The days of our lives

For the past couple of years, whenever I rode the subway, I always picked out the ten people sitting or standing closest to me and then counted how many of those ten were wearing masks. Nine months ago, it was six riders in masks. Three months ago it was one. Last week I was the only masked warrior. Using this methodology, Covid is over. At least in the minds of those people I was viewing at that moment in time and in that place.
Another way to measure better days have arrived showed up Monday when Amazon told its employees that they all had to come to work five days  a week. You’d think the company that sells so much online wouldn’t mind a few stay-at-homes, but apparently not. By comparison, Canada’s public service gets a break. This month Ottawa finally got around to mandating three days a week in the office, four for executives.
Canada’s largest employers have been following similar rules. At Royal Bank, which employs almost 100,000 people in Canada and the U.S., there was a lot of to-and-fro for a while. In August 2022, for example, CEO David McKay urged employees in an internal memo to “come together more often in person” but didn’t specify exactly how many days a week. A spokesperson later said McKay meant working two or three days a week by the end of September.
By March 2023, the bank said employees could still work from home one or two days. It may be just semantics, but to me that didn’t sound much different from the statement made in the previous year. These days, the bank is describing in online ads something it’s calling “hybrid work” without saying when or where a new employee will carry out that effort.
Despite all such attempts at returning positivity, there are other signs that tell us the downtown Toronto core is still a different place than in pre-Covid times. I’m underground in that part of the world about every six weeks and I can tell you by look and feel that even now there are a lot of people who are working from home. The hallways are still nowhere near as busy as before. The food court with multiple emporiums that straddles CIBC and TD banks used to be packed pre-pandemic. These days, I never have trouble finding a seat to eat my fish and chips from Buster’s Sea Cove. Whenever will we reach safe harbour?