I pity the cubicle dwellers and sararimen. The last time I had a jobbyjob - going on, fuck, fifteen years now - things were bad? But there was an assumption that you worked the hours you were paid for, and if you got work done, you were good. It didn't happen that way everywhere, and it was definitely getting worse? But we acknowledged that working too hard was a mistake.

The idea that you must work more than you are being paid for if you wish to continue being paid for it is every bit as toxic as AB InBev producing nothing but IPA. If you stop making beer, people will stop drinking it and you'll be left trying Pabst Hard Iced Coffee just in case those goddamn consumers put down their White Claw.

I have told every receptionist we have that I wouldn't do their job for the money I'm paying them. The money I'm paying them? Is more than they'd get doing that job at any of our competitors. Would I like to get rid of that job? Absolutely. But right now, society and market custom expects that job to exist, and expects it to pay far less than it's worth, and people take the job. I don't know that there's a future there. There probably is at some limited level. We make it clear that the job has no opportunity for advancement, that we expect their time with us to be short (but pleasant) and that we're eager to help them build their skills for wherever they're headed next. I'm losing one in a month and she's ebulliently telling everyone who will stand still long enough to hear it that she's leaving the best job she's ever had. But I still wouldn't do it for double the money.

It's supposed to be a trade. You give me your labor, I give you my capital. It should be even but almost never is. Really, you're trading time for money - I don't have time to do that job, but I do have money; you don't have money, but you have the time to do the job. That's where things went wrong for the capital side of things; COVID revealed that the capital-to-labor equation has an arbitrary coefficient in it and we just up'n'changed it for a good chunk of the year. Now? Now the labor side has a new coefficient to evaluate the value of their time, and the capital side is furiously insisting they forget.