Apple is indefinitely delaying the return of employees to corporate offices from February 1st to a “date yet to be determined” due to continued COVID fears, staff were informed via a memo sent by CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The delay comes just weeks after the company asked employees to begin returning by February, a timeline that had already been pushed back several times.
“We are delaying the start of our hybrid work pilot to a date yet to be determined,” Cook said in the memo. “Our offices remain open and many of our colleagues are coming in regularly, including our teams in Greater China and elsewhere.”
He cited “rising cases in many parts of the world and the emergence of a new strain of the virus.” Cook also strongly encouraged employees to receive vaccinations and booster shots, saying “this is by far the best way to keep you and your community safe.”
In the memo, Cook also said the Cupertino, California-based company will provide each employee a $1,000 bonus that may be used for work-from-home needs, saying it’s “in support of our commitment to a more flexible environment.” That includes retail workers.
“These funds are intended to help you with your home workspace and can be used as you see fit. You will be receiving more information about this shortly,” he said.
MacDailyNews Take: Listen, we’ve always told it like we see it, so here you go:
Why actually work when you can simply apply a little pressure to spineless, paralyzed “leadership” and stay at home, coddled, not having to work at anywhere near the same level as before, yet still receive your regular paychecks, random $1,000 bonuses, etc.?
Who, besides your customers, care if promised tentpole features are delayed into next year?
If all you have to sit through are the occasional mealy-mouthed memos devoid of actual science-based facts from your jellyfish “leaders,” that’s an infinitesimally small price to pay.
Life is good when your bosses seemingly watch and, laughingly, believe CNN.
Does Tim Cook actually believe the tripe in his memo or is he as afraid of being sued into oblivion by his own employees if he requires them to actually come into work? We hope it’s the latter, but these endless delays of the inevitable are still a sign of worrisome weakness, dithering, and indecision.
Tim Cook and Apple “leadership,” here’s a fact that we know for certain because we’ve personally heard it: Apple employees are laughing at you behind your backs.
At some point, some Apple employee, likely someone older who unfortunately has multiple comorbidities — maybe who smokes, has asthma, is overweight, or has other risk factors — is very likely going to contract COVID-19 and die. Some lawyer will be enlisted to try to sue Apple over it. This sad scenario is virtually unavoidable. Return-to-work delays atop return-to-work delays are simply kicking the unavoidable down the road; a waste of time.
In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not disappear. There is no such thing as zero-COVID.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will very likely become endemic, yet pose less danger over time. People will acquire immunity via vaccines (effectiveness TDB) and naturally as they contract and recover from variants like omicron since the partially-effective vaccines permit not only transmissibility, but also breakthrough infections. Influenza and the four human coronaviruses that cause common colds (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu vaccines and acquired immunity means that sane societies tolerate the unavoidable seasonal deaths and illnesses they bring without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite return-to-work delays, etc.
At which point, if ever, will some people decide that wasting away their short lives in abject fear of a bad flu, very likely engineered by China and partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is a hysterical self-defeating overreaction?
Adam Gopnik was writing about a different “disaster,” but, going on two years worth of “two weeks to slow the spread,” his words from August 2011 are a rather interesting read in late 2021 and something to bear in mind as you consume “news” media:
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios — the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about — was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things…
That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preemptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.
And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 28, 2011
As we wrote back on March 9, 2020: The real virus is the panic.
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