Working From Home

i wouldn't want to work in-person at my job again (hell, i don't want to work at all at my job these days), but doing this in-person intensive outpatient group has helped me. i feel like just need some sort of reason to leave the house regularly and be around a specific group of other people in a safe and healthy environment... my life has really been lacking structure and routine since we went remote and i'm continuing to struggle with it. i've tried doing regular co-working, but my friends keep losing their jobs and becoming homeless so it's difficult. :(

https://zoomescaper.com

i have to attend professional organization webinars every few weeks. i just join with no audio or video and do whatever. they always send me the certificate for credit afterwards. thanks guys!

I've now somewhat officially been told I'm probably never teaching classes again, now permanently supervising them. That is only making official what had already essentially be true for the last 1.5 - 2 years, but while I would have balked at this a year ago, I willingly accepted this offer today. (my job isn't changing, nor am I getting a raise, just I'm being pulled from the mix of instructors permanently)

It sucks, because I came over here because I genuinely liked teaching, but I'm realizing I'm suffering a form of PTSD from the last 3 years, that didn't really hit me in full force until dad died. Just talking to people (with the exception of close friends/family) feels like a chore now - it stresses me out.

so something that I used to flourish at, like training, now bums me out. it's not just work. when I sang a song at a fundraiser last month, my whole body went rigid and started shaking while singing, feeling abject terror with hundreds of eyes staring at me - despite having done theatre/singing for over 25 years.

perhaps this move will be good for me. which is why I ask why in the FUCK they gave me this class to teach immediately upon returning from bereavement. I got about 4 days to ease into it, but I was not in good shape to teach this class and frankly they should have fucking asked me first. I'm doing an ok job of bullshitting it but I sound like someone who is miserable and trying to fake it.

on the plus side, sounds like it's my last one, ever, so....I'll go out with a whimper.

I got observed during training yesterday and got (extremely undeserved) perfect marks and it felt like being an aging pop singer who can't hit any of the high notes anymore getting a cloying, insincere ovation. I mean I'll take it and hey, sometimes seniority helps when it comes to benefit of the doubt, but ...ugh.

sometimes i think working at home, which was a huge benefit before, is a hindrance now, given my current mental state. I live too far from the office to drive there regularly though (plus a waste of gas for little benefit).

always nice when mom goes to report dad's passing to Spectrum and they re-open our internet under a new account and promise us that they won't shut the old one down until we set up the new one but they shut it down anyway, towards the end of one of my training classes, so it takes me 45 minutes to restart it, and then ten minutes into the new connection, it goes down again....because mom for no apparent reason decided to change the Wifi password I'd just set 5 minutes ago.

sigh. this is the only downside to working from home.

lolz - so today we had a virtual Halloween party that was actually a secret baby shower for one of our managers. it was actually a really nice event for her.

but then one of the hosts decided we were going to play Family Feud over MS Teams and it took like a half hour and everybody kept getting confused as to whose turn it was, how to buzz in, and the host took like 5 minutes to confirm whether answers were correct.

it was pretty cringey but inoffensively so.

i've gone from phoning it in to basically doing what Peter Berg's character did in Office Space. it doesn't feel great. I'm not that kind of employee. I'm finding it impossible to focus though. in or out of work.

I hear that man... I get done what's expected of me, but I don't go looking for anything extra

WFH sucks when its a 30degC day and I'm in my NON AIRCONDITIONED HOUSE. >:|

do they not have that in Australia generally or wtf

No, I just live in a crappy house.

Oh, but apparently our housing is badly made, we just dont do proper insulation or double glazing, I hear a lot of complaints from like, canadians who come here and say theyve never been so cold?!

Also houses in Australia do not generally have air conditioning, no

well, that sucks!

What, plenty of people have aircon, what you mean. I regard it as outlier that I dont! (rental property with cheapass landlord), but in summer the whole street is humming with HVAC.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in my life I can only remember being inside one free-standing house in Australia that had built-in air conditioning

(and that was one I lived in for seven years, a former stablehouse that had been converted to flats, where if I turned on the AC in my room for 71 seconds on a 42°C (107℉) night, or played music on computer speakers, the tenant above would pound on the floor with a sledgehammer or s/t. my next-room neighbour eventually moved out when he made the ceiling cave in on her bed one night.)

a SLEDGEHAMMER o_0

in order to get working air conditioning you must defeat AIRCON MAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xovc6DymOEE

what? no, you're thinking of air man. you cannot defeat air man.

