Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from ACM, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's newsletter was written by ACM national agriculture reporter Chris McLennan.
For a long time I had to catch a train from the country to the city for work.
Every day of the working week that journey would take at best three hours out of my day.
For lots of the year it was dark when I left for work, dark when I came home.
That was 15 hours a week and it was not always pleasant hours.
And it was not always 15 hours, that was a good run. My train was often cancelled for no reason, or delayed, or replaced by coaches.
Crammed into a steel cylinder with coughing and sneezing strangers.
One bloke even vigorously cleaned his ear out with a cotton bud while I was quite close to him on one occasion. He disposed of said cotton bud by dropping it to add to the filth on the floor of the carriage.
A guy who regularly used to roll his cigarette and have it placed ready between his lips for lighting when he got off at his station, had had enough this one day and just lit it.
No-one knew where to look as the smoke quickly filled the train.
In the morning it was a race to grab a parking spot in the "made" section of the muddy parking lot at the station.
At night, it was a struggle not to slip over in the dark to find it again.
I was talking to a lady on the train one day who said she had been making the same journey for more than 20 years.
Made my four years seem hardly worth mentioning.
I recall all this because people are going back to work again.
No longer do they have to work from home, and that's good.
Not for everyone mind, I get that too.
But I reckon you miss a lot from not being in an office.
Especially when you are new at a job.
The noise of those early newsrooms was unbelievable - teletype machines were encased by chipboard boxes which contained a little of the clatter.
Police monitors screeching all sorts of gibberish from both sides of the room.
As the newbie on police rounds, I had the radio scanner on a shelf next to my left ear. It was in a wire mesh box so people couldn't reach in and turn it down.
Reporters and editors, usually fresh back from a boozy lunch would yell messages rather than both to get up from their desks.
It was bedlam and I loved it, I learned more by saying nothing and taking all this in than any Zoom conference.
Something that can be explained by a colleague in an instant might be too difficult to bring up in an online meeting.
It's hard to get to know a person online, well, it is for me at least.
Training is always better face-to-face.
After my train adventures I took a job in the country, what a difference.
I could park out the front - five minutes from front door to work. Of course, we shouldn't have parked out the front. We should have left the spots for customers but we never had many so it didn't seem to matter. And I was the boss so I made the rules anyway.
Working from home suited a lot of people during COVID and it will be hard to give that up.
Someone close to me who works in recruiting says the top question asked by potential applicants has changed in recent months.
It has gone from "how much does the job pay" to "what do they (the prospective company) do for job satisfaction" and more questions about work-life balance?
Four-day weeks, working from home, even working from the country.
They call it flexible work culture.
When you hear President Putin casually discussing nuclear options it does give one pause to think about life's priorities.
Both workers and the companies they work for have a lot still to learn about how to manage this new workforce world order.
It is a timely conversation we are having.
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