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Life after COVID...
[American Consequences] Returning to a world where a global plague isn’t killing people by the million, sickening millions more, and endangering practically everyone will be a great improvement on dying or having a ventilator thrust down one’s throat. But what will this post-COVID world be like?Some of the most common predictions are that work-from-home setups will replace the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of Dunder Mifflin in the reboot of The Office... in-person retail shopping is dead as disco... cities will de-gentrify because millennials are fleeing from their confinement in yoga-mat-sized apartments stinking of kombacha to the spacious fresh air of suburbia... and the size and scope of government will grow faster than you can say "$900 billion coronavirus stimulus plan." The last prediction will certainly come true. Government loves an emergency. And in this current emergency, government discovered that it has all sorts of emergency powers that no one had ever thought of before. Government will be itching to exercise those powers again. Expect bars and restaurants to be closed and lockdowns to be ordered next time there’s an outbreak of toenail fungus. (Also, gatherings of more than 10 barefoot people will be banned.) Working from home turns out to be... work. A question that could have been shouted over the top of a cubicle divider and answered in 10 seconds turns into an e-mail thread as long as the works of Proust. Reply All. There’s no going "out" for lunch — which should be good for our waistline if we weren’t "in" all day raiding the refrigerator. One of these days, consumers are going to realize that Amazon is just a Sears and Roebuck catalogue that can’t be repurposed in the outhouse. The whole household is underfoot. The kitchen sink is the water cooler, but the kids don’t have any good gossip and flirting with the dog is pathetic. Furthermore, there’s no 9 to 5... Coworkers are scattered around time zones and across the International Date Line. When it’s time for an after-work drink in New York, it’s already tomorrow morning in Singapore. Plus, drinking alone is also pathetic. Which brings me to the one upside of working remotely — no one can smell your breath in a Zoom meeting, so I fill my entire coffee mug with scotch. Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-12-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=590433 |