Dear LPG, 

As a retired person, I know that my ‘clocking in’ days are over. Still, whether starting work back in the day meant clocking in, signing in, or just letting everyone know that you had arrived, I always felt that having to do that every workday was where the ‘Big brother is watching you idea started to remind me that someone is continuously checking. 

It was signing in for me, and as my first job was in an office, it was just something we did. However, on those days when the train made you late, or you were not sure if you had left the iron on and had to go back home to check with the result that you had to take a later train, the statistics showed up when you put them all together.

Then there was Covid-19 and the lockdown which came with it, and, during that time, I knew that I was not the only pensioner living alone in a self-isolation situation who depended on telephone calls for my sanity. Being forced to not leave home for so long would not have been bearable without the many calls from my friends and family as we all regularly checked to see if each other was all right. I did a lot of phoning, too, and after that question and its answer, the conversation would inevitably turn to how the person at the other end of the phone was getting on. 

Even though I am well past the age when I have to work for a living, this is where I got a bit jealous of some of the younger ones and worried about others. A couple of them were furloughed, and I would not have wished for that feeling of not knowing if I would have a job to return to on anyone. But while for those in the NHS, public transport, retail, and so many other essential working industries where workers had to go out into that world, some of the family members from my children’s generation were working from home and a chat with one of my home-working nephews left me telling him how I would have enjoyed not having to get a train to go to work every day.

I assumed that missing out on commuting would have saved hours every week, and there would be much more freedom when doing your work. Still, I did not realise that everything you do on a computer can be monitored even more closely than when you make the journey to be there physically. In the good old days, it was just a case of clocking on, clocking off and making sure that your line manager was happy with your progress, but my nephew told me that everything you do on the computer could be logged. Computer programmes allow employers to track keystrokes, internet usage, and even webcam activity.   So, if you pop down the road to pick up your child from school, your employer can see your inactivity in a much more detailed way, while once you are at work, a chat with a workmate is perhaps less likely to go unnoticed.  

The internet tells that Willard Legrand was the inventor of the first time recording clock in 1889, and while I can now see that employers need to make sure that they are getting value for money from their workers, I have learned that working from home is not the easy option that I assumed it to be. 

LF, Croydon.