Update: in person interviews are now cancelled. Legs are still sore and I ran 4 miles. I have a very generous friend who invited me to WFH at her place which is happily enough at the beach, so I’ve taken refuge here today/tomorrow. I’ll finally fulfill a long term goal of a Long Beach run (attempted unsuccessfully twice before). Also, corona has shown up up north but not down here at the beach yet, so this could even be considered a precautionary measure.

Because I was honest enough to tell my boss that I have issues with working from home and believe it has a negative impact not only on productivity but also mental health, now I get to have a 2x as long meeting with her tomorrow for our regular catch up. I appreciate the effort, but it’s not the toll of working from home for two days that I’m worried about. It’s the fact that our leadership said they are making this decision at 30 day intervals and have not even established criteria for when they’d consider lifting this moratorium. I can wfh for two weeks. More than a month? That’s my issue. And I’ll be honest — this is a measure we are forcing on all workers we possibly can. That means people who didn’t have laptops have had them specially ordered just so they can be forced to work from home full time without ever having done it before. That’s managers managing remote associates who have never had to do it before.

I really don’t believe I’m the only person who’s going to feel mental health impacts of this. I get that we need to think about public health and value it, I just think that long term, there are going to be other costs as a result.