Thank God for the end of August. The end of half-arsed work and half-arsed holidays. One in six of us holidayed over this bank holiday weekend, chasing the last gasp of the summer. This week is back to school, back to business and, oddly enough, back to work for the masses of employees who’ve spent most of the summer idling at a desk.
Why do we put up with the mouse-wiggling?
The chatter of lunch breaks in the park or after-work beer gardens veers one way or another to the same topic: workers moaning about being trapped in the office and getting nothing done. It seems we haven’t progressed much in the twenty-seven years since Office Space was released. The complaints are the same: ‘No one was meant to live in a cubicle… I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working… In a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.’ In August, these sentiments plague every office job more than usual.
The heatwaves don’t help. LSE researchers found that the June heatwave led to 24 million working hours being lost. Two-thirds of employees who sometimes work from home say they wouldn’t come to the office if the aircon wasn’t working. August can only be expected to have been worse. The tetchiness has infected every workplace, from browbeaten insurance men staring at their inbox, waiting to be sent home early by their line managers, to marketing girlies logging whole days of ‘mousewiggling’, moving their cursor across the screen to imitate activity and avoid the wrath of digital monitoring. There’s not even the Friday booze trolley to compensate for it any more.
