Working From Home

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

never worked anywhere that had designations like that, it sounds awful

yea it's dumb

do you get something special if you are "Excelling" as opposed to "Achieving"? Like free ice cream or a blow job or a raise? ... If not, this just seems like some adult version of stupid stickers for most improved at writing their name or tying their shoes in pre-school.

maybe some free mdma?

#onethread

it's my pretty firm belief that finding meaning in your job is never worth it because your job will never find meaning in you. find just enough meaning to keep yourself from losing it imo, then find an overabundance of meaning outside of work to balance it out.

I just got an 'exceeds expectations' review for the first time in the better part of a decade that I've been at this job. Which I take as more of a sign of the alarmingly-high rate of attrition in our department (who knew so many people were hiring in 2020) than of my actual performance (which in my perception has been lackluster but I guess it's more impressive when you don't have to watch me almost literally sleepwalking through a day).

And no, I don't get any special prizes as a result. No raise last year, expecting the same this year. And they're still uncertain whether any kind of WFH privileges will be extended indefinitely despite everyone having now amply demonstrated that they can WFH with both grace and aplomb.

xpost I can imagine earning a living from something that infused my life with meaning but I can't imagine ever finding meaning in something that I actively refer to as 'a job'.

sarahell it used to be the only way you could get a pay raise (Achieving = no raise, Excelling or higher = raise).

This year nobody gets them, so rationing the ratings seems dumb

No excelling means Neanderthal is literally a viking

Lol

training a class this morning and accidentally did a full Desktop share instead of just the application I wanted to show, and accidentally showed the chord chart for Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride to the class, which I was playing on the ukulele last night.

if you know what i mean

ew

pretty sure one or maybe more lucky coworkers have seen site new answers

lol that's happened to me more times than I can count.

thankful that the NSFW threads weren't up

maybe this is more of a "too much time on ilx" thing, but at one point in the past two weeks, in a good-natured argument with my co-worker, I mentioned the Innocent Smoothies Aesthetic ... and it took me a few minutes to realize that my co-worker had no idea what I was talking about, but that he probably thought it was some new very online intellectual term that he should know, and thus he didn't say, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

lol "can't pretend I don't know what Innocent Smoothies r, gonna just nod"

it would have been hilarious to have been on a call with this co-worker a week later, and hear him say, while trying to impress a client, "you know, like the Innocent Smoothies Aesthetic?"

"have you heard about why Pomplemoose is problematic?"