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by kccqzy 2296 days ago
Thanks for the heads up. I honestly don't see why people see a need to mock me, when I'm pointing out the fact that at my home I don't have the amenities that I enjoy at the office. I'm not even complaining about anything. If someone else had posted a similar comment, I certainly wouldn't have mocked them.

But then again, it is sad that these days, mockery is the default way of discourse on the internet.

9 comments

For what it's worth, the mockery seems weird and dumb to me. It's pretty clear that you were just engaging in a discussion about whether working from home increased or decreased productivity. But everyone seems to be finding a 'woe is me' tone somewhere between the lines. I wonder if it's mostly a bandwagon effect or if people would tend to read it that way independently.

On the bright side, maybe it will do some good overall, because working from home is (IMO) clearly a good idea at the moment, and now people have a strawman villain they can fight against by supporting WFH policies.

> I honestly don't see why people see a need to mock me, when I'm pointing out the fact that at my home I don't have the amenities that I enjoy at the office.

You're being mocked because you're musing over the lack of luxury office amenities that many, many workers in the U.S. don't have.

And the fact your comment about needing to walk to Starbucks and actually do the dishes make you sound like a manchild.

Honestly, the bit about cooking and doing the dishes sounded even more ridiculous than the coffee thing. What kind of adult can't do even the most basic cooking, or never has to do dishes? How many people actually get all their food at the company cafeteria like this person claims to?
In college I used to work tech support for $8/hour and we had free coffee. My mom used to work at a factory, and the factory-line workers would eat lunch at a subsidized cafeteria provided by the company.

People just hate tech workers and are looking for every reason to represent them as being entitled and out of touch.

Its an issue because things like coffee are in no way necessary for being productive, and certainly not to the extent that you should need to walk a mile to get a coffee before working.

But for me the problem is less anything you are doing, and more the implications of what you've said about Google (and other companies for that matter). The fact that employers are trying to remove so much of the "friction" of normal, human life to maximize time spent working is a bit dystopic. I mean, by the same logic, why not scrap the cafeteria and bathrooms for that matter, hook employees up to feeding tubes and catheters, so they literally never leave their desks?

Cooking, eating, meal cleanup, etc are a part of human life. If we are trying to streamline that, it should be for the extra comfort of the individual, not so that a company can keep them at the grindstone for even longer. So the argument that working from home causes decreases in productivity because employees have to care for themselves isn't actually an indictment against working from home, it's an indictment against the expectations of productivity that employers have.

Just for the record, mockery has been a significant part of the Internet since the days of Usenet, so don't take it personally :)
Poor you, again, lol.

Seriously, though, I hear you both for what you were actually doing (not really whining) and for how you are taking it. I personally have never been able to just let things roll off me,either (or, better yet, turn them into humor).

In the time you spent on this thread you could have already ordered everything you need online to be delivered to your home.

You have to admit, despite being the butt of the joke, it's pretty funny.

I'm not even a Googler and have 3 monitors at home. And I'm pretty sure if you request it they probably find a way of paying for one or give you one for home.
You're complaining that you have to do basic household chores, what do you expect? A cookie?