I’ve been at my current job for nearly 18 years and I’m on my 6th manager in that period. The first manager I had was the worst of the lot (so far…), a very anti-WFH and task-driven person. The lease on my desktop computer was running out about three months before a big organizational reform in 2014 where my position was moved into a completely different department (comms adjacent rather than random general admin services that didn’t fit anywhere else). With about 70 other first line managers, she was demoted to a senior IC.
As one of her last management decisions concerning me (certainly the last one I remember), she denied my request for a laptop rather than a replacement desktop. When I asked why, she straight-out said, with a completely deadpan expression on her face, that “I can’t trust you to do your job if you’re at home.” I was so stunned I just mumbled something like “Okay,” but later when the shock of it had worn off, I was pretty angry and told my husband and all my friends that she has no more control of whether or not I’m actually working at the office, given that I had my own office at the time (80 percent at least of us did) and mostly kept my door shut, and the office policy was pretty firm that not even managers were supposed walk in on their reports without knocking when the door was closed.
The first thing my new manager did on the first day that I reported to her was to ask why I didn’t have a laptop, and when I told her that my old manager thought I didn’t need one (without going into detail), the second thing she did was to order a laptop for me.
Following the organizational change that moved me to the comms department they started issuing laptops to pretty much everyone, with a few exceptions like our graphics designers. The price difference between high-end laptops and standard business ones was then much greater than the price difference between a high-end graphics desktop and a standard business desktop. Now even the graphics designers have laptops.
For years I could pretty much ignore my former manager’s existence as an HR rep. Basic professional courtesies like greeting her with a small smile when I saw her in passing at the office sufficed. At least as a very task-oriented person she never expected me to pretend to like her, not showing my active dislike was good enough.
Then Covid happened. Granted, for the six years that I had a laptop before Covid I didn’t have a dedicated home office setup, so I only bothered to WFH when it was unavoidable for other reasons.
The cognitive dissonance I experienced when I had to listen to her explaining our new WFH-friendly hybrid policies that were put in place when the near-total ban on in-office work was lifted was something else. She was a pro and did (and still does) as her position required her to, but I’m pretty convinced that she still prefers the old style of working when people were always or almost always at the office, even if she realizes that that ship has sailed as our offices are too small to have everyone there at the same time. Sometimes when she posts on our intranet forum her anti-WFH attitudes show through the cracks just enough to prove that she truly hasn’t changed her mind about it.
CitrusGirl, I really hope you can keep your laptop.