Whoop, we’re going back to the office! Jolly japes! Gossip! Free mineral water and Digestives!

Sundar Pichai is woken by insistent miaowing: the cat needs to be let out. And of course in this new world order of social distancing, this interpersonal remoteness, this new normal, Sundar will have to do it himself.

Now that I’m up, he thinks as once again he is forced to hunt around the kitchen for the bent paperclip he uses with alarming frequency to depress the Reset button on the intermittently operating smart catflap, I may as well check if everyone else is. He launches a Google Meet but on second thoughts quits and fires up FaceTime instead, out of politesse.

"Hey Timbo, how’s it going?"

Tim Cook has evidently been up and about much earlier. He appears on-screen behind an ironing board with a half-full laundry basket to one side.

"Hey Sunny," replies the visibly weary Apple CEO. "Just finishing off the whites. It’s never-ending, isn’t it? I hate the new normal in which we must all take more individual responsibility and creative initiative while sanitarily working from home," he adds by way of unrealistic but helpful exposition. "It’s a right fucker."

A sing-song melody rings out on both their smartphones. Satya Nadella is trying to connect. Timbo and Sunny quit their FaceTime chat and, each with a heavy sigh, launch Skype. As usual, pressing the green Accept Call button doesn’t do anything and the insistent call melody continues unabated.

Fifteen seconds later, Satya appears on screen. He appears to be under a sink.

"Guys, do you know much about fixing a leaky plughole? I tried calling a plumber but the fool said he couldn’t fix it by remote access. Aargl. Flargl largl. Uggl uggl largl."

As Skype’s audio stream inevitably breaks up, Sundar hears miaowing outside the freshly inoperative smart catflap: the cat wants to be let back in. Tim’s thoughts too turn back to home chores as he remembers he still needs to prep the root vegetables for the oven. Satya would have to Goo… er, Bing an explainer video on the finer aspects of telescoping basin wrenches by himself.

…

There’s not going to be a new normal, trust me. It’s just marketing blah to sell you more work-from-home kit that you have to pay for yourself, thereby subsiding your employer while it simultaneously collects Government furlough funds. It’s a concept championed by people who have never once in their lives experienced manual labour from a first-person perspective.

Me, I tend to share the Michel Houellebecq view that life after COVID-19 will be exactly the same as it was before; maybe a little worse.

So while it may be amusing for your kids to watch you "work" from home – i.e. hurriedly push empty wine bottles out of shot before joining another over-long, agenda-less Zoom conference with remote managers while trying to appear comfortable and relaxed with the situation by picking up the nearest unwilling pet to stroke on-camera but ending up looking like some demented cat lady or Poundland Blofeld – it’s time to think about returning to the old normal.

If your kids think working from home looks so amusing, buy them the Fisher-Price My Home Office 8-piece Playset. Whenever they sit down and open the play-laptop, start drilling holes on the other side of the wall. Whenever they pick up the play-smartphone, ask to borrow it because "it’s my turn" and "you promised", then throw a strop and tell their grandparents they are being mean to you. Whenever they put on the play-headphones for a play-video-conference, stub your toe on something and scream in their faces for the next two hours.

Me, I can’t wait to get back to the office. No matter that I’ve worked from home for the last 27 years.

Until very recently I assumed I might be alone in harbouring such deviant desires. Results of all the remote working surveys I’d read indicated so: you know, this kind of stuff in which almost a fifth of working adults pledge never to return to full-time office work ever again, and more than a fifth claim (ha ha, get this) to be more productive working from home.

One thing working from home definitely has going for it – at least, if you believe in the new normal – is that you don’t have to worry about the impact of your woeful personal hygiene on colleagues. By contrast, it looks as if office workers will be expected to keep two metres apart from each other and wear face masks at their desks, almost certainly for longer than just a few weeks; probably several months.

