Working From Home

snow storms just don't hit the same when you're already working from home :-(

lol

anybody got this on their bingo card?

"hey I was away, can you repeat what you just went over?"

"you...mean the last five minutes?"

some people literally type "brb" every 2 minutes

meanwhile I get to hold my peepee until break

Just quit a job that I started in June. Never went to the office. Never met any of my colleagues.

Refreshing, and weird.

Congrats

I hate sometimes when the business pressure from leadership clashes with my humanitarian side. Disclosure, I was a very toxic person to work with in 2006 - I'm amazed more people didn't quit (if only I'd had Effexor then). Had to spend years undoing the corporate programming ("work is your top priority") and remember my compassionate side.

i'm glad because there was one learner who was late each day and I asked her if there were any tech issues we should be aware of, and she tells me her husband is on dialysis and requires daily assistance, and that she was discharged from the hospital for heart failure the day before training.

yeah, i'm not marking this person late anymore. I couldn't have known, of course, but man, people are putting themselves through hell right now just to obtain gainful employment since the gov't has abandoned them.

i took a clandestine nap this morning from 11-11:45. no emails. led a meeting at 1 that went well and i got compliments. good day lol.

Heh i napped through half of a few days earlier this year. Work naps ftw

i keep working with people who can't seem to work out that they need to occasionally toggle between the meeting room and MS Teams chat. just about every co-instructor I work with gets tunnel vision and only looks the material they're presenting, so if I discreetly try to message them on the side, they don't see it, and they don't see it when I write it in the meeting chat, even if I tag them to make it 'ding'. so then I'm forced to do the thing I don't want to do and interrupt them out loud in front of the class to tell them what I wanted to tell them (or ask them to read their messages, if it's not something I can share in front of the class).

they always use the excuse that they don't have dual monitors but I DON'T EITHER! and I can jump back and forth without a problem!

like right now, for instance, when the co-instructor blew through a section and completely skipped a necessary item, and isn't responding to msgs, so I basically am gonna have to go "hey excuse me you skipped this" in the least awkward way possible.

Take a nap, a stroll into town on errands or in the park most days

Great lark this tbh

slept poorly last night and got maybe 5 hours sleep tops, had a kip on my lunch hour today, feeling ten times better than I would have without it. miserable pissy and cold rain outside which I'm very glad to not have any reason to venture out into. bliss.

hey that sounds like my day in wfh world! high five.

then I wrote an article about interfacing Automatic Generator starts with lithium batteries, which is a huge PITA for many reasons

i keep working with people who can't seem to work out that they need to occasionally toggle between the meeting room and MS Teams chat. just about every co-instructor I work with gets tunnel vision and only looks the material they're presenting, so if I discreetly try to message them on the side, they don't see it, and they don't see it when I write it in the meeting chat, even if I tag them to make it 'ding'. so then I'm forced to do the thing I don't want to do and interrupt them out loud in front of the class to tell them what I wanted to tell them (or ask them to read their messages, if it's not something I can share in front of the class).

For the most part I think Teams works pretty well, except for this. I really wish that if someone started chatting with you while you're on a meeting that this would somehow be on the same screen as the one having your meeting on (I guess make it optional, because it could be annoying I guess). I do have dual monitors and a message will generally pop up on the other screen so it is easy to miss if I'm focused on the meeting.

yeah. it was a major adjustment for me to get used to as well. for the non "new" look of MS TEams, it's embedded within the MS Teams meeting so you can easily jump back and forth, but for some reason the 'new' look felt that was too convenient and separated the two.

problem is I need the 'new' look because it's the one that gives me Large GAllery mode.

scheduling training classes in December = everybody has mentally checked out, especially the managers. a quarter of our hires' managers aren't even here, and have already begun PTO, so the hires come to us instead (cos they don't see on the out of office message who their managers' backup is or feel comfortable msging them). likewise, 2 of them didn't even show up today for the manager checkpoint, having backups lead them in their place - which defeats the entire purpose of a manager checkpoint.

on the plus side...this class ends tomorrow.

Is the two screens thing worth it? I teach language, so conversation is really important, and I want to be looking straight at my students while I talk. It seems like it would be hard to have a second screen without looking to the side all the time.

I feel like it depends on what you're used to. I'm a guy who used one screen for 16 years, and they gave me a two screen setup in a training class, and it broke me - completely threw me off, and I refused to do it again. it felt like adding extra steps and the process of dragging things from one screen to another aggravated me. had I been on two monitors from day 1, would probably have gotten used to it.

I guess it depends on what you do exactly. I've been working with two screens for a long time now and briefly going back to a single screen at the beginning of the pandemic really affected my productivity. Even for meetings, it's pretty useful for when you need to look up something while still keeping the meeting on screen.

The trick is to make one screen your main screen and the second one a secondary that you use when you need to have more than one window open.

i feel like yeah, if you're doing task based work rather than presentational work, that could be a much bigger benefit. when i was a project manager, it would have been a godsend

I've discoursed elsewhere on why I don't use two screens, I have a 27" 4k(?) monitor and I still only look at one thing at a time on it. I have limited range of motion in my neck and even eye saccades to the extreme corners of the screen can tire me out a little bit so I just look straight ahead.

