Lies About the Pandemic
We've cured Covid! Long Covid, too! Time to get back to the office and get over ourselves.
At last, there’s something we can all agree on. The pandemic is finally over.
With it, our long national nightmare of “remote work” also comes to an ignominious end. The lazy entitlement of the fecklessly nomadic remote worker dies with a sad whimper.
Everything will return to normal. The planet is healing.
RTO or GTFO
The world’s brightest, most intelligent, hardest-working workers are gleefully working their way back to comfortable, spacious offices located in cozy, familiar city centers. There they’ll find safety from the many hazards of working from home, which include prolonged exposure to family members, ill-advised home improvement projects, and 380 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
The awkward intimacy of sharing a restroom with a perfect stranger is back, baby! Good thing, too, since that’s about as close as we’re getting to one other these days.
Corporate leaders can celebrate the control, surveillance, and the crisp authority afforded by an on-site workforce on the far side of a podium. Their true motives for the sudden RTO push is more sanguine: the altruistic desire to rescue our languishing downtown business districts.
The convenience of being close to City Hall is undeniable for those planning a wedding, divorce, or a name change. Who doesn’t love a neighborhood where the sun sets at 2pm? Despite almost biblical concentrations of wealth, these areas are safely devoid of art or culture that might attract undesirable and unruly residents.
Your family and your tax dollars will be welcome here. Without the ongoing contribution of your middle-class salary, the investment portfolios of heavily-leveraged billionaires will continue to be placed needlessly at risk.
City centers were, of course, totally evacuated for the entirety of the last several years. Just a few months ago, buildings were completely vacant, and businesses were shuttered. Armed gangs roamed streets littered with decaying husks of once-successful companies destroyed by the pandemic.
Beloved American institutions have been wiped from the face of the Earth. Innovative firms like J.C. Penney, Chuck E. Cheese’s, Friendly's Restaurants, and Pier 1 Imports have all but disappeared.
These were healthy, thriving companies — loved by dozens of customers until their cruel extermination by the scourge of remote work. Now-jobless CEOs were helpless to anticipate or respond to this bizarre phenomenon, which materialized overnight in early 2022 with absolutely no advance warning whatsoever.
Another inevitable consequence of the 2021 urban exodus was the 2022 crash in apartment rents. This development is great for average people and their families, but terrible news for landlords, who in US cities are practically worshipped as entrepreneurial hometown heroes.
The revitalization of American cities spurred by RTO (“Return to Outback Steakhouse”) brought on the end of homelessness, which turns out not to have been caused by decades-long attack on the social safety net, our disastrously failed health care policies, or the stigmatization of addiction and mental health, but by people working from home.
Thanks to the wise and timely choices of corporate leaders, local economies everywhere are once again booming and blooming like mums in the Spring.
RTOh?!
Generous, empathetic executives are assuming the role of a mindful shepherd, cautiously leading their flock back to the office, like lambs to the… ah damnit.
Let’s try that again. CEOs are trading in their Vail vacation homes for metropolitan condominiums in neglected but recently-reborn places like downtown Seattle. Today you’ll find knowledge workers everywhere, natty in their pressed Dockers, popping out for lunch in the vibrant Pike Place Market, a favorite among locals.
In recently repopulated Brooklyn, a suburb of New York City, managers can once again be found sipping lattes at Starbucks, a pre-pandemic favorite. Starbucks was nearly killed during the pandemic, managing to eek out a miserable 80% gain in share price over the past five years. Scientists now speculate the ubiquitous chain may never be killed since, like a virus, it was never really alive to begin with.
Residents can scarcely contain their joy and relief. The sleepy hamlet is once again brimming with vanity license plates, pricey strollers, and electric scooters now promising modestly diminished lethality.
Underneath it all, a disquieting enmity remains. The city’s stalwart inhabitants will never forget or forgive the economic devastation wrought by people who selfishly prioritized their own safety over the needs of employers, their investors, and their REIT portfolios.
RTOmmmm
The many wellness benefits of RTO (“Reduce The Onanism”) are soon to be enjoyed by millions. Workers arrive at the office in a state of fresh psychic calm, soothed by a peaceful, meditative 75-minute commute. Transit travelers have resumed curious eavesdropping on conversations shouted into the iPhones on the quiet car.
Investors eagerly await the skyrocketing productivity sure to result from RTO. Science from trusted sources on the internet proves that innovation and collaboration are boosted when we’re inhabiting the same filthy, fetid, crowded spaces. Inspired by this insight, RTO CEOs are quietly and quickly repatriating the millions of high-tech jobs they sent overseas just a few short years ago.
The inclusivity of our CEOs is proudly on display. Corporate America has finally paired up with government to solve the seemly-intractable problem of immigration reform. They’ll close the utterly embarrassing backlog of potential new American workers, and reform the inexplicably humiliating guest worker program.
New policies prioritize the dignity of all workers on American soil, regardless of their country of origin. In a startling act of obvious and urgent necessity, President Biden announced that laid off H1-B visa holders will no longer face deportation.
Long Covid has been cured, a truly great relief to the 65 Million people who have been told that they have a disease and also that it does not exist. Well, not exactly “cured.” Scientists have found that the vast majority of with Long Covid have already had it for so long, old age will probably kill them before they find a cure. Instead they’re heralding a promising new therapy, which involves taking two Centrum, pulling your pants up to your navel, and going for a walk.
Everybody knows that you can’t trust the science, since it disagrees with itself half the time. Let’s just stick to the facts. Since everything was horrible during the pandemic, our priority now is getting everything back to how it was before. Back then, everything was great. For CEOs.
Ready Trusty One-hitter
The next great epidemic is, of course, already upon us. According to analysts at federal agency NPR (National Podcast Radio) an epidemic of loneliness is sweeping the nation.
Ok, I will admit that this sounds a bit like something made up by a CEO in order to get us back to work. But it also suggests something that I desperately want to believe, which is that we are still capable of feeling anything at all.
Perhaps not. According to Vox Media, the internet’s Teen Vogue, it’s going to kill us all (the loneliness, not Teen Vogue:
A new report from the Surgeon General says that social isolation’s effects on mortality are equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes every day.
This is ridiculous! If social isolation and heavy smoking were so dangerous, I’d have been dead at 28, along with every other writer in America. Now they’re saying it’s bad for us? Thanks, Joe Biden!
The real masterstroke of the current administration was legalizing weed right before RTO (“Reefer to Office”) went down, ensuring those who do come back to work reluctantly will at least be as high as fuck.
You know what? Maybe returning to the office isn’t so bad after all. How about you all get in there and find out. Let me know how it goes.
I’ll be here catching up on Teen Vogue.