Working From Home

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.

heh last week I had to drop something off at my co-worker's house, and the first thing I said as I walked in the door was, "wow, it's your zoom background in real life!"

does anybody else find that colleagues that don't work at home seem to think those that do have the same discipline? (i.e., you don't leave the house except lunch, you will only work out of your own home).

I am housesitting for a friend's dog today as he went on a business trip so I planned to get there during lunch, as he'd already fed and walked her. I also had a doctor's appointment at 1:45 that my entire team knew about.

Of course, at around 11 am, I find out that the facilitator of another class left due to being in pain, and my boss had taken over and was floundering badly, so he asked me to take over until my appointment. and he wanted me to time their one-hour lunch with the time I left to go to my appointment. I had to say no as a) when would I eat and b) I had to tell him I needed to get ot he friend's house as otherwise the dog won't have been let out in 10 hours and she has a tiny bladder, and he seemed surprised, like I should have told him or something.

I told him about the appointment because it would cause me to *miss work*. I didn't tell him about the friend's arrangement because I was going there at lunch and I wouldn't miss any work. like wtf...

(to be clear, I *did* fill in, I had to say no to delaying the lunch, and had to take it a half hour earlier than he wanted me to)

actually, I get a bit of the reverse -- though most of my work is with clients rather than colleagues -- where the logic is, because I am working from home, I should be responding to their emails, texts, etc. on Saturday afternoons, Saturday evenings, Sunday afternoons ... etc. A significant number of them are unemployed, so that sense of time that changes when you don't have a job ends up extended to me? ... otoh, some of them who would take forever to get back to me about stuff are very quick to respond. I shouldn't complain. I only have to set an alarm once every two weeks for the 9am zoom call that I mentioned upthread.

oh that's major dealbreaker with me. I've heard a lot of friends that wfh say the same - "they think I should respond to them 24/7".

I had one needy client who prompted me to buy a Google Voice number and 'turn off' the forwarding from that number to my personal number each night so they wouldn't have my real number and I'd be forced to wait until morning to deal with it.

only so much power I had there though!

my concerns that I will not be able to continue to do a fair amount of my work from home — that is to say, design my own in-office time — have now changed to “they’re not going to let more than 20% of the people on site, ever again”

companies are looking at office ownership/rental dollars are making some calculations now. I already had some remote coworkers, but I think that they’re not going to be outliers by any means in the future

half the people in some of my meetings are in a completely different office in a different state, anyway. doesn’t much matter if I video chat them from my place or my office. probably easier at home than in my actual cubicle, tbh

Today's coworkers:

https://i.ibb.co/9sGdh3s/IMG-20210301-162923.jpg

Lets not give tim burton any more ideas hmmkay?

shit can we IP ban him

Tim Burtons IP Ban, with johnny depp as the wacky founder of wing chung and his daddy issues

oh jesus, lol

The opposite of the thread title but ... has anyone worked on a risk assessment to *get back to the office*? (From a UK perspective, if that makes any difference?)

Lemmy hasn't been contributed much to meetings recently. You should have a talk with him imo

weirdly he keeps not showing up to the meetings where I would discipline him

second straight year my annual review was merely "Achieving" rather than "Excelling". prior to last year, I'd only had a rating lower than "Excelling" once in my entire career. the review itself has nothing but glowing things to say, no actual major feedback, and actually states I'm doing things not even required of my role. but once again, the stupid politics of "only xx % of our department can be Excelling and you're a lowly business instructor" win out.

we're already not getting raises, though, due to COVID impact on financials, so what does it matter.

boss said he and his boss attempted to get me Excelling and was shot down by Execs. damn clique-ish bullshit

i'm very disappointed in you Neanderthal