#telework

January 27, 2026 - Day 222

My letter to reps:

Remote work is a part of modern society and should be prioritized wherever it can be in order to facilitate disability accommodation, tamp down fossil fuel expense and emissions, and reduce the spread of disease. Telework is a necessary part of a functional future society and should be incentivized in government work and private industry, wherever at all possible.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.

Government Executive -  Trump’s ‘DOGE’ commission promises mass federal layoffs, ending telework The incoming administration will handle large-scale RIFs with compassion, Vivek Ramaswamy says. November 18, 2024 01:40 PM ET “So this is a historic opportunity. We're not actually going to squander this.” He added that reductions to telework and relocating agencies would help motivate employees to leave government voluntarily. He called it a “dirty little secret” that most federal workers “don’t even show up to work.”  About 80% of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person, according to a recent Office of Management and Budget review, and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all because their jobs are not conducive to it. Of those who do telework, employees on average spent about three-fifths of their time on site.  “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won't want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That's a good side effect of those policies as well.”

Many people in various jobs in various industries public and private legitimately work remotely. A lot of CEOs work remotely. A lot of business owners work remotely.

This attempt to marry telework to the old disinformation cliche trope of “people don-wanna work” is dishonest. Tycoons want to “shrink the government in order to drown it in the bathtub” because they don’t want to pay taxes, and that’s the dirty little secret laid bare here — they don’t want to pay taxes, and they don’t want anyone to create a functional society for people. They want a rigidly enforced class society made up of tycoons and all the rest, with everyone in servitude under a microscope marching to their petty self-serving orders. I’m guessing a lot of Trump voters work remotely, because in a modern society it is a norm! I suspect that even Trump voters don’t actually want to go backwards on this. What about Elon Musk futuristic fans? Do they think ending modern remote options in various fields should happen? It doesn’t really make sense that these tech moguls are so against modern tech solutions, right?

Nobody is fooled — It doesn’t make sense for anybody but the billionaires.

“The Sunfish. 317. Where the meadow brook deepens under hazel bushes, or plunges into the the milldam's pool, or where sunbeams piercing the warped boards of the old broad bridge, illumine the scented water, barefooted children, with worm boxes poles strings pin hooks and puppy, peeping downward, behold the sunfish, akin to humanity in its eyes, fanning itself with winglike fins, a translucent golden shadow in an enchanted water world.” (Guide Book to the Tiles Pavement in the Capitol of Pennsylvania by Henry C Mercer, 1908, p. 85)

I love how in the English language they immediately invent words to define a situation that, until now, was not very common.

The pandemic made teleworking widespread when before, most companies looked askance at it and did not decide to promote it.

Now I can say that it is a blessing and a punishment.

Blessing because it allows me to manage my time and reconcile work and family life, in addition to saving time in commuting, adding more hours to personal time.

But it's also a curse because on conflicting days you end up working many more hours than your share ("well, you're already connected, you show up from time to time…" 🙄 ) or medical leave is carried out that way. Just one example: I couldn't take a break when i had COVID last year because we were at low minimums, so I kept working from home 😷

But there is another variant: workation (work+vacation). And this is wonderful.

Lowering the lid of the laptop at three in the afternoon and it's like telling Scotty to teleport me to the planet Vacation lol.

And that is what will happen from tomorrow.

And why am I telling you this? Well, because surely the blog posts will be a bit erratic during this month.

I will try to look out and be up to date but, as they say, life is short and you have to live it.

Take care of yourself, respect yourself and, above all, enjoy the moment and ignore the noise.