This is no great shakes for anyone already involved in office-based, non-retail, customer-facing roles. IT training centres, for example, have been open since late July with distancing policies, protection shields, hand gel, visors and masks all in place. But still, I understand from press reports here in France that a certain sector of the working population, especially in the USA, considers mask-wearing to be nothing less than the act of a little kitten.*

Now, I have enjoyed learning about each new face-mask conspiracy theory as it pops out of Russian propaganda bots but I was surprised when a journalist from public national news broadcaster France Inter risked ridicule during a press conference with the Government’s Director General of Health by asking whether it was reasonable that manufacturers routinely embed RFID chips in face masks.

I was even more surprised when the DG immediately confirmed that many types of face mask do indeed have RFID chips inside. He said it’s used in a clinical environment to check whether a mask has hit its use-by date. Apparently some fabric ‘smart masks’ (oh yes, I kid you not) contain a chip that allows them to be counted how often they’ve been washed and re-used before alerting the wearer the maximum recommended limit has been reached.

Hang on, don’t some types of RFID allow the chip to be detected over a kilometre or more? Not to worry, it would never happen in Britain: the world-leading Government-developed app to detect the masks simply wouldn’t work.

Anyway, despite all the detractors I am overjoyed to learn from another survey that Brits are now looking forward to returning to work. Why? Well, according to human resources software company CIPHR, the top reason for wanting to return to the office (with 67% of respondents) was to enjoy some office gossip, amusingly referred to in the survey as "Chatting with colleagues".

Further down the list come the usual suspects, such as "Having a dedicated working space" (36%) and "No distractions such as kids or TV" (34%), which is a reminder that, amazing though it must seem to employers, not all of us have a spare bedroom within our domestic palaces.

Indeed, learning of such poverty among their subjects came as a shock to all governments early on during the lockdowns. Official advice to joggers and gym-goers that they should stay at home was "based on the science" that we should just take a few laps around our tennis courts while remaining well within the bounds of our own moats.

Two reasons stand out from the survey, though.

At number 10 in the list, 13% of respondents said they looked forward to "Using the office Wi-Fi". Clearly, the pandemic has not affected people’s sense of humour. I’ve had faster, more reliable and more secure Wi-Fi connections standing outside a crumbling 1970s shopping centre than I’ve ever experienced at the heart of a customer workplace. Office Wi-Fi is shit.

Of course, this could simply mean 13% of respondents have even shitter broadband than they ever suffered at the workplace. Given the silly conversations I’ve had with bank call centre staff who had been forced to work from their homes, this is probably the real reason.

"Hello. Your site’s not working."

"OK, if you insist."

"OK."

"Yes, well, could you tell someone that your site’s not working?"

[After five minutes] "Hello?"

The other shocker from the CIPHR survey is the Number 2 reason for wanting to return to the office is – roll of drums, please – "Free food and drink" (53%).

Really? Maybe I’ve not been invited to the right kind of office but the only "free food and drink" I’ve experienced in the office space is instant coffee and a unpleasantly chewy biscuit whose embedded RFID chip reported itself to the Kremlin to be beyond its ‘Consume By’ date sometime back in the mid 2000s.

So much for work-from-homes. Turning to furloughed staff, 47% said they had "Missed their job".

These respondents are having a laugh. They surely must all be in IT roles, for which the minimum requirements in the original job ad included a mandatory two years of previous disappointment plus a certificate in bitter sarcasm.

Or perhaps those on furlough had hit the nail on the head. Some 41% said they were "eager" to get back to work "to stave off boredom".

Sure, you probably get bored sitting in the office too. But being bored with a free coffee that tastes of pencil lead accompanied by half a packet of soggy free Digestives while using shit free Wi-Fi makes it all worthwhile.

That salary appraisal can wait another year, eh?

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. If you are enjoying Autosave is for Wimps, please recommend it to your friends. But then, if you enjoy this kind of thing, it could well be that you are in fact utterly friendless, so it’s not going viral anytime soon it seems. You can also watch and listen to Alistair Dabbs drinking his own self-purchased coffee on the weekly BIG Show podcast at the British Tech Network.

* "A pussy". The French newspapers use Google Translate.