Working From Home

e) shared toilets

this one is big for me... there were some odd shit happening in our shared bathroom pre-pandemic, and not nearly enough stalls for how many people were in the office

Here at home, I have an old magazine and quality TP

for me the benefit of tinkling at home is a bidet and cheap washcloths (i can't just shake it and shove it back into my pants anymore, and toilet paper tends to get stuck to it).

of course a lot of places you also have _gendered bathrooms_. all of that trans bathroom shit, you don't get that here so much, and even if you did i got passing privilege, but god gendered bathrooms are fucking stupid. i'm sorry. they just are.

i don't want a lady to hear me taking a crap, are you crazy

that's why when my wife and i are both working at home i use the outhouse

obviously not a subscriber to the henny youngman school of gender studies

In my dream home (not yet a reality), the bathrooms and showers are outside and can't be reached without leaving the house

lol rush i did think that just as i hit "submit".. i guess that simplifies things

we had an earnings call and we had a fairly disastrous year, rumors of layoffs swirling.

pro: layoffs result in severance, get 2 weeks for each year of service (I have 19)
con: i am likely the highest salaried in my department (excluding the managers) - easy target
pro: i know how to do things nobody else does on this team
con: this company has proven nobody gives a shit about that
pro: i've survived every round of layoffs before
con: i've survived every round of layoffs before

office much nicer today with exactly 0 people in it. coffee still gak though.

it is just a coincidence that today is the last opportunity i will get to use the company bandwidth to download episodes of doctor who ahead of them turning off desktop downloads and me being on holiday for a week.

Neanderthal: that is almost exactly my position, right down to the years of service! Town Hall next Thu. I guess I would hear something before that.

Most teams now have "anchor days", where they're required to come on-site once a week. I'm not included in this requirement (in fact, no one has spoken to me about WFH/office policy in over a year). We've greatly reduced our physical office space (it started pre-covid) and now - for generic hot-desk set-ups - it's a single floor (100 capacity) in the western hub (industrial estate, Z4), and a single floor (65 capacity) in the central hub (old Victorian building, Z1). Canteen in former closed permanently spring 2020. If it's free food truck day, the place is packed. The Z1 office is generally pretty full, judging by the booking app. There are also activities in this business that can't be done (easily) remotely, and those teams have always been coming in (different wing of the Z4 office).

I choose to go the Z4 hub on quiet days, once every few weeks, and never to the Z1 hub. Better ambient lighting and temperature than I have at home, especially in winter. Monitor and chair lottery, however. Free coffee, tea, toast, etc. I feel like a bit of a ghost.

I think the return-to-office was much more keenly pursued in other locations.

(we were told, mike, that the industrial estate that we share(d) with you was being sold off and required a very expensive move somewhere else - all the climate controlled storage etc had to go. did that not affect you?)

((you probably saw the auction of a bazillion vinyl albums...))

I'm never there often enough to notice what happens at other units (it's pretty vast!) but, no, I don't think that closure affected us. That place was the only reason to want to come to that part of the world! I think I'd be pretty happy archiving that stuff for the rest of my working life, instead of doing... whatever it is I do.

I like to go out for lunch to break up the monotony of the day, work a little while out, then go home and finish the day.

today, I forgot somehow that I had a meeting at 1:30, and I only arrived at the McDonald's at 1:15. oh well, I'll attend it from here. this McDonald's is quiet, and it's a short meeting.

no sooner than the meeting starts, a very noisy pair sit very close to me and the barely audible muzak suddenly turns into a very loud Usher/Lil Jon "Yea"

lol....lesson learned.

The place I work for part-time is interested in increasing my hours starting in June; meanwhile, the place I work for "full-time" as a contractor is giving me additional responsibilities and there's talk of hiring me as a full-time employee. I really hope the part-time spot doesn't want me to go full-time as well; juggling both would probably start to feel like real work.

lol, it was a valiant effort Neando.

Going out for a walk at lunchtime and forgetting about that 1pm meeting is something I do a bit too often. Likely to happen a bit more often in the coming weeks with the spring weather.

