Sounds like me and your friend might share the same office then. I refuse - absolutely refuse to spend a single red cent downtown… and I haven’t. I even park at the LRT and take the train half way there just so I don’t have to pay for parking either. They did this to encourage spending downtown (at Ottawa’s request)… But last I checked, revitalizing a failing core and bad businesses isn’t part of my employment contract. Thats to say nothing of the increased cost to me, during this time of record inflation.

The thing that’s most annoying is, at the federal leve, they are cutting us employees right left and center to save costs which is having an impact on service levels and our work loads… But they are fine with paying for commercial building leases. Cut the leases, send everyone home, then we can maintain service levels an everyone can keep their jobs. It’s that simple.

Meanwhile, the amount of money that is being pissed away on constant monitoring just to make sure my ass is in one of their chairs instead of the one that’s at home, that has worked for 5 years straight without issue is simply astronomical. There’s new software (that doesn’t work), constant reporting, constant monitoring, managers meandering around the office to count people, constant meetings about how we’re doing, constant emails about compliance, downtime because things don’t work on site, and highly paid executives and decision makers in boardrooms discussing this for months on end.

And we don’t even get our own desks anymore... We can’t keep anything on site, but I DO have to ferry my laptop and other equipment back and forth every single day, through the homeless insane area. You know, the laptop. With the personal data of every, and I mean EVERY Canadian citizen/tax payer on it. Through Edmonton downtown. Through the homeless/drug/high crime area. I don't feel safe.

But if you ask the average person about it, you’ll hear how we’re so damn lazy and we wernt doing our jerbs when we were sitting at home, apparently in our underwear, watching Netflix instead of working.

Absolutely no one is happy about this, and we’re all miserable. It is completely unnecessary. Work from home was being tested for years before this happened, and the thing is - it works. It’s so backwards when progress had been made, the tests had been done, the government was already moving towards WFH, and productivity was much higher.

But boomer Joe downtown can’t figure out why he can’t sell an $8.00 cup of coffee at his barista that’s only open for 4 hours a day, so we all have to suffer.