Have found it very hard to go back to one screen, but that is v much the nature of my work

I work with a minimum of three screens these days - the laptop’s built-in screen, another big screen driven by the laptop, and the screen of my iPad Pro which I use for meetings and calls. If I’m working on other things that don’t require access to the official VPN I’ll also have my MacBook screen. I also juggle Signal, iMessage and Slack on my two phones. It’s sort of fun as long as I don’t have to sustain it all for very long periods of time.

Ive had moments where its laptop for mails, monitor for RDP into server or w/e (i have, but it doesnt play nice size wise and needs to be put away every evening so i dont often bother) and tablet for the pdf or zoom alright, i think the latter is p great actually, would incorporate going fwd

Having a dedicated tablet screen for videoconferencing is unbelievably valuable once you have it

like, dear all organizations: take a vanishingly small percentage of what you’re about to save on real estate going forward and buy all your teleworking staff some very nice tablets, it’s so worth it you don’t even know

otm

Even just let yr employees go in to the office and take one or two of the dozens of slightly outdated monitors that you have languishing in a supply closet

We were allowed ransack, its just that i havent the tabletop real estate at home to justify the setup

the most hilarious thing about our office is they do not have any clue who has what equipment. prior to them outsourcing our IT, if they gave you a piece of equipment on loan or to manage, they never officially 'signed it out' or had any clue who had it, so shit would just disappear to various corners of the floor, and it was kind of like a scavenger hunt, whatever you find and take out of the building is yours.

now, however, they don't have guest computers anywhere like they used to, and there are few other options for desktops to use on a temporary basis if your laptop dies.

there are a bunch of classrooms with computers that nobody can use because they're on our old company's software which was inexplicably never migrated, so it uses a server we no longer have access to. so if your laptop dies, you're basically not doing any work until you go into the office and get a new one and...they don't always have one available! pre-pandemic, you could commandeer somebody's desk who was out of the office, but uhh that ain't gonna fly now.

I have a huge collection of stuff from the office, most of which I don't even use

I took my giant monitor home, and keyboard and mouse. Makes my tiny laptop much more bearable. I rotate the monitor so I have a giant code/mail screen and keep meetings on the (raised, for a flattering video angle) laptop so I look at the camera.

I wish I’d grabbed my chair but I didn’t want an ugly computer chair in my living room! If I’d known in April how long we’d be here though.. ugh

yeah, my back started spasming yesterday and I realized it's time to upgrade :/

That sucks. No proper pain yet thankfully but I’ve forgotten what it feels like not to squirm a thousand times a day!

Yesterday I was on a brief call with a coworker and he had to get up from his chair for a sec and I saw the headrest said RESPAWN on it and realized oh yeah all the millennials are just buying gamer seats for their home office setup

my company gave everyone some cash for WFH equipment or expenses so i upgraded from my laptop screen + 1 monitor on an arm setup to a dual-monitor rig + laptop screen. i have so much stuff open most of the time that i'm really liking the extra real estate.

nice!

I use my home screen plus the 4k screen I got from work by abusing the hardware catalog options at my desk. also been gaming on the 4k

coming back to work after the Christmas break (the university were I work closes between Christmas and new year, we get paid without having to take vacation) was so much easier because I didn't have to traipse out in the shitty rain and instead just rolled out of bed and started answering emails with a cup of tea.

I never want to go back to the office

on the other hand, i started at a co-working place yesterday and even though i had to walk through rain that was just above freezing for about 20 mins to get there i felt like the hallelujah chorus was my soundtrack. i have two kids (9 and 12) and a partner at home, all supposedly working and doing schoolwork. we have three usable desks in our house, tops. and i just.... walked away from it, for several hours. god it felt good.

my brother got me a high-end bluetooth speaker setup for christmas so can listen to music in my home office on good speakers instead of thru shitty laptop speakers

feels like a whole new workspace :D

except i am an old lady and auxed-in my 160gb ipod to it instead of bluetoothing

Bluetooth is crap anyway

My 160 iPod Classic was one of the casualties of 2020 and I am still in denial

Xp

coming back to work after the Christmas break (the university were I work closes between Christmas and new year, we get paid without having to take vacation) was so much easier because I didn't have to traipse out in the shitty rain and instead just rolled out of bed and started answering emails with a cup of tea.

I never want to go back to the office

― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver),

Yet because there's no one around at my uni I always want to return to my office. It's better than the oppression of home. I revel in the fiction of routine: picking out a nice shirt, driving to campus, parking, getting tea in the middle of the day, home by 4 p.m. I realize not everyone can do this, but if you can, by all means.

I was rehearsing my monologue for Buffalo Bill in the Shakespearean Silence of the Lambs my friends and I are filming. Y'know..."I'd fuck me".

We shoot tonight and i was rehearsing my monologue while my co-instructor presented. I was on mute the first 10 mins, but I was lying on my back due to the recurring back problems of late. So I guess somehow I accidentally hit the unmute button on my headset.

After I'd said the final line a few times ("Were I two people, I should fornicate"), I noticed I was unmuted.

I don't think it was audible as I'd actually taken the headset off by that point but close call nonetheless

I hate nothing more when I"m put in charge of designing a new tool that I don't even believe in myself (I think it sucks). I have no say on format, so when of course the complaints come in, I agree with them, but have to defend this piece of crap.

I also do not care rn given teh state of things in the States rn

allen wrenches do kinda suck but so many things require them ... idk ... or is it a different kind of tool?

unfortunately "tool" in this context probably means "website"