Remote work wasn't a very sexy topic back when we first started talking about it a few years ago. All of the cool kids were into urban density, yimby-er than thou. Everyone was focused on the rise of the creative class and the utopian urbanists had firm control over the narrative (and that was a group that really didn't like it when someone brought up telecommuting).
At the beginning of the pandemic, we wondered if the upheaval would finally nudge knowledge work into the 21st century. A couple of months later, we suggested that business travel would also be radically different on an age of virtual offices.
This is a story we've followed closely and I would have thought we had heard all of the arguments on both sides, but this piece from Josh Marshall pointed out a disadvantage of remote work that we had never even thought of.
The Low Drama of Work From Home
Work from home has been a boon or a loss for people across the US. Now it’s deprived just-fired former Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul of some what appears to be some much-desired drama. In their write-up of Saul’s firing, which didn’t note that TPM reported the news first but we totally don’t care about those things, the Post quotes Saul as saying he does not recognize the legality of his dismissal and plans to show up for work Monday morning like any other day.
That’s going to be pretty awkward when Saul shows up and presumably SSA personnel have to physically bar him from going to his office! And yet that’s not actually what’s going to happen. Saul plans to go to work Monday morning by logging in from his home in New York – Saul’s a big-time apparel industry executive and GOP donor.
Showing up for work after you've been fired makes a big, dramatic statement. Sitting in your living room petulantly staring at a locked computer screen simply doesn't have the same impact.
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