The café at the end of my road is absolutely bursting with Twats. That’s not me being offensive. It’s just a fact.
On Mondays and Fridays there isn’t space to open a MacBook because of people like me (and probably you) dedicating ourselves to the WFH revolution.
New research confirms what we can all see when we look up from our turmeric lattes. A study of mobile phone data shows that doing as the so-called Twats and working on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays has become typical in offices around the country. Those of us who live in suburbs and small towns are commuting less into big cities.
I would contend that I am not a complete Twat. I typically work three days a week in the office, but those aren’t always the middle three in the week. Nevertheless, I do enough weekday lurking around in my London suburb to see how it has been transformed.
In the before times, if you found yourself at home during the working week it could feel eerily quiet. Like when you were at school and had to have a day off for some reason and you walked down streets devoid of children and felt as if you had gone through a portal to a different version of Acacia Avenue.
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Now it’s always busy in suburbia and we Twats are everywhere, especially cafés. It used to be that after 9am coffee shops were the preserve of the yummy mummies (and the odd daddy) having a gossip after school drop-off and all those people who had abandoned offices to focus on never finishing their novels.
Today the coffee shop is the office. And the yummy mummies aren’t entirely delighted. I bumped into a friend, who has always worked from home, in the long queue for coffee recently. “Shouldn’t you be in the office?” she said brightly, with a smile that suggested that was where she wished I was, along with the ten people waiting in front of us.
● The new work-from-hybrid — are you a TWAT?
I’m not a great one for working in cafés if I can help it and am fortunate enough to have a spare bedroom where I can tap away and avoid inflicting my phone conversations on others or being forced to listen to theirs.
Oh God, the work calls. They have made cafés intolerable. Surely, if bosses knew that their densest and most egregiously performative employees were barking into their phones about the massive proportions of their deals and their ability to leverage them to everyone’s eye-popping satisfaction, they’d order them back into the office five days a week.
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The apparent indispensability of café offices became clear during the cold snap before Christmas. Regulars at one of our local cafés doggedly stayed at their favourite outdoor tables, pecking at their laptops in fingerless gloves as they made their early morning calls to Asia.
Every retail establishment now serves coffee and has sneaked tables on to the pavement. Even a new nursery school near me is serving coffee and snacks through a hatch to parents who can’t get a table at one of the more established places.
My spare bedroom office overlooks the street and our house is on a T-junction, so I am ideally placed for nosy monitoring of my neighbours’ comings and goings. My main observation would be that the local dogs can’t believe their luck. When the Twats are home they are getting longer, slower, more leisurely walks than they ever did before.
Good for them. And good for their owners. Hopefully, all that walking is making them sounder of mind and body. And if their bosses aren’t complaining about their output, then this can only be a good thing. But if they are complaining — and, let’s face it, Britain does have a productivity problem — then they might start looking at who has a very fit dog.
Presumably the anonymised mobile data can show which phones are hanging around dog parks half the day. If I were a dog owner and a civil servant I would not have wanted that data in the hands of Jacob Rees-Mogg when he was on the rampage last year because all his staff had gone Awol.
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Where I live, little pelotons of Mamils used to head out at dawn to thrash around Richmond Park before the commute into London. Now the middle-aged men in Lycra seem to depart at all hours of the traditional working day. No doubt they are working flexibly and making up the time before or after their cycle. Of course they are.
The same goes for runners. I see them going out later because they no longer have a train to catch. Clogging up the towpath when I used to have it virtually to myself. Stopping to stretch at the bench that I want to use for my warm-up. Other runners really do need to go back to the office. Full time.
