to refer to those who go out to the office or the construction site or the embassy abroad as the "remote workers"?

Historically speaking, the separation of home and workplace is a relatively recent phenomenon. Some date it back to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of factory work. On the other hand family farmers these days might prefer to farm full-time yet are often compelled to commute to an office job in the city just to survive!

Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa in the 1950s and 60s, I enjoyed a fairly typical middle class lifestyle for that time. Mum was at home. Dad went out to work. Like the fathers of many of my friends, his work was top secret and directly related to the Cold War. I really didn't have a clue what he did. He was the more "remote" parent from my perspective, although he wasn't really cold or distant with his own family.

Times have changed, of course. Like a lot of women of my generation, I was in the workforce for pretty much my entire adult life until I retired. I went to the office first thing in the morning and came home in the late afternoon. I had a number of workplaces over the years and relationships with co-workers ran the gamut from friendly and cordial to stressful and strained. Likewise, there were some jobs I loved, some I hated and many others that fell somewhere in between.

While I did sometimes socialize with colleagues outside of working hours, home base was always the "real world" for me, a constant in my life. Work and leisure activities were things that came and went.

As to my retirement lexicon, that's still a work in progress!

I spent a good portion of the morning cleaning the inside of our fridge. It's a task I used to do concurrently with defrosting but now that we have a fridge that doesn't need regular defrosting, the task is generally accomplished on a hit-or-miss basis. With a little bit too much miss just lately. At any rate, today seemed like a good day for it. We've gone through most of the leftovers from Christmas dinner and today is our usual laundry day, so the cleaning cloths and towels I used will all get dumped into the washing machine at 7PM (when the cheaper electrical rates kick in).

Ever since the great lockdown of March 2020, people have been speculating that working from home for most of the workweek will become the new normal, at least for office workers. Indeed, workers will demand it, viewing it as a basic right or entitlement. But is that really what most employees want? Or what they will want, once the pandemic is behind us? And do the benefits of working from home accrue mainly to the employee? Frankly I'm dubious about these seemingly unquestioned assumptions.

I wonder what kinds of statistics are being kept so far. For example, can we tease out worker preferences by gender, age or family status?

This is just a hunch but I'd be willing to bet that married men (including those in common-law relationships) would be the group most eager to work from home. As for women... well, Guilt tends to be our most constant companion. I'm happily retired but if I were sitting in a home office trying to justify my pacheque by putting in at least 7 hours' worth of telecommuting keystrokes every day, I know I would end up working MORE, not less, even considering that I could dispense with the bus trip at the beginning and end of the day. And that's just the work of paid employment.

In addition to that, I'd be worrying about the housework that needed to be done, the kids who needed attention and the bills that needed to be paid. Many believe that on average, men are much more able to compartmentalize their lives whereas women are expected to constantly multitask. Consider too that women are more likely to be in lower-level positions in the workplace, where they likely have less control over workload and work flow and less capacity to delegate. In my last position prior to retirement, I was in a sort of mid-level (a.k.a. sandwich-generation team-leader) position; we had to sign off on "performance agreements" without necessarily being accorded the authority to "make it so", to bring in the staff we needed and the program dollars to accomplish the basic objectives of our sections. And of course, one has to show oneself to be a good "team player" and get along with people one may not particularly like; if you can't express frustrations outwardly, the tendency for many is to stew inwardly, often to the point that it impacts one's health!

But back to housework. When you do all your work from an office, someone else orders and supplies the appropriate furniture, equipment and other resources. Someone else vacuums and cleans the office and takes away the garbage. Someone else pays the heating bills, fixes faulty plumbing and cleans the toilets. Policies on staff areas like lunchrooms seem variable; I remember one office I worked in where we took up a collection to buy ourselves a mini-fridge and the responsibility for cleaning it was shared, with a rota posted so we'd know whose turn it was that week. I think a microwave oven was supplied but we were responsible for cleaning it. In another office, we used a weekly rotation system for who made tea and coffee at our break times. We also were responsible for arranging and paying for social activities like Christmas and retirement parties and gifts. But still, a good portion of the socializing and enjoying ourselves was done on paid company time - we didn't have to feel guilty about chatting and getting to know our co-workers. In lockdown, I would bet there aren't too many chatty coffee breaks over Zoom.

