Is it just ME? or is ‘working from home’ just skiving?

It’s amazing how much people can get done — food shop ordered, sheets washed . . . and the odd email sent

STROLL into many an office across Britain on a Friday and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped into one of those dystopian films where everyone has disappeared. They are like ghost towns: tumbleweed blowing across the desks, deserted corridors, empty meeting rooms.

Where IS everyone? Fire alarm? Norovirus? Mass kidnapping?

No, silly, they’re working from home — perhaps the greatest mass con of modern times.

Ping! In pop the automatic email responses with wearying regularity: ‘I work from home on Fridays, but will be checking emails often.’

Let us call working from home what it actually is: skiving.

The work-from-homer starts small. They may begin by asking to ‘wfh’ for an afternoon if they have to wait in for the plumber. Next thing you know, it’s every Friday.

It all sounds sensible on paper. No commute means more hours available to toil away, right?

With everything happening online, why shouldn’t people be dealing with the Singapore office in their front room?

But, in practice, working from home is the twilight zone between work and leisure. It’s not that people are lazy, it’s that the siren call of domestic prevarication is too strong. There are litter trays to be cleaned, eBay purchases to be returned, sheets to be washed, food deliveries to be ordered.

It is amazing how much people can get done when working from home — it’s just that most of it has nothing to do with work.