While COVID-19 may have rekindled interest in movies such as Pandemic and Contagion , society seems to be moving towards what Alvin Toffler had envisaged in his books Future Shock and Third Wave .
During my college days in the late 1980s, the two volumes were a staple with every book shop and pavement seller. From the random reading of reviews, I got to know that the books talk of an information society and the rapid changes that will happen in a “super-industrial” society when technologies get outdated fast.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” was a regular Toffler quote. Third Wave talks of the concepts of telecommute and home becoming office, thanks to computers.
Back then, growing up in a Tier-2 city, all this sounded too much of futuristic mumbo jumbo. The offices were still marching to the clickety-clack of the typewriters, and employees had to sit neck-deep in mounds of paper and files. Electronic typewriters were seen with the same awe as iPhones.
Talking of phones, they were wired. Getting a phone connection used to be like winning a lottery. Many used to mark PP along with their phone numbers, which meant private party or the nearest contact number, not self-owned.
Computers were seen only in science magazines and Hollywood films. Those in the middle or the fag end of their careers saw computers as an evil that will gobble up jobs.
Later, the mobile phone-Internet duo brought about tectonic shifts in how we work, communicate and every other facet of our lives. Toffler’s prophecy looked plausible but it remained more of an exception than a rule. Only those doing freelance gigs worked from home, but for others, it was most often a consolation prize provided by the manager after rejecting the leave. Many bosses looked at work from home with suspicion and companies even had a monthly cap on it.
Cruel necessity
COVID-19 and the world’s biggest lockdown in India changed it all. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but cruel necessity leaves you with a Hobson’s choice. Everybody had to work from home. Managers who had so far looked down upon this practice as the first refuge of slackers were forced to list out its virtues. Even industries such as banks, insurance and newspaper publishing, which had never experimented with this practice, were forced into a sink or swim situation — often with mixed results.
Webinars, Zoom meetings and Slack messenger were the new trappings, with the dining or the study table doubling up as home office.
The early days were heady — no office commute, no need to worry about work wear or whether it has been washed and ironed, shaving became optional, no last-minute panic stricken checking of the office bag for chargers, access cards, pedestal keys and spectacles.
Then the warts started becoming visible — back and neck pain started popping up as the home chairs were no substitute for ergonomically superior office chairs.
Clearing small doubts and quick questions that just needed a shout out to the colleague at the next pod, now requires laborious typing of messages and waiting for a response.
The country’s perennial problem of erratic power supply rears its head time and again.
Another bugbear is the patchy Internet. With almost everyone working from home and students taking online classes, Internet speed often winds down to a crawl. The system hangs at crucial moments like when you are about to click the “send” button of an important e-mail or during important calls.
Earlier, leaving for office and the commute back, however harrowing, marked a kind of dividing line between work and home. But now that line has blurred. One has to be mindful of the number of pressure cooker whistles and those unwelcome tinkling of the doorbell during a call.
So it looks like this accidental global experiment, forced upon us by an invisible virus, and its serendipitous findings are here to stay. And it is too enticing a template for companies and offices looking to cut overhead costs.
We are trying to build a generation of employees who will see their colleagues only through Zoom video and will never see the insides of an office, the cafeteria banter, the office politics, the raucous bullies, office romance and gossip, visits to nearby shacks for chai-sutta ... the list goes on. A scary prospect!
