50% Of My Country Envies Your Remote Work Hell

That’s just the percentage of unemployed Indians in India

In Fisher-Price Has Turned Our Remote Work Hell Into A Toy, Rob Walker had me laugh out loud with his satirical and on-point article. The story discusses a toy digital workstation aimed at pre-schoolers.

Working from home hasn’t been easy for a lot of us. I’m used to reading about America, on Medium.

Then, I looked around me.

I mean, I’m in India — I just handed over last year’s textbooks to parents of a child a year younger than mine, now in the eighth grade. They can’t afford a new set of books, or they don’t want to waste money on a set when a used one is available for free. Most people don’t have a nice phone for their child for distance learning, let alone a laptop or a desk. Children sit on the floor, on mats, to study.

Internationally, think of how privileged a parent is, to be digitally literate, and to aspire to digital literacy for their child who is still in preschool. To buy a laptop that isn’t even a real one, which is just a dummy, a toy. What’s satirical for America is aspirational for some parts of the world.

If someone has work, which isn’t physical labor, in India, he’s respected. Such people will often ‘complain’ about having minor injuries, like neck strain, unique to the salaried class that can only happen to someone smart enough to use a computer.

They aren’t usually complaining. They’re saying: “Guess what? I’m such a valuable employee, I have to work even from home, they can’t do without me. I’m not a mill, factory or farm, kitchen, shop, or municipal worker. I’m the brains of where I work, so much that I can do my work with a computer that you wouldn’t understand.”

So… do you like your computer home workstation now?

50% of my country envies your computer and would probably be afraid to touch it. If they could afford it, a $24 toy that teaches their child how to use a mouse or a keyboard (does it have all the alphabets in proper order? Wow! Accelerated learning!) is appealing to them. Though they’d never blow that much on a toy, they’d save for a real one.

Just in case you still don’t understand where I’m coming from, and in case you’re still unhappy about ‘having’ to work at a computer, look at my photos of a book read by 8-year-olds in the third grade in India. Kids learn about computers from photographs in textbooks. Sometimes, they even have a glorious, golden half-hour in the school computer lab, sometimes five students to one screen, where they actually touch a computer and perform the operations they have memorized on paper.

50% is just the unemployed. There are plenty more people employed in manual labour jobs who would also love the privilege of sitting at a computer to earn their living. So maybe the percentage of people who’d envy your remote work hell is even higher!