Pre-pandemic, people in jobs they enjoyed with congenial co-workers often came to regard their workplace as a second home and their co-workers as a second family - or even a first family if they had no family or friends living nearby! Pre- social distancing, your office or cubicle might be cramped but at least you could personalize what little space you had, with a few photos of the kids or other significant mementos of your life outside of work. Now, those returning to the office are faced with a soulless "hoteling" culture with generic little boxes or cubicles "depersonalized" to remove all hints of their former occupants.

I guess the jury is still out on the future of work and the future of the workplace. I began my career when everyone was predicting the great leisure society. It's said that no one on their deathbed says they wish they'd spent more time at the office. But what if your office is now your home and your home is your office? What if, after retirement, you can no longer access the personal and community resources you need to live and thrive in that home? Then maybe you move from home to A (LTC) Home and the downward spiral may already be underway. What does that say about our society?

It doesn't have to be like that, of course. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for all people or all families. And Long Term Care homes and Retirement Homes are all over the map when it comes to quality, comfort and suitability for the individual resident. But let's remember that we're dealing with people here - the ones who live, feel dawn, see sunset glow... not just Full Time Equivalents (past, present or future) or dependency ratios!

It seems that young people do everything on their portable phones these days: Talk, text, take pictures, play games, make contactless payments and do their banking... amongst other things. Many older people do those things too, the main difference being that they remember the days when your typical telephone was stuck to the wall or located in a moderately private and soundproof box on a street corner or in the lobby of a public building.

So I was quite intrigued by the premise of the book I'm currently reading, The Phone Box at the Edge of the World, by Laura Imai Messina. It's a novel with fictional characters but the titular phone box actually exists, in a garden in Japan. And the kicker is: the phone (known as the "wind phone") is not hooked up. You can still lift the receiver and dial numbers, but there's no one at the other end. Or rather, the person at the other end is whoever you want it to be.

People go here to talk to those they have lost. In many cases, the people have died. Sometimes they are simply missing or far away, and the caller may not even know if they are dead or alive. It's a way of handling grief and loss in a private forum. You can say all the things you couldn't say before, or "tell" the person how things are going now and what you hope to do tomorrow or next year or ten years from now.

The two main characters in the novel, both in their thirties, have both lost people close to them in a major tsunami that occurred in the area in 2011. Yui has lost her young daughter and her mother; Takeshi has lost his wife, the mother of their daughter Hana, who has stopped speaking as a result of the tragedy. Yui and Takeshi meet at Bell Gardia, site of the wind phone and get to know each other better. Eventually they start to travel from Tokyo to Bell Gardia together on their monthly visits there. A relationship develops between them, based on their shared experience of loss.

In many ways, this novel could not have appeared at a better time. The wind phone offers the ultimate in physical distancing. It's also electronic distancing! The one thing it probably isn't? I'd say emotional distancing. The phone instead offers a kind of emotional, spiritual, imaginative and cathartic proximity to those we've lost and in the process, gives us better insight into our own psyche and our interactions with those who are still with us.

It's really not that different from visiting graveyards or setting up roadside memorials like ghost bikes. Some would say it's not so different from praying or attending confession or making a pilgrimage of any kind. Or daydreaming or meditating. Or any kind of creative expression.

During a pandemic, with traditional funerals and memorial services often out of the question and drive-in or drive-by events not cutting it for many survivors of trauma and loss, something like this could be restorative to the heart and soul.

For more information on the real life site, see:

http://bell-gardia.jp/the-phone-of-the-wind/