Reply to Taking FMLA in a rage over RTO

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?[/quote]

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.[/quote]

OP, this is difficult to understand.  What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?[/quote]

It is not difficult to understand for anyone with a serious chronic health problem.

All travel consumes energy. Healthy people have that energy to spend; many people with disabilities do not because we are using substantial amounts of it on surviving. (In OP’s case, on healing from sepsis, FFS.)

Commuting spends energy in particular ways—the repetition, the alteration to sleep/wake patterns, either having to drive (which is a substantial cognitive burden) or having to use transit (which means a lot of time “in public”—sometimes a problem for those of us with socially problematic symptoms like needing to lie down or quickly find a bathroom. Metro has none BTW.)

A workspace in a home can be set up to meet the priority of getting the work done while also fully accommodating the body of the person doing the work. Shared workspaces aren’t like this; they are designed for default humans who don’t need to do things like lie down intermittently or have immediate access to bathrooms, food, drink and medications.

People here spouting off about getting “welfare” or “going on disability” have no idea how difficult any of the programs implied by those terms are to access.

OP, I am sorry—it all sucks.[/quote]

Op here. Thank you so much, PP. You explained it better than I could have.

I feel like so many of the replies here are coming from a place of assuming I’m lying. I have an infectious disease that is confirmed by testing and imaging. It’s not possible to fake it. It is fatal in many people. And I’m not even referring to the sepsis, which was a whole other thing.

When I was trying to go to the office, I would pump myself on adderall and sudafed (to amp me up and combat fatigue), plus Vicodin (to deal with pain), and Tylenol to minimize risk of spiking a fever. I’d also bring immodium because when I overdo it, I get diarrhea. The immodium and Vicodin both help with that.

At home, I work in a spare bedroom
With an en suite bathroom
And a bed, plus a fridge with ice packs and snacks. So I’m
Able to just grab what I need. During the 5 minutes it takes to go to the bathroom at the office, I can go in 1 minute at home and then lie in bed for a few minutes. Instead of chit chatting with coworkers, I can lie down and apply ice. On my lunch break, I can take a hot shower. All of this stuff helps immensely.[/quote]

What infectious disease do you have?[/quote]

Not OP, but this is not your business!! I wish people would leave OP alone and I don't even have an illness or infectious disease myself. She's not required to tell her employer the disease name to qualify for FMLA. She certainly doesn't need to tell anyone here.[/quote]

There's nothing the OP can say that won't make the RTO trolls go "haha, you were a sucky employee anyway!"[/quote]

Girl, ain't that the truth. So many of them here acting like they know about the law they don't know about, too. [/quote]

I think this might have been a reference to me.  So I should be clear- I am not in favor of major increases in onsite requirements. I am also someone who understands reasonable accommodation law.

It doesn't work like this:  "I have a qualifying medical condition, therefore I get to work from home."  I think we all agree that one couldn't say "I am blind, therefore I get to work from home" or "I don't have the use of my legs, so I get to work from home."

[b]There needs to be a limitation on getting the work done that is caused by that medical condition that can be relieved by working from home (and not as relieved by other accommodations)[/b]

OP may or may not be able to establish those things.  But so far, she hasn't.[/quote]

That is exactly what she is describing.

And no, my post was not a reference to you—it was to people upthread effectively saying “your boss wants RTO and that’s the end.”[/quote]

DP. She’s roughly described why she thinks WFH would accommodate her disability, but has not described why other accommodations would not be sufficient. At most she’s described why she doesn’t like them and that it would be more comfortable and convenient to work from bome.

She also hasn't demonstrated that WFH is a reasonable accommodation. The fact she's worked from home while others were also working from home does not mean she can continue to be effective when others return to the office.

And that, of course, presumes she's even been effective at her job. If she was, her employer would likely be more interested in incentivizing her to stay. She acknowledges that her employer wants to be rid of her, which implies she hasn't been effective at her job.[/quote]

She hasn’t argued it clearly here, but given what we know about the impact of sepsis on the body, we, here can be pretty sure that her WFH is in fact needed and that other accommodations would not be sufficient. See previous about the amount of energy it takes to commute.

Maybe others here work in the offices where RTO means you all return to one place and meet F2F all day. OP has said she is in a large org, which almost invariably means that this is not the case—and that these folks are likely still going to be doing an enormous amount of Zooming from their desks, across locations, time zones, and national borders. There is every reason to believe that someone WFH can be effective in that setup.

And if she’s not effective, that has nothing to do with whether the employer is obligated to engage in the accommodation process. They are, no matter what her performance is, and they apparently have not.

I’m so sorry, OP. These folks are right that you will have to state the need more clearly, but they are being jerks about it, and you don’t deserve that. [/quote]

We know next to nothing about the impact sepsis had on her body because she hasn't stated anything clearly. The term "sepsis" covers conditions with a broad range of severities. The sepsis is almost certainly been treated and the infection resolved, but now claims to have a mysterious "infectious disease," but she won't say anything about what that is.

She's been fairly clear about what make it uncomfortable or inconvenient to work, but not what would make it impractical or impossible to work. Yes, commuting is tiring and WFH can be nice if you have a long commute. Yes, it's more convenient and comfortable to have a private bathroom right next to you. Yes, it sounds nice to be able to take a hot shower during the middle of the day. But it is far from clear any of those things are necessary for her to be able to do her job.

Similarly, we don't know anything about her job-not as it existed before the pandemic, during the WFH period of the pandemic, or as they RTO now.

Obviously she has no obligation to reveal any details here, but I'm not sure why anyone would blindly believe everything she says here (and everything some of you inferring based on each others' comments) when she's been so evasive and vague in her responses.
[/quote]

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