Ffs.
You would need the three weeks to recover after that.
That’s the current average. But we’ll adjust by group so that for example new joiners or more junior grades spend more time in the office. If I never saw the IT guys again it wouldn’t bother me.
Had quite the day of it today. A Ghanaian lady and her child rocked up this morning, sans passport. She’d obviously been well coached by the trafficker who’d brought her in as she knew to write her name, DOB, the word “asylum” and absolutely nothing else down so the fact that she couldn’t speak English wasn’t really an issue. We processed her as normal. Now, as quite a few others had lost their passports today, the guards informed us it’d be a long wait before she’d be collected. Again, not really an issue.
After about 20 minutes, it became clear that the child was in what appeared to be mild distress. Now, even though it’s been well established on here that I’m a crazed, far-right, anti-immigrant racist, I actually hate seeing children in distress. I went over and asked what was up. The mother pointed to the child’s stomach so I assumed that meant she was hungry. I only had fruit to hand so I got her some apples, oranges and a banana. The mother’s facial expression told me that this wasn’t exactly gonna cut the mustard.
At this point, I tried to establish what language she spoke so I could break out the google translate but every time I asked I was met with silence. I still assumed that the child was hungry (that’s the issue 99% of the time) so I showed her some photos of food and tried my best to offer a facial expression that said “any of these?” She shook her head and produced and sandwich from her bag that the child began to eat.
Knowing that the child was not hungry, I started exploring other avenues. I showed her some photos of medicine but again she shook her head, producing a bottle of what looked like Ghanaian Calpol from her bag. It was here that she finally spoke, saying a word that sounded like “Fant”. I repeated it back to her and she nodded, saying it again.
After some googling and wikipediaing I discovered that there is actually a language in Ghana called Fante but, annoyingly, it’s not on google translate. I tried a few others, including a language called “Ewe” but none worked. She kept repeating “Fant” and, though I’m no expert on Ghanaian facial expressions, I feel she was forming one which seemed to convey “how does this thick cunt not know what I’m on about here?”
I rang the people we source translators for and asked for a Fante translator but, unsurprisingly, they didn’t have one. They could source one, maybe, but it could be a few hours, which was no good as she’d be long gone by then. I considered calling a paramedic but the child fairly obviously didn’t need one and anyway, the odds of he/she/they etc being a fluent Fante speaker were fairly low.
As a last gasp effort, I gave her my phone and said " listen, I really want to help you here, can you show me what you want?" After a minute of her thinking, typing, pausing, typing and so on, she hands the phone back to me with a picture of a can of Fanta on it. One trip to WH Smith and €3 later (go fuck yourself airport prices) and the problem was finally solved.
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Brilliant
You’re a good man.
She’s not even in the door and she’s already pouring tins of Fanta into her kids… She’ll fit right in 
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Will be expecting her post in the people who’ve been mugged off thread via Safari on her iPhone 14 later on in relation to the Fanta. You’re a good man for being nice to her even though it’s akin to a fast food meal donation by a drunk innocent culchie to a junkie on the street.
Sounds like another demanding customer but good to get her out of the Ghana war zone.
Prescient.
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How the great home working experiment fell apart
A brutal and widespread tech downturn has shifted power from employee to employer
ByJames Titcomb11 April 2023 • 9:00am
Tens of thousands of Facebook employees had been working from home for just two months when Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction: in a few years, half of the company’s employees would not regularly come into the office.
“I think we could have 50pc of our people working remotely,” Zuckerberg said in May 2020, talking up the advantages of staff not being chained to a desk such as more diverse hiring and less pollution.
“There are some very clear benefits to remote work.”
Two years later, Zuckerberg has appeared to alter his stance.
As he announced a brutal round of layoffs at Facebook’s parent company Meta earlier this year, Zuckerberg suggested that staff did a better job when in the office – at least early in their career.
“Engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” Zuckerberg said.
“Our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person.”
Although he said Meta remained committed to “distributed work”, the statement marked a shift in thinking that has been mirrored across the tech industry: employees are wanted back at their desks.
Tech boom is going bust
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Share price declines
View as data table, Tech boom is going bust
The chart has 1 X axis displaying Time. Data ranges from 2022-04-11 00:00:00 to 2023-04-10 00:00:00.
The chart has 1 Y axis displaying %. Data ranges from -58.925 to 5.309.
MetaGoogleAmazonAppleMay '22Jul '22Sep '22Nov '22Jan '23Mar '23-80-60-40-20020SOURCE: Bloomberg
TECH BOOM IS GOING BUST
Share price declines
%
End of interactive chart.
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has ordered employees to be back in the office a minimum of three days a week from next month, following Apple, which made the move in September. At Twitter, Elon Musk has largely reversed a policy allowing staff to be fully remote, to the extent that some have been sleeping at the office.
The diktats contrast with the early days of the pandemic, when Big Tech was at the vanguard of what was then seen as a long-term revolution in how people work. Google, Twitter and Facebook were among the first employers to send people home in early March 2020, when registered Covid cases in the US were in the hundreds.
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The young, tech-savvy workforces easily adapted to replacing human contacts with video calls and instant messaging services, some of which they had developed. Increased demand for digital tools, streaming services and social media meant Big Tech companies were forced to hire thousands of new staff without an office induction.
Share prices boomed, making employees rich, and many found they could live like kings outside of the expensive tech hubs they had previously had to inhabit.
After a few weeks, Twitter said staff would be able to work from home permanently. At Apple, chief executive Tim Cook hailed staff’s efforts after a crop of newly-released products led to record sales.
“There are worse things for a company whose business is innovation than having to periodically do just about everything in an entirely new way,” he told investors.
