Working From Home

I set up my philips hue bulbs in my bedroom so now I can have cooler light temperatures during the workday, which is nice for feeling awake imo

light is so important

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

― Canon in Deez (silby), Tuesday, January 12, 2021 12:11 PM (one hour ago)

hahah sigh -- so basically it's a checklist on a website? This stuff never ceases to amaze me ... probably because I'm old or something. Like, isn't the point of your company or division or whatever to train people so they know what they're doing and don't need someone to make a checklist for them?

this also reminds me of almost 20 years ago when I taught income tax school for a company that basically had software that the preparers were supposed to follow line by line in terms of interview questions/procedure ... which in some ways was good, but in other ways was dumb. ... like a lot of clients don't understand the questions or they think they understand but they don't, and it also is a bit dehumanizing, and really the key thing to being good at this stuff is being able to communicate well with the client, both in terms of explaining/asking as well as listening and understanding what they're saying/asking. ...

I think software has improved a lot since then, but people are going to misunderstand/misinterpret things in checklist form but will do so less if they understand the purpose of the questions/tasks. ... And then they get to the point where the prescriptive checklists are annoying AF

hahah sigh -- so basically it's a checklist on a website? This stuff never ceases to amaze me ... probably because I'm old or something. Like, isn't the point of your company or division or whatever to train people so they know what they're doing and don't need someone to make a checklist for them?

― sarahell, Tuesday, January 12, 2021 4:29 PM bookmarkflaglink

the strategy is to have them memorize the concepts, use their tools as a reference to refresh them of their client's rules. and for Pension, it's kind of necessary, because there are often hundreds of grandfathered formulas. but lots of seniors do 'memorize'.

ultimately though the challenge is when I was hired back in 04, I got 5 weeks of training in a classroom with my teacher. It was fantastic. Most people get 2 weeks now, virtual, and the technology is twice as hard to use as it was when I was hired because we overcomplicated things.

truly was a dream job back in 04-05. we had a cafeteria that provided free breakfast/lunch/dinner, all beverages were free, snacks were free (cookies, ice cream), and my HMO plan cost $20 a month and covered 100% of my claims.

oh those were the days.

and for Pension, it's kind of necessary, because there are often hundreds of grandfathered formulas.

oh god ... true ... one benefit (lol groan) of capitalism's victory over organized labor in the last 50 years or so is that this stuff is becoming obsolete as those workers die off and almost everyone now has defined contribution plans instead of pensions ... capitalism wins again

unless you are dealing with government workers/retirees ... I had a client (retired teacher from NYC) who would always complain how horrible California is because they tax her NY teacher's pension, whereas NY does not. ... and, I don't think she ever got it fixed so they took out CA state tax. Anyway ... She recently moved back to NYC

yeah most of our clients that have Pension have frozen it by this point.

my company has never had one in the time I've been there. and the 401(k) has been modified over time to suck more and more

most of the people at my company can't write an SOP to save their lives, but on the rare moment one of them actually nails it and writes a good one, I'm also realizing just about nobody here can follow them.

three colleagues given a task which had an SOP developed by an outside department and it's actually quite good....all three have done it completely wrong AND completely differently from each other.

i'll probably wind up doing their shit for them....again.

first work from home downside appearing for me. my wife has class during my work, our apartment is really too small for her to be on a Zoom call and me to be on one also, or on the phone. I mean it's not impossible but it gives me flashbacks of working in a call-centre in the 00s which i don't like.

I've been in the bedroom for any courses/calls, same situation

that is rough, yeah. i've worked from home for 8 years, and truthfully the only time I was able to fully control and mitigate background noise were the two years I lived by myself.

sound bleed's bad enough when it distracts you from doing your thing, worse when it actually bleeds onto your call and people are hearing it.

right now my parents are so deaf I hear the 50s Perry Mason reruns blaring in my room when I work some days. usually have to walk out to ask them to turn down a lil.

I have taken calls from the bathroom, the car, and my son's bunkbed.

Ye Malfred Pruffrock

i once led a conference call on a city bus

AND once had to fill in for a trainer that had a panic attack and fled while I was riding a Megabus. gladly it didn't last long cos co-riders were getting ANGRY

they're refreshing my laptop (aka giving me a new one). as part of the transition, they asked me to supply my current user ID and password on a form.

my current password is basically a lewd sex act plus random numbers and symbols. guess I should change it again real quick

no one should ever ask for your password cmon this is basic. i wouldn’t give it to them tbh

it's the stupid way we do things. since our laptops are encrypted and use Bitlocker, they ask us this so they can set up our Bitlocker login correctly on the new machine.

why they think me writing my username and password on a form that goes through a nemail, even one on a secure secure, is beyond me but we outsource our IT now and they are the ones who insist on this stupid policy!

i'm going to wind up changing it right after anyway.

*secure server

we also have a client that was one of the main culprits in the Great Recession who still insist on background/credit checking everybody who works on their account. I have refused to submit/assist this client for 12 years ongoing because it's offensive af

3 consecutive hours of meetings on a Friday = pee-youuuuuuuu

wfh advantage of the day is I can start cooking a pot roast at 2pm and then go back to work, on a workday

ya it's definitely time to break out the slowcooker

i love being able to do laundry during the day, or any around the house shit for realsies.

