Back in the first few months of covid my old school company was forced to start working from home because of some bad PR and some city rules. They HATED it. Morning meetings and spreadsheets where we logged what we did every hour of every day kind of hate. It got ridiculous to keep up with, I was moving, and I got divorced from an abusive relationship a month before covid hit. I got in trouble countless times for not having my excel log of every hour of every day filled to the extent that they wanted. It was filled just with not as many words as they’d like. Queue performance meetings and literally yelling sessions where they just screamed at me and got upset that I “wasn’t taking this seriously” because I didn’t cry or get upset when they yelled at me. Eventually I broke down in one meeting and said I was in the middle of a divorce etc. and my manager seemed sympathetic for the first time. He looked at me with empathy and talked about how awhile ago he and his wife had a miscarriage and how that really messed him up. His advice? “I found that coming to the office earlier and pouring myself into my work and being the best employee I could really helped to distract/clear my head from the grief”……… I had no idea what to say holy fuck. I thought he was gonna connect with me man to man and he dropped some good employee bullshit on me. Capitalism has stolen this mans mans soul. I literally started looking for jobs the minute I was out of there. Jesus Christ wtf. Anyway making more money working permanently full remote at a better company now. Thought y’all would enjoy lol.
EDIT: to clarify he was trying to use his story to get me to fill out the spreadsheets better in the context of what we were talking about. To use my grief as a tool to be a better worker.