Apple employees refused to return to the office under Tim Cook’s orders, claiming it would make the company ‘whiter, more male-dominated’ CREDIT: Noah Berger/AP
Zuckerberg laid out the broadest vision, saying he personally planned to spend half of 2021 and 2022 working from home and that anyone who wished to move abroad would be supported.
Companies made half-hearted moves to bring staff back into the office as vaccines became widely available, but the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants gave them a convenient excuse to push back reopening.
As late as last summer, working from home looked like a permanent trend. Last June, office occupancy in the tech hub of San Francisco was just 32pc according to security firm Kastle. “Office mandates are never going to work,” said Marc Benioff of Salesforce, the city’s largest private employer.
When guidance was brought in, it was loosely enforced, especially in satellite offices. Staff at Facebook and Google’s UK offices say that for much of last year they effectively had a free vote on whether to come into work.
Workers who were asked to go back protested, pointing out that they had options elsewhere: companies such as Coinbase, Dropbox and Airbnb all said they would allow remote work permanently.
In August, Apple employees petitioned against Cook’s order announcing staff would have to be back three days a week. Other workers took more radical steps. In February, contractors working for YouTube announced plans to strike in protest at return to office plans; an earlier strike by Google Maps workers had secured a delay to office returns.
However, a brutal and widespread tech downturn has changed the picture. Since the start of the year, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon have laid off thousands of workers as rising interest rates hit their share prices.
Financial pressures have made tech bosses more conscious of the multibillion-dollar investments they have made in their currently under-occupied headquarters, such as Apple’s spaceship-like Silicon Valley base and Meta’s Frank Gehry-designed campus. It has also shifted power from employee to employer.
Apple made half-hearted moves to bring staff back into the office as vaccines became widely available CREDIT: Steve Proehl/Corbis Unreleased
“Tech firms right now are downsizing, and they’re going to target first for downsizing the people who will not come into the office,” says Thomas Roulet, an associate professor in organisation theory at the University of Cambridge, who studies home working policies. “People who are not visible, people who stay at home because they thought tech firms were going to be super flexible, they’re going to be first in line because their bosses have never seen them. And they are not connected to the culture of the organisation.”
Amazon’s boss Andy Jassy said in February: “There is something about being face-to-face with somebody, looking them in the eye, and seeing they’re fully immersed in whatever you’re discussing that bonds people together.”
Things are even slowly changing at Meta, where Zuckerberg has spent part of the last year working from Hawaii and where executives are distributed around the world (Sir Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri are London-based, while the head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart resides in Los Angeles).
Last week, the company stopped advertising entirely-remote jobs, although a spokesman said the move was temporary.
The shift has been happening across the tech industry. According to figures from jobs website Adzuna, the number of tech jobs in the UK advertised as fully remote has fallen from 39pc in April last year to 27pc last month. Hybrid jobs, which involve a mix of office and home work, have risen from 20pc to 29pc, while office-based roles have climbed from 7.7pc to 9.1pc (the remainder are adverts that do not specify). The change is similar in the US, although more roles are advertised as fully remote.
“With the pandemic slowly becoming ancient history, employers are becoming firmer on return-to-office policies, whether that means fully or partly coming back to office,” Adzuna’s co-founder Andrew Hunter says.
Last year, Cook called working from home “the mother of all experiments”.
That experiment now seems to be ending.
Devastating losing the €100k+ job but having to now buy your own yogurt and fruit and also wash and iron your clothes Is a proper kick in the teeth to the Facebook lads and lassies …
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Was telling my trusted business confidantes (cc @briantinnion, @Rocko, @Appendage) on WhatsApp earlier that I was privy to a Microsoft Teams meeting mishap this morning. You know the type that went viral in the early covid days when people were wrestling with wfh & IT…
It was an all lender weekly update call with a couple of advisory firms. Some people put cameras on, some don’t, it’s a 15-30 minute call & usually standard fare.
We were settling into the call & next thing a lender camera came on & one of my counterparts from another bank was stark naked & standing in the shower! Seemed she was multi-tasking & must have inadvertently flicked on the phone camera while resting it up on the shower ledge.
Breasts, vagina, everything, were completely visible & she turned the shower on & started washing herself. A few shocked mumbles from other participants ensued and then the meeting organiser chimed in with “a camera may need to be turned off”. But the woman, & I was glad it was a woman, obviously didn’t hear him as she had the shower going & was chancing her arm paying cursory attention to the meeting.
Naturally, I had no option but to watch her rubbing shower gel all over her diddies as it was fundamental to my transaction monitoring responsibilities. The meeting continued for another 2-3 minutes with people awkwardly pushing on with their updates, all the while she was giving herself a good scrubbing in the bottom left panel on my screen. Indeed the old keep calm & carry on spirit was a joy to behold.
Then there was a sudden grab of the phone & the camera abruptly went off! The mishap wasn’t mentioned on the remainder of the call & we duly bade each other good day & went on our respective merry ways.
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You could log that in the Job Opportunities in Financial Services thread if it exists.
By God. Did you spotlight her?
I bet you’re glad now you didn’t change careers.
I hope the meeting wasn’t being recorded.
A Director of Customer Care based in North County Dublin was recently let go due to telling the Executives in the US and London that he was busy and would join the Teams meeting later but then appeared on screen while the meeting was going just as he finished whacking himself off.
All on the call were shocked for about a minute while he was reaching for the Kleenex before one of the Execs in the Dublin office shouted “xxxxxx you’d be better turning your computer off”
Ye all forgot the remove person from meeting option or the option to turn off people’s camera. Like rabbits caught in two big headlamps so ye were
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I’d say they knew what they were at alright.
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That lady is the victim here.
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