Slow cookers are in the same category as air fryers and instant pots for me, viz they don’t seem like they could solve a problem that I have and I mistrust their newfangledness.

Love a rice cooker though.

WFH has made buying a house so much easier, taking the hour here or there when needed and having herself available to discuss things or come on a call as required has been a massive stress reducer vs having to manage it in dribs and drabs from different sites

Saving on the day yo day costs of commuting and mooching around town also a big factor

Day o'day, noted former irish ilxor

thought you'd go for a Harry Belafonte joke instead

newfangledness? slow cooker?

Yeah Crock-Pots are a grandma thing to me. Personally I love a slow-cooker for chili and daubes and pot roasts and other soups and stews.

Instant pots and air fryers? Nope for me, but I will not judge those who like them.

I get the appeal of rice cookers but just don't have room for a lot of single-use appliances

Instant pots are really nice if you want to cook tough cuts of meat without giving them all day in the slow cooker. Also good for curries. I don't use mine nearly as much as I should, but I'm always happy when I do.

permanent wfh is going well, i think

but as others have suggested, i now have a need for a bigger dedicated space

that shouldn't be a problem for a lot of people, though, as there are now so many companies that have switched to having people work fully remote

so i guess i'm following the trend of moving to wherever i want. i'm just waiting til covid numbers go down a bit or are manageable

I'm assuming that sometime close to summer I'll be back in the office, and I admit part of me isn't looking forward to that again, though I am absolutely not complaining otherwise -- it's my job and I enjoy it and do well with it. But what this time has definitely helped clarify for me and hopefully shown others up the chain is that there's a lot I can do from home that helps out in general in ways none of us had thought of before, and that's going to factor into seeing out the rest of my years working for the system if there's a way to switch full-time to doing at-home work along the line towards when I want to retire. (Which, given I'm about to turn 50 in a few weeks, is increasingly less of a theoretical prospect.)

If I ever became a big boss I’d probably go work in the office more assuming the office still existed at all but my hope for back to the office planning is to just go in with a laptop and sit at a hotel desk and maybe attend/run meetings from conference rooms like 1 or 2 days a week. Maybe try to have team onsites once a month or something to hang out and hack?

Working for the university makes me feel like we shouldn’t have a hyperdistributed workforce, even within IT there’s many staff who obviously will need to work from campus, attending to infrastructure, and most of the people we support will be working and learning in person again. But making a bunch of developers who basically to a one work better with privacy and quiet come hang out in a building all the time is clearly unnecessary.

My new manager was appointed during covid, lives one county from the atlantic and is

*heavily*

supportive of our team continuing wfh for four days a week

I worked from home a lot prior to Covid, but my clients would come to my home office for their appointments. I sometimes miss having people over like that. But it is super comfortable to just be able to work on their stuff without them there at times of my choosing.

Also, I don't have to worry about potential awkwardness of a neighbor knocking on my door asking, "Is that your stuff in the dryer?" while I am with a client.

My brother would walk in the door and try to yell nonsense like BUTT SOUP hoping i was not muted.

He was 35 at the time

lol, you are obviously related

Yuuup

The Larx Brothers

feel like every time I have a huge class which requires two or more facilitators, my co-facilitator constantly gets sick and I get left to finish myself. obviously I am not mad at someone for being sick, nor do I want them to "fight through it" (hate that phrase and I wouldn't let them do it even if they offered). it's just that now that i am helping take care of my dad, having my partner lead half the day helps me be free once in a while to check on him or help my mother out for 5 mins.

and yet the one time I got laryngitis and couldn't talk, they basically made me 'fight through it' cos nobody else was available. thinkin' of jumpin departments again though right now pickings are slim. more will be avail towards summer probably.

(obv not mad at anybody for being sick, just frustrated at the bad luck i constantly have with this, going back to 2018).

13 of my 30 class members lost MS Teams connection for 30 minutes or more, most missing an hour or more, and all 13 from the same useless partner location that we should have fired years ago

one diff between WebEx and MS Teams - WebEx sucked dick, but I swear I never had as many people at partner sites who "suddenly got booted from the MS TEams meeting and can't get back in". like they'll try and it will endlessly say Connecting.

even with WebEx's moody ass, this didn't happen. have had 20% of the people at a location have to call IT simply because they couldn't get in.

(I know what it is - it's their shitty-assed server. but nobody is willing to admit it. but is MS Teams a big resource hog?)

Not that ive spotted tbh

if it's not, that just leads me to believe our partner site just has a shitty server and that WebEx didn't tax it so much.

the Breakout Room feature in MS Teams is a godsend though. group activities became much easier

oh idk being that most all of our business locations are located in areas who all faced extreme weather from the winter storm, maybe just maybe it might have been a good idea to postpone the class we had scheduled this week.

8 people in my class (which is only 20 ppl) have missed at least 4 hours of class or more, or have had their internet and power going off and on multiple times a day. so they're lost and frustrated and I don't blame them. i just emailed the boss to say "uhhh why don't we just reschedule some of these 8 people so they're not completely lost and want to quit after the next round of training?".

and yet I doubt they'll do it, they'll just say "well we'll give them extra practice next week", then they don't, and then they quit because they weren't ready and we penalized them for being hit with a winter storm like they had any control over that.