Are you kidding me, HR? The office is not my ‘home base’.

Everyone is pissed off because they made us return to the office four days a week after we proved that the hybrid model was working well, and HR themselves know this very well.

So today, we’re in a mandatory ‘culture workshop,’ and one of the HR people is going through a presentation about work-life balance. Someone pointed to a slide about work-from-home setups and asked when we’ll go back to using them. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, ‘Look, we’re a family here, so consider this your home base!’.

Yeah, right. This is not our ‘home base’ at all. It’s a noisy, open-plan fishbowl with terrible coffee, where we have to listen to each other chew and pass around the latest plague circulating the office.