I walk down to a park a few blocks from my house almost every day, usually stopping to buy a bottle of Guinness on the way.. rain or shine
Nice to get out of my place, even if just for a half-hour

I was inspired by my trip to Stockholm last summer, seeing people laying in the grass sunbathing: "what are theses people doing? don't they have work or school? Wait, I'm gonna start doing that too."

another monthly Face to Face day where everybody is meant to come into the office. but...

one is crying off with 'diarrhea since early morning' (thanks for that)

and the one who instigated these face 2 face days has just posted 'would love to have been there, but have to wait in for delivery'

elsewhere people are commuting in having moved away during lockdown, hours of train travel and literally £100 in one case.

the other two senior managers are a) travelling in after 11 after not feeling well this morning and b) on holiday today

but nigel HAS made it in from Penge. and a colleague who nobody has seen since in person since march 2020 is here.

after last time i booked a desk on the quiet side, away from the desk-eaters and the shouty people. nice view of white city, if such a thing is possible.

Going out for a walk at lunchtime and forgetting about that 1pm meeting is something I do a bit too often.

Having the dev scrum dailies right in the middle of my lunch break (it's not anyone else's 1:30pm) is a new intrusion into routine. Walking around the rec ground, earbuds in, trying to follow a screen-share on a phone.

Going in tomorrow: the Xmas gifts have arrived! Corporate-branded merch that the kids like. Ironically perhaps. In three years we've gone from: 200 'credits' to spend in our online store, shipped to yr house in Dec, to: choose two things only, it'll be three months before you get them, collect from the office.

The best thing about working from home (which I’ve done, for, gasp, 11 YEARS now) is the lunchtime walks in relatively mellow surroundings. Just essential for clearing my head. Every now and then the work day is too crazy or the weather sucks, but without the ability to do this I might lose it

Koogs, your description of your office is straight out of Barbara Pym's Late Quartet.

another in-office day on... Tuesday, the day after Easter holiday weekend. i can guarantee people haven't seen this in their calendars because nobody looks beyond the current week, especially if the week before is short.

(and last Monday all the mixer taps were out of order so no hot drinks (short of popping to starbucks))

Dear Andrew ****,

You have 1 assignment that is 1454 days overdue.

You must complete the following assignment(s):

- Executive Series: Securely Working From Home with Quiz

Lol

I am working from home tomorrow but cannot because kids are on Easter holiday and mother-in-law in staying and I will not be able to focus for one minute. So I need to go to a cafe or a pub, however though I live in a city (Cambridge) there are no cafes or pubs within half an hour's walk.

No point here, just thought I would have a whinge.

Coffe grounds and hard boiled eggs

anybody else used speech to text in meetings to transcribe boring, unnecessary meetings when your mind inevitably drifts

Someone I know online just got a job at some startup offering this service

(Xp) we use Teams and I think it transcribes all meetings that are recorded. The problem is asking everyone at the beginning is they consent to be recorded.

If someone is giving me some long list of tasks/grievances etc in a meeting I just pull the old ‘please send that to me in an email so I I have a record of it’ trick. Makes them very less likely to do it again.

Company just decided to go from 2 days in the office to three. I am not happy.

we had another in-office day and someone got upset because someone else had booked the one standing desk

and i inadvertantly sat in someone else's desk (they are all in the booking system but some obviously have residents like 50% of the time, residents who don't book their own desks)

nobody really benefited from being there afaict

i feel like it doesn't work unless there's a regular sked. i like 1 day a week, everybody in the department shows up boom you can talk to whoever you want to or need to and then that's it. you can develop understandings and habits etc

boss sends me and another guy a video of a meeting we missed as we were on PTO and tells us to watch it asap.

he turned transcript on. I ain't watching shit lol.

Also posting for amusement for LOLs at clueless leaders. We changed our telephony technology two years ago to move to a cloud based application. It has been a complete disaster, as it's been very poor and overcomplicated a simple process, but then leaders were stunned yesterday to find out that employees found a loophole to avoid work that nobody knew about.

Under all of our previous telephony applications, agents had two lines - a personal and a business line. If you were on a personal call and a work call came in, and you refused to answer it, you'd still be next in line and keep getting calls until you did. And it was easy for managers to tell you were refusing to take calls.

Our new application has one line. Yes, there is a personal call option on it, but it's from the same line - it just turns off the call recording technology and makes the agent's direct phone number visible on caller ID.

Leaders mistakenly thought these were actually two separate lines. Agents otoh discovered that if they were on a personal call, it would prevent a work call from coming in, AND would put them at the back of the line for call routing.

