SpanishInput wrote:sfuqua wrote:I wonder if anything good is coming out of this pandemic.
In my humble opinion:
-There is now more acceptance for "working from home".
-People of all ages have now used online meetings, and haven even been "virtually" to weddings. This helps both the environment and people that would otherwise be isolated.
....
I think this pandemic has accelerated many beneficial workplace changes that may have occurred anyway over time but which would have been very slow in coming. My workplace was forced in a huge hurry to upgrade to support us working from home and like most places rose to the challenge well, out of necessity. Absent the pandemic, it would have taken years and years to get around to this, mostly through inertia. It has resulted in what I expect to be a permanent shift for many - subject to how management decides to handle things down the road, my guess is the majority of my colleagues will elect not to return physically to the office. The courts (the Federal Court as well as the provincial courts) have massively reoriented court procedure, to the point where remote attendances are now very much the norm rather than a rare exception (it used to be just incarcerated litigants who could attend court remotely via videoconferences, and even then there was usually a glitch in the technology), and these all now run seamlessly, again because everyone had to adapt. I no longer have to fly to various places in the province to conduct various matters, and instead can conduct them remotely. Much of this results in greater efficiency, huge savings in time and expense and (mostly importantly from my perspective, and as noted by Spanish Input) lower impact on the climate.
But to answer sfuqua`s question from my perspective concerning Vancouver, both my subjective impression and conclusions drawn from media reporting of increased aggressiveness (including an increase in physical violence) between people in the municipality comparing the present time to the Before Time, yes, more people seem more angry currently. And way less civil.