No loans. I never even quit working at all through the pandemic. I wired houses through the whole thing.

I employ people.

A lot of people are opportunists and some people like to test the edges to see just what and how much they can get away with.

That being said, large corporations usually have some type of protocol to follow where people are given many chances and where everything is documented before they’re terminated. And they have these processes for good reason. So they don’t get sued. It’s not as simple as just cutting the dead weight.

I don’t care that people are downvoting me to oblivion because I don’t care about the karma counter, and my comment was made in jest.

Outside of workers possibly being more easily distracted at home, we have research from the pandemic that WFH is really good for the relationship of your in group, (your individual team) but is bad for the interdependent relationships between different departments and how all the sectors of the organization interact. Essentially individual team cohesion goes way up, but out group connections and collaboration suffer massively because you are no longer interacting with or forging relationships with people who work in different departments and on different teams etc. in your day to day. It also makes your job a lot less secure. I think hybrid is a good compromise personally.

You can spot patterns and it becomes obvious fairly quickly who is legitimately having a one off issue, and someone who is playing the system and just making excuses. The company very quickly at the start of the pandemic provided everyone with hotspots etc because of the constant home internet connection\wifi problems.

Part of the problem is corporate policy itself. I don’t know how much you know about Sam’s Club and Walmart corporate policy but it’s very hard to fire the lazy\problem employees in the corporate\home office space. There’s a whole verbal warning, three written warnings\write ups and coaching etc before you can even be considered for being fired. And the things you have to do to even get a write up have to be ongoing issues, and are pretty egregious from my point of view in the construction industry where people can get fired on the spot for things.

My wife is a senior director over contracting for Sams Club. The problem I observed in her dealings with her team during WFH was that people didn’t work consistently, and were constantly having tech issues, or at least were using tech issues as an excuse to get out of work. They’re hybrid now, and are in office 2 1/2 days a week. Tuesday, Thursday, and half a day Friday.

I myself am a licensed master electrician (I own my own company) who works mostly on the residential construction side of things. I’ve never had the pleasure of working from home except to do my payroll every week. My job is hands on, on location. I personally think all you folks who don’t want to go to the office are a bunch of whiny crybabies.

Overpopulation is ecofascist propaganda.

My family doesn’t have a generator or anything but I am glad we have a natural gas cooktop and oven. It’s by no means ideal, but if we lose power we can still cook and heat the main living area of the house. We were without power for 12 days during a huge ice storm that laid an an inch and a half of ice over my area (northwest Arkansas) in January of 2010. The gas stove kept us all warm and fed. Thankfully have never had to do that again! Although, I did enjoy the comraderie and closeness that my family developed through that particular hardship. Without power there was no tv or video games or anything so we had to entertain ourselves by actually interacting with each other. We played a lot of board games, cards, listening to music on battery powered radio, just sitting around talking etc. It’s amazing how struggle can bring people together!