Are you a fan of The Office? The original British one, or the American take? Chances are, even if you haven’t watched the series, you’ve come across memes and screengrabs from various hilarious moments on the show.
“I have been able to do what I really like – travel” – Nikita Mehta
September 12, 2022 in Culture, Remote, StoriesOn one of less awkward weekly catch-up calls, Bees and Kablers got together to play a game Mary had devised. The game involved answering a bunch of questions from “What was your worst date?” to “What’s the silliest thing you believed as a child?”.
Last year, I almost moved to the Netherlands. Having an Erasmus Mundus degree makes me eligible to apply for an Orientation Year visa, which gives me a year to look for work there. Many of my classmates from different parts of the world have opted for the visa and now live in the Netherlands. I was almost about to follow suit, but fate had other plans – so the Netherlands was not meant to Bee (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
It’s a random Monday in the summer of 2015. I’m sitting in class at the Department of English at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, doodling in a friend’s notebook while the professor reflects on representation of consumerism in Vladmir Nabakov’s Lolita. My friend notices that I’m making a list of random hill stations. She joins me, and by the time the class ends, we have a list of ten places – Darjeeling, Kurseong, Ooty, Kaluk and so on. We get our other friends to check out the list, and by the end of the day, we’ve planned an entire trip together. In the coming fortnight, we have a chunk of days off for May Day and some other local festival. Coupled with some ‘self-assigned holidays’ (what we like to call the days we bunk classes on), we can carve out a good amount of time for a satisfying trip to Sikkim.
If you’ve been reading our posts on remote and asynchronous work, you’ll notice our repeated emphasis that remote isn’t working from home. Remote is an entirely different format with its own moving parts; if you merely twist it into a version of work-from-office, you won’t succeed.
“Man Shares Hack To Appear Online During WFH”. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have seen variations of this headline ad nauseam over the last two years. Mouse tied to Roomba to appear in motion, GIFs of people perpetually nodding to make them seem like they’re paying attention. A quick internet search will reveal tons of these hacks, including viral TikTok content (reviewed by YouTubers chasing, you guessed it, virality). As the boundaries between work and home blurred, the line between work and life grew tenuous, leaving less time for life already stressed by a raging pandemic. And forced to show up, employees rose to the occasion to develop innovative ways to cheat the surveillance systems keeping tabs on them. Continue reading »
Two years into the deadliest pandemic since the Spanish flu, every organisation all over the world – big or small – has had a taste of remote work. Some have gone on to adopt a remote or hybrid model full-time. Perhaps you’re a business that survived remote (or “office at home” masquerading as remote work). It’s 2022 now – you’re fatigued, concerned about revenues, or maybe you just want to get on with your life because, hey, let’s face it, Covid is here to stay. Continue reading »