OP: Your comment of “For those of you complaining about returning to work, get over it” struck a nerve.
I can appreciate the need to return to the workplace for the various reasons discussed in multiple threads before, but your comment feels rather flippant and dismissive.
I am a rule follower and respect what the company asks me to do. However, I am not comfortable with the rapidly rising cases and returning to work right after the holidays, when many have traveled and been around a multitude of people.
Some of us face greater odds of a catastrophic outcome, should we get COVID (either because of our own health conditions or those of people in our lives). I don’t expect preferential treatment from my employer, but I do expect common sense to prevail.
Chevron has been so careful until recently, but in the past couple of months we seem to have thrown caution to the wind. We have resumed travel even though Omicron was spiking (a whole LT recently met in person; was it really necessary?).
My question is, why? What is so darned important that we now were rushing to get back to the office, when we have managed to effectively work from home for nearly two years?
It seems foolish to press employees to return to the office right now. The statistics are not in our favor. I am a practical person, and I what concerns me isn’t right now, it’s the level of contagion and cases requiring hospitalization in a few weeks, when we begin to feel the impact of the holiday period travel and large gatherings. The problem is that if we wait until then to react, we face a much more potentially serious scenario than if we simply postpone return to work now.
So, OP, I get that your circumstances might be such that you can be relatively carefree about COVID. I just ask that you find a bit if compassion and reasoning for those of us who face real life or death potential from this virus and are genuinely concerned about a premature return to the office.