We’re sick of the posts about working from home. We’re a workplace technology vendor. We love working from home but world enough is enough. Everyone ignored the future of work for decades. Your boss thought working from home was time off. Now everybody can’t get enough.
We’ve decided to put some sparkle into your work. It’s not all Working From Home in a Deadly Global Pandemic (‘WFHIADGP’). This means you are now saved from yet another vendor post giving you meaningless drivel about why you need a new solution, why you should take up our free offer or how good we are at our pandemic response.
Bringing the Sparkle
At CollabSystem, in our rush to deliver vapourware, we can lose sight of the joy of work. If you find it, can you point it in our direction.
That said, we all work for a reason, even if that reason is that we need something to do with Wednesday afternoons (major hump day drags in our offices). At CollabSystem we work for PURPOSE. Ours is not just a single capital Purpose. Ours is an all-caps PURPOSE. It’s big and it’s bold and it’s all-caps. Our PURPOSE is our hope for the future. Our PURPOSE is our reason for being and all that we do for our clients. Having an all-caps PURPOSE is what brings the sparkle to our work and lets us keep it. Are we doing this right, Marie Kondo?
How good is working with families?
Families, hey? We all have them. Being home is a great opportunity for us to reconnect, reengage and share our work with our families, if only they wanted more of that. Unfortunately, a side effect is exposure to our families’ work. Who knew that life being work 24×7 for everyone in the family would bring such community, joy and hope in the collapse of our economic system and way of life? Nothing brings us more joy than trying to manage family life while we hose down the latest crisis at work, in our partner’s work and in the household whitegoods.
We all have parents, partners, ex-partners, kids, ex-kids now adults that never leave the house or leave and only come back for cash, food or laundry, that cousin who loves to share conspiracies on facebook, pets or a complete hatred of all of the above. Being home reminds us minute by excruciating minute of the joy that comes from our relentless love and eternal war with our families. At this time CollabSystem would like to especially acknowledge the love and adoration of pets (who doesn’t love pets? Apologies to all the cat owners out there who are coping with cat bland indifference). We would also like our relatives to stop emailing us the viral chain emails. We have enough. We work at a global technology vendor, just getting to a workshop involves a multi-party distribution list debate.
We all long for the simple sparkle of great droning long presentations in a quiet conference room with doughnuts. We long for IT support. We long for the ability to leave our workplace. We long to claim expenses. We long for the clang Of security gates. How good is stationery. How good is regular pay. How good is work? We didn’t realise how good we had it.
The magical feeling of relentless work in a crisis
If you’ve ever been in a chat, reading a document, finishing a presentation, while taking a phone call, while on a conference call about an email that you forgot to read because you were reading the news and trying to understand a message on Twitter, then you have discovered the sparkle of WFHIADGP. There’s no reason to stop working. Forget waking at 5am, just never sleep.
There’s no end to the stimulation, even before coffee. There’s no where to go, nobody to see and nothing to do. At CollabSystem, we know that work is the best way to prevent yourself from realising the existential meaninglessness of life. You too now have a PURPOSE. Yours is all-caps now too. Job done we gave it to you. Is that the right thing to do, Marie Kondo or did we make a mistake in sharing our sparkle?
You can take that sparkle to the kitchen table you now use for conferences. At work you might have leading edge AV equipment, but at home you have sparkle if you push the mess a little to the side.
The good news is that soon the work will end. Hopefully we can all go back to the fun we used to have at home. We can do work in our beautiful offices with fancy security gates on the bandwidth that never ends. Then the sparkle will last forever.
Are we Caffeinated enough?
While at home we need coffee, lots of coffee and even more coffee. Whatever issues your work brings you in this troubled time, add sparkle to your life with more coffee. We hug our coffee mugs to our chest every day just to feel the joy.
As a global technology company we run on caffeine. We aren’t talking the instant stuff. We are talking fancy cold brew dripped for hours with iced water using single origin beans that come from a mountain a long way away and have been roasted by someone with a beard and tattoos. Time out to make coffee is one of the only acceptable breaks from work and life when working at home. We’re heading out to harvest the beans soon and don’t expect to see us back any time soon.
If the excess of coffee has you wired, stressed and barely sleeping, then you are almost caught up with the rest of us. The alertness that coffee brings will make you better able to ignore the news and win the battle at the supermarket for precious supplies. It’s such a good thing you emptied out all those cupboards in 2019 as part of the last craze, isn’t it? There’s now more space for coffee, toilet paper and alcohol. Once upon a time we only stockpiled work stationery at home.
We miss the barista who makes coffee near our office. We can’t wait to get back and rediscover her sparkle.
Thank God It’s Friday
The great thing about being at home is the ready supply of alcohol. Who knew we would miss the absence of anything like an HR team to stand in the way of our substance abuse issues? We find alcohol to be a barely acceptable coping mechanism at the best of times and its definitely a great anti-social lubricant for those in isolation.
With our global technology expertise, we have come to to an understanding that it’s always Friday somewhere in the world. So celebrate the sparkle of your work and enjoy your Friday. Tomorrow is another day of working from home on the weekend. The days do tend to blur a little online. Then again that might be the lack of sleep, stress and alcohol.
Wash Your Hands
Our legal department told us there had to be some useful advice somewhere in this article. Here it is: wash your hands. Wash them until they sparkle and keep doing it. Good luck and stay safe.
COLLABSYSTEM 