The Inevitable RTO Email.

Hi Friend and/or Friends.

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

In other words, alea iacta est. In other words, it's time. Not thyme, not tarragon, not turmeric. It's time.

Time to get your scrawny, ultra-processed-food-filled ass back to our ass of a workspace. It's time to be inundated by the relentless noise of an open-plan. It's time to fight for a seat like subway riders fight for a vomit-free place to sit. It's time to subject yourself to the germs from every cough, the vapor of every sneeze and the banality of every meeting request. 

It's time to be treated like an industry-farmed animal with barely enough room to think, breathe or turn-around. It's time to reconnect and engorge with people who will be fired around the same time you will when we in management get around to our next sortie of "right-sizing" due to the ever-impending "challenging macro climate."

As management is more unconnected and less engaged in anything but squeezing extortionate profits from the sweat of your labors, it's time for you to become more connected and more engaged.

As of June 4, 1997, and retroactively to that date, everyone will be required to come in six days (minimum) weekly, or 297-hours, whichever comes second.

Starting January, if we stay in business that long, we expect you in eight-days a week, including our new and quasi-trademarked holding-company-originated day, Sadday™. Both your managers, their managers, their managers, and their managers and their manglers will be in touch (in an HR-endorsed way) and will tell you exactly what to do, when to do it, and whom to do it to. 

 

I understand that this will be a maladjustment. But more importantly it is a cold and callous edict, a fiat even, but not in the manner of a broken-down Italian motorcar. I truly am told to feel by my corporate overlords that the destructive benefits of more face-to-face interaction will increase engagement, communicable diseases and inspire greater collaboration, cohabitation and supercharge our disappointment in our miserable overall output.

 

Thank you all for your cooperation and for continuing your fine attrition efforts of the past year. Getting on board, getting water-boarded, and most of all being bored to death are important efforts to continue as we move forward into backwardness.

Onward and downward! 

😊

CEO 4753y,

Eastern Western region of North American Operations,

South American Division.

AKA, The highly paid person who will never make eye-contact when seeing you in the elevator.

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