There Is A Lot Trump Doesn’t Know

 The Golden Child works from home.

She worked in an office until Covid. She commuted almost an hour, one way, to work there. She shed that burden happily. Eventually she moved several states away from, but still works for the same office in the same company.

After Covid, the company decided workers should return to the office. Many, like the Golden Child, simply couldn’t. Some had sold houses and moved to where the cost of living was much lower. But more importantly, the company had dropped leases and couldn’t force employees to move back to their offices, and didn’t want the massive reorganization of moving employees to new offices. Computers make it easy for the company to organize workers without regard to geography. The company got used to that, and didn’t want to undo it.

But returning workers to the office space physically near them proved to be impossible. There simply wasn’t enough workspace for all the employees, not in every office the company had around the country. So workers come into the office at least one day a week. They grab a desk, plug in their computer, and go to work. 

It isn’t efficient, and it certainly isn’t effective in restoring an “office culture.” The same people aren’t in the office on the same day, and the people in any one office may be working with people in several other cities. Which, as I say, is how the company wants it. (The Golden Child oversees a team scattered across several states.) So what, really, is the point of being in the office? Or, for that matter, paying rent for office space for every employee in the company?

That’s the question with the federal government, too:

With Trump demanding all workers whose jobs haven't been put in limbo show up at federal buildings, the Post is reporting, "A U.S. Navy Department employee in Virginia, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he was ordered to return to the office Monday. But because of a lack of space, his team has been spread among four buildings, some of them separated by 30 to 40 miles. 'I’m making a 15-minute drive to get paperwork routed,' he said. 'Some people are making a 45-minute drive.'" 

Another federal employee told the Post her office has 40 people attempting to share 14 desks and therefore, "they take turns at the desks and spend the rest of the day killing time and chatting in the halls." She has been forced, at times to sit in an auditorium with no computer access and no work being done. 

Another worker who has been told to return after working remotely, "If I’m in an office space, I don’t work with anybody in the office. My bosses are in a different location, our team is all over the West, and it has been that way for decades. It’s not that people don’t want to go to work. There’s just no place to go.”

This was predictable, at least by people not as clueless as Trump and Musk. In the name of “efficiency,” a word they no more understand than they do the component words of DEI, they have created great inefficiencies.

Whether they know it or not.  Reality doesn’t give a shit what they don’t know. But we need to.