With the first lockdown, like a lot of folk who were enabled by amazing technologies such as Zoom and Teams to be able to do their office jobs from their own homes, we've been doing this for over a year now but as the world happily flings us back into the abyss of "normality" we will inevitably have to go back to on-site working.
Our place is being fairly reasonable and flexible about it all, it's not a big bang approach of us all flocking back to packed offices all in one go but nor is it any large-scale move towards proper remote working full time. There's still a lot of discussion to be had on whether that'll ever be the case for jobs such as ours, but the fleeting glimpse we had of it being even a vague possibility seems to have been extinguished under a blanket of going back into the office.
...which means the commute. I can cope with office conditions, I can cope with my workload, my colleagues, the good stuff and of course some of the petty annoyances of being a worker bee but the commute is the one part of all this I loathe the most, and the part I am least looking forward to.
Previously we drove to work, car sharing and parking on work property but for one reason or another we can no longer do that. So we're now not only looking at the exorbitant expense of using public transport to get between home and work, we're looking at the sheer amount of time this takes out of our days. A clear hour (if not more) at the beginning and end of each day that is no longer ours.
It has a massive impact on our morning routine (as we have a daughter we also have to factor in getting her up and getting her to school), but also a massive impact on her at the end of the working day when we will no longer be there until early evening, when we'll also have to get home, cook dinner and try and enjoy the hour or so we'll have left before bedtime.
It sucks. We've been spoilt rotten in lockdown with a daily commute that takes less than 30 seconds (or however long it takes for our home computers to boot and access work systems) now facing the prospect of joining the rat race once again. As depressing as the whole loss of lifestyle thanks to COVID / Brexit is, the loss of those two hours a day is immeasurable and inconsolable.
It just makes no sense when you're in a working role where you are expected to sit at a desk for 7.5 hours a day to spend 2 hours getting there / back. Sadly, to some people, there's just no trust that people working from home will actually work so I guess we're stuck with it (until retirement at least, whenever the hell that'll be given the state of our pensions and prospects for later in life even with a fairly decent pension plan)
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