We were talking about how the pandemic affected barber shops and I described pretty much what had been going on with us and then I asked him, how was he affected if at all? Tells me he's an engineer and he didn't mind working from home a little but he preferred being in the office around people. I was like yeah fair, I remember a lot of clients after the initial massive lockdown basically being the same but many were happy to be stuck at home permanently.
He then went on to explain that the CEO has asked his workplace to be back in at least two days a week, with Wednesday being the one where everyone has to be in the office. “But no one ever checks it, which I think is silly. They should be there”. I'm intrigued at this point, why do you think that? “Well so many people just sit at home watching netflix all day instead of doing actual work.” Yeah but if they've done all the work they need to do for the day, why shouldn't they be able to relax? “I just think if they've managed to knock it out in 3 or 4 hours they should commit the rest of the day to doing more work.”
At this point he also claimed if he was CEO he would make sure everyone was under surveillance so he knew they were working instead of slacking off. I gave a counter point that people are gonna “slack off” no matter what, and if they've completed their work it's up to them to do what they want to do. He kinda agreed but didn't seem too happy with the idea.
He then told me what job he did, and that he was promoted recently to a higher status which means he got to oversee more work and had a bigger project to work on. I was like sweet that's cool, congrats. He then said he hadn't earned the higher pay rate yet so he was looking forward to when that came in. It took a lot of effort to not ask if he enjoyed the indoctrination or if he just wasn't aware of it.
So damn weird.