It seems like my employer of almost six months expects remote workers to be online (i.e. green Teams status) even if there is nothing to do. I haven't been told this directly, but I started suspecting this one day after my internet went out for an hour. I didn't have any work pending, and I still had access to Teams and Outlook with my work cell, so I didn't notify my supervisor about the outage. The next day, my supervisor insisted on me sharing my Outlook calendar. Later, during a check-in meeting, she told me a story about another new employee who “didn't seem to think she needed to work eight hours a day” and got fired. My supervisor seemed genuinely perplexed about why someone would think they didn't need to work eight hours a day. Maybe because there's not something to do for every one of those eight hours? I spend much of my days “learning” work-related things online, attending trainings, and finding busywork to do, but keeping up the farce is exhausting some days. I much prefer the attitude of “As long as you get the work done, we don't care when you do it” of previous (albeit freelance) jobs. Has the “butt in seat” mentality infected remote work, too?