Let’s do this together YOUR
My boss emailed first thing yesterday asking what I had on. I sniggered to myself, because I really am that childish, and emailed back: “Floaty negligee and fluffy kitten mules.”
The boss laughed politely while fighting the urge to sack me.
But she might not have been so amused had she been able to see via the webcam on my laptop that I was, in fact, still wearing my duvet.
WFH has always had its perks, such as not getting dressed until midday and showering only when the boiler engineer comes round. But the trouble is lockdown has lifted the lid on all us homeworkers’ dirty little secrets.
And while my boss would rather poke her eyes out than be forced to watch me on a webcam, some employers are now dreaming up new ways of managing their out-of-office staff.
First there was the story of a “smart cushion” being designed by a Chinese technology to monitor their staff’s heart rate and count the minutes spent away from their work stations, which I first thought was an early April Fool’s joke.
And now a French call centre giant is threatening to use webcams to spy on its home-based employees. The firm is said to be planning to connect staff to an artificial intelligence system that can detect breaches, such as looking at phones, eating or leaving desks while on duty.
But it strikes me that if their artificial intelligence was so damn clever, they would have got the robots to do the job in the first place. Frankly I could have already been replaced by a vacuum cleaner and most of you wouldn’t even know the difference… know the difference… know the difference…
Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.