No A/C in Darwin? Alice Springs? seems like you would die

Actually in a lot of those places you have slat windows and a lot of ceiling fans. Its too humid to bother with AC I suspect.

hasn't been a problem in 11 years of working virtually but I've been hit now by 4 outages in a little over a month.

three of them internet, one of them (happening right now) power. I'm 40 minutes from the office and no longer even know where my badge is. fortunately it's my last day of work before a two week vacation and I finished all of my last assignments on Friday.

the only downside to virtual work. fortunately got mobile hotspot. what do y'all do when outages disrupt your virtual work

When I had crappier internet service I'd head to the public library a few blocks from my house and spend an hour or so there doing what I needed to do.

yeah I hit the library, bookstore, or nearest Starbucks when the power goes out.

My home Wifi is much more reliable than the office sad lol

that involves me putting clothes on!

the best wi-fi around here is the local McDonald's which I've sometimes used to work during a (gross) lunch there

there is a Panera, I used tow ork for hours from Panera intentionally some days....today however I have nothing to finish so i'm just gonna mobile hotspot it for a bit.

If it's brief, I usually just use my phone's hotspot

When there was a three day power outage a few years ago I lucked out. The office was closed, but my friend had recently moved and had several weeks left on her apartment she'd vacated so I drove over there and used the one remaining chair. My coworkers mercilessly joked about how I sounded echoey due to the fact it was an empty apartment.

power came back early. boss asking me what's on my plate today, I'm like "I'm about to take a two week vacation, and I finished all of the work I had left on Friday - are you really going to give me an assignment for half of the day?"

but it turned out to be something I was already doing anyway.

Hotspotting has saved me a bunch of times in crunch wifi situations, it can generally get me by unless I'm somewhere that I also have a weak signal.

If it's my power that goes out and not my internet, my battery backup keeps the internet chugging for a few hours

I really need to look into a Router that does that. my boss's boss told me about it the other day.

my mobile hotspot is much better than it used to be, but can't handle MS Teams meetings well. surprisingly good with almost any other function though.

Oh, it's not my router. I just have a UPS like this one and have my cable modem and wifi plugged into it. Just make sure you get one that lets you turn off the warning beeping in case the power goes out in the middle of the night.

oh cool!

now I'm having flashbacks to the prior era where you were supposed to plug all desktop machines into a UPS at home/work because suddenly killing the power to your computer would mean you lost files or they'd get corrupted

kind of nice that's less of a concern these days

Still have the shriek of my dorm neighbor seared into my brain when power cut on the floor and he lost his entire paper that he hadn't yet saved

The pre-autosave era was brutal.

Unlearning the tendency to slap ctrl+s all the time was healing

I’ve never had an outage that lasted long enough to be a serious problem, but if I did I’d probably have to head downtown to the local facility for the agency I work for and borrow one of the floater desks. (That’s a 30 minute drive one way in good traffic.)

mobile hotspot is all I have... I think it's on the verizon network, it works okay most of the time

$120/year, which my work pays for

Autosave is a tough one for me because my habit was always to open something created previously and start customizing.

I frequently forget to save it with a new name until it's a little too late - so I need to both (a) rename the new content to get it aligned to the current situation, and (b) go backwards to restore the old version for archival purposes

ooh yeah that's a rough one

You never have to "save as" if you just start with a duplicate. For most of my jobs I duplicate the file first, rename it, then get to work.

But I also command-S to save non-stop no matter what. That's a tough habit to break.

We had to show that we had both standard and backup internet - and they were both tested on the office VPN - before they let us all start WFH back in the EndTimes. I also have my data link and my phone data on seperate carriers so if theres somethhing more major (like our massive Optus outage last week), it wont take everything out.
So if my NBN fibre goes down, I can hotspot. If power is out, I can hotspot on the laptop (which has a suprisingly long battery life - these Lenovo X1s are great). Ive been able to last for 5 hours working on phone and laptop battery alone when we had a planned power outage a couple years ago.

Mobile outages are more problematic because every bloody thing in the world uses MFA passcodes now, and if your phone's out, your SMS is out, which has made things v difficult for me before. Companies need to offer 2-alternative MFA! So many are SMS only.

The other week I thought I lost my phone, which would have rendered me unable to log into either of my jobs (full-time and part-time, each with its own remote access app).

the funniest password thing was corporate IT having a password reset site that was crashing out and using microsoft’s version of captcha, which sucks ass

It wasn't Saviynt, was it?

I haven't a clue. It looks like a stock application that was deployed poorly