I was supposed to move to Glascow once for work, but then the company merged with a bigger one and it didn’t work out. Too bad, I’m a sucker for a Scottish accent. Anyway, this is pretty funny:
Category: Humor
Fantastic idea!
The loneliness of the long-distance office worker
“Oh man, this is making me weep,” Swamp Rabbit said. We were taking turns reading a Philadelphia Inquirer story about possible psychological damage suffered by office workers who, for their own safety’s sake, must work at home for as long as the COVID-19 disaster persists.
In suddenly empty offices all across America, idle water coolers stand as memorials to a workplace culture that has virtually disappeared during the coronavirus epidemic. For millions now forced to labor at home, the casual collegiality symbolized by those gurgling office gathering spots has given way to seclusion and uncertainty, possibly exacerbating what ex-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called ‘America’s epidemic of loneliness.’
Swamp Rabbit shook his head. “Them poor water coolers. I’ll bet they ain’t gurgled in weeks.”
I pretended to smack him upside his head. “It’s not funny, dude. Forced solitude is taking a toll on our mental health. Where would we be without the casual collegiality of the office workplace?”
He raised his mangy head and looked me over. “You’re putting me on, Odd Man. You don’t like office work.”
I failed to suppress a laugh. “Let me put it this way. I never worked an office job that didn’t make me feel like I was trapped with people who, with a few exceptions, weren’t scheming backstabbers or just hopeless drones.”
“They probably felt the same way about you,” Swamp Rabbit said. “You ain’t exactly fun to be around.”
“That’s my point, rabbit. Why should office workers have to put up with each other? We’re talking mostly about bullshit jobs — writing ad copy, public relations and so on. Why not just use the Internet to do the work from home?”
“I don’t know, Odd Man, it can get pretty lonely at home.”
“You mean lonely like the loneliness of the long-distance runner? It’s a lot worse being lonely in a crowd of dead-ass office workers.”
I told him we were reading a bullshit story about people airing bullshit grievances about bullshit jobs. They’re getting paid to work from home and therefore had little to complain about, especially compared to essential workers who get paid next to nothing to risk infection every day.
Swamp Rabbit told me to calm down, he agreed with me, but why did the Inquirer run a story that tries to make us feel sorry for at-home office workers?
“Because office workers are their audience,” I said. “Who else would have the time or inclination to read such crap?”
LOL
SGN
John Krasinski is doing a great job with his show, and it’s just the kind of lift we all need:
Daily ‘briefings’ from the beast
Swamp Rabbit wore a surgical mask today when he went to the SuperFridge. To protect him against COVID-19, he said, but I figured he just wanted to rob the joint without being identified.
He brought ketchup and fish sticks back to the swamp, just in time to hear me ranting about Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Why did the liar-in-chief force the various states to engage in a bidding war for much-needed medical equipment and, in some cases, actually use FEMA to bid against certain states for that equipment? Why did he refuse for so long to invoke the Defense Production Act, which compels private companies to quickly make sure there is no scarcity of equipment needed for a national emergency? Is this a case of Trump being stupid and malicious, or just stupid?
“Don’t make no difference,” Swamp Rabbit said. “With a dude like Trump, stupid and malicious are the same.”
I showed him a Boston Globe editorial about Trump that doesn’t pull any punches. It starts with a famous literary line:
‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’ wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of untold suffering.
The language is even stronger a few paragraphs down, just in case Globe readers hadn’t yet got the point:
The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.
Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Trump ain’t no Lady Macbeth. If he gets blood on his hands, he just wipes it off and looks for something else to wreck.”
He suggested I check out Trump’s daily marathon press “briefings” and remember how we wondered what would happen to the country if its fate fell into the hands of someone who can only wreck things. As Yeats asked:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
We’ve known for three years what the beast looks likes. The only question now is how much wreckage he will cause before he slouches in some other direction.
Do-re-mi, COVID 19 edition
From out of the blue, new realities
I was reading to Swamp Rabbit from Albert Camus‘s The Plague:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
I reminded the rabbit that he and I, along with tens of thousands of others, had been at the Flower Show less than a month ago. Even the most ignorant tulip watchers knew the coronavirus was coming, but hardly anyone at the event seemed worried. It was too hard to believe, in such a balmy setting, that a plague would soon “crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”
“Enough Camus,” he said, stretching out in a beach chair on my porch. “I don’t need no more existential dread. I’m depressed enough as it is.”
He was playing devil’s advocate, like last week. Or maybe he wasn’t.
“Camus believed in courage, not dread,” I replied. “He believed in fighting the good fight, even though the deck is stacked against you.”
Swamp Rabbit laughed. “It’s easy to feel courageous if you got groceries and the Internet and checks in the mail. It’s peeps like us who ain’t got no dough who feel the dread.”
I fetched a rusty milk crate and sat down six feet from him. “This is tough on everybody, rabbit, even those with money. People like privacy, but they also like to go to ball games and flower shows and so on. They don’t like sheltering in place. They don’t like too much isolation.”
“Peeps don’t like forced isolation,” he said. “They like having a choice. The thing is, there ain’t never no choice if you got no money… Is my six-pack of beer still here?”
He was trying my patience. “Virus deaths are spiking in Europe,” I said. “The worst is yet to come over here. Trump has stopped saying the virus is a hoax and started calling it the invisible enemy. He wants his base to think it was planted by the Democrats and the Chinese.”
The rabbit sat up, angry. “Trump’s gonna do what he always does — blame other peeps for problems he’s too dumb to deal with. F–k Trump. He oughta be quarantined in some dungeon somewhere.”
“That’s better,” I said. “Anger will keep your spirits up, rabbit. We’ve got to grapple with the new realities, the opposite of what Trump’s doing.”
He slumped back into the beach chair. “You go right ahead and grapple with them realities, Odd Man. Where’s my beer?”