IT Manager gets fired after company is forced to send worker their equipment when they're banned from taking it home: '[The] IT manager was nowhere to be seen. Turns out, she had been demoted'

When conversation starts about working from home or the office, many employers insist that their staff work from the office—even when they could easily do their tasks from home. This is especially so when the employee's work involves handling sensitive information, meaning devices need to be kept safe and secure under lock and key. Still, what constitutes "sensitive" is a grey area. When you're a middle manager of a retail operation, there's probably a good chance that the information you're handling really isn't all that sensitive. However, your employer might still insist on the same security all the same because they read it in a book somewhere.

Of course, even for those handling legitimate sensitive information, these policies were suddenly capable of being changed when certain global-events-that-cannot-be-named in 2020, which forced the whole world to work from home… or not at all. Suddenly, as it turns out, everyone was capable of taking their equipment home when grand-scale productivity was on the line, and some organizations began requiring workers to take their laptops and phones home with them so that they could still work if something were to keep them from coming into the office. Funny how that happens. 

Anyways, some employers continue to insist that their staff keep their equipment under lock and key, and while it's better than dealing with an employer who insists on you practically being on call all the time, silly policies such as this tend to be a hindrance to all parties, as any absolute and inflexible rule is. In this instance, the insistence that this worker does not take their equipment home resulted in the authoritative IT manager being out of a job.