You can figure out the rest. Lol...

in-person day again today including 3 hours of meetings in the other building, about 2 hours of which were attempting to get the corporate wifi working (no success, ended up using my phone). the instructions on the intraweb talk about removing profiles. mac tool for disabling profiles has the '-' button greyed out and a message that 'this mac is supervised and managed by [corporate overloads]'

when not in meetings i've been using bandwidth to do the outstanding mandatory training. my main dangers are neck ache from a badly setup chair but the training videos are full of war correspondants getting shot at.

it also turns out that bribes are not ok, but paying bribes to get through armed roadblocks if you are a war correspondant is ok. swings and roundabouts i guess.

mac tool for disabling profiles has the '-' button greyed out and a message that 'this mac is supervised and managed by [corporate overloads]'

i love when corporate equipment restrictions actively prevent you from doing the things you're expected to do or expose your machine to risk. at my place, the software updates are restricted by IT to just those the system automatically pushes out to you, or those available in the appstore, which is fine with competent admins, but...not ours.

one time, Java published a security update to prevent against a recent exploit that was of severe high importance. our admins apparently missed the memo, and continued to push out/host a very outdated version of Java.

which lasted until several people had their laptops basically rendered inoperable due to the exploit in question.

six people were let go from WFH positions for not, well, doing ANY work during their training class. they were saying 'hello' during role call and disappearing for the rest of the day.

every time I see this I secretly think "you're going to get WFH taken away from us, jerks". there's already talk about possibly moving some training back to in-person because of things like this, but I don't know how that would work as we stopped hiring people based on proximity to our offices in 2020. nevermind that it's a tiny number of people that are the problem.

I fortunately don't think I'd ever be forced to go into the office as our Orlando office has sold off so many floors to other companies, there's barely any room to conduct trainings there.

(I've been WFH for 12 years, so...not exactly pining for a change)

My contract for my part-time job expires next Friday, and the vast corporate hydra for which I work has a policy that you can only be a contractor with them for 18 months. Somehow I managed to dodge auto-culling for a while (probably because they kept firing my supervisors, ha ha) and stayed with them for two years and change, but now the axe has finally fallen. It's not a grievous loss; I was only billing them for 15 hours a week and have a full-time job as well. But funnily enough, I got an email today from a different recruiter than the one who got me the job offering me... the same job! Except it's a dollar less an hour, and they've added a requirement that the candidate must provide a weekly report accounting for their time, including listing which projects they've worked on. Hahahahaha, good luck, whoever gets my old job!

work message board:
> I may not be able to attend the early meeting as I will be commuting to work

this is how things have changed. people used to be expected to be here for 9:30 every day but after 3 years of mostly wfh, commuting now feels like something done on the company's time, not the employee's.

I meet 'em halfway

After 2.5 years of being managed out of N America, I'm back to having a UK based mgr. He goes into the Z1 hub most days and while there's "no pressure" to come in, he is running 60min workflow meetings once a week from the conference room at that facility and I'm the only London person dialling in remotely. At far end of the room he makes notes on a whiteboard which, of course, I cannot possibly read from a webcam 5m away. So time to start frequenting Bond St Crossrail.

(I have been to the Z1 facility once this year; it's a hot-desky single-floor remnant of a previously warren-like cinema production house (and in that form it was my regular place of business for two very strange weeks in summer 2018). Was fine but not a single power supply fitted my ancient laptop; went rooting through cupboards for an old PSU after the old fella's battery shut down mid-morning. IT support does not exist.)

I normally get to wfh 2 days a week but this week it will be 4 days and I am overjoyed. Lot of laundry gonna be getting done.

man this is rich coming from Wells fuckin Fargo

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/business/wells-fargo-staff-wfh-nightcap/index.html

I'm up for a bonus due to performance and have to put together notes basically proving I deserve it. I've barely done anything and I have until Monday.

on the one hand, it's largely because my pessimistic brain has told me I'll get passed over because we're in a department with low visibility, on the other hand, it's largely because I have no idea how to put what I did into a measurable context with numbers.

a bonus would be nice right now, it'd stop the bankruptcy train for perhaps another half year (or longer, if it's a big one). cos in this case, I'm not happy 'just to be nominated', I know I'm good at what I do, give me money.

Continued to _____

Maintained ______

Achieved _______

Improved ______

Successfully completed _____

Collaboration
Flexibility
Prioritization

go through all your ILX posts where you describe how you've been left to deal with someone else's shit over and again! (nb this is not meant to sound like a sarky comment on your posts! but you do seem to be correcting others' cock-ups a fair bit so may as well get those in there)