Mondays and Fridays went first. And then going into the office at all. And after that, it turned out that you couldn’t really be expected to be in the same country as the company you work for, and your boss certainly couldn’t contact you out of hours. Now, it is claimed that graduates are refusing to come into the office for job interviews. Seriously?

In reality, the WFH virus is mutating, and like many viruses, growing more troublesome all the time. A culture of industry and hard work that has taken centuries to create is being trashed before our very eyes – and sadly it will be very hard to ever restore.

Working from home has been transformed from an occasional privilege to something that can’t even be questioned.Credit: iStock

It was probably too optimistic to expect the traditional job interview to survive the onslaught on traditional working cultures. The days when you might buy a new suit, polish your shoes, and arrive twenty minutes early, all to make sure you made the right first impression on a prospective employer are now consigned to the past.

And yet why would we be surprised by that any more? When the pandemic struck, and we were all locked up at home for several months, many employers reckoned working from home – or lounging around in your PJs to give it its technical term – was a short-term solution.

Sure, we might learn a few lessons in flexible working, while using office space more efficiently, but then everything would get back more or less to normal. Instead, it turns out that we allowed habits to form that are now out of control.

Working from home has been transformed from an occasional privilege to something that can’t even be questioned. Aided and abetted by over-powerful, woke human resources departments, it is considered an absolute right.

Any CEO with the temerity to suggest it might be good for people to pop into the office a bit more often can expect to be treated as the reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge. It doesn’t stop there. “Working from anywhere” presumably means that you can be sunning yourself on a beach somewhere while still officially “working”.

The “right to switch off” means that your boss can’t contact you about anything outside of working hours. But what if the entire company is about to crash?