Working From Home

working at home = dud for me. 6 mos. of freelancing for aol and i was ready to comit hara kiri with a letter opener.

Always got stuff done though - often at 9pm on the Sunday night when server traffic was quiet and my conscience was playing up.

working from home: classic
working from home when your flatmate has been made redundant and is mooching around the flat with his annoying boyfriend all day: DUD DUD DUD oh god just go awayyyyyyyyy

I twisted my knee playing football last night (that's why I'd stopped playing!), and couldn't walk properly today as a result, so I emailed in sick to work, and told them I had various things I'd do online and that I'd be available via email and my work mobile. As result I've actually been marked down as "home working" today rather than on sick leave.

This is the first time I've done this (although I do, if off sick or on leave, generally check work emails reasonably regularly - especially when I was off after my hernia operation for instance), and it's been surprisingly productive; I've organised as many if not more things as I would have done had I been in the office, sent a gazillion emails chasing various things, edited a load of copy, drafted some new web pages, AND had a nap and stroked the cats. And all while wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that are full of holes and not fit to be seen in public.

i'm working from home today and it is fucking amazing.

-shouting abuse at co-workers who can't hear you in response to their emails
-singing along to records
-cooking your own lunch
-not bothering to pretend to work if there's a lull or you're done by 1600
-no commute obviously

I have been working from home for almost four years. I can only see advantages. If you're office based and you have Skype, Webex and so forth I really don't see any reason *not* to. The people who still insist on buying or renting huge energy consuming, Earth destroying office space (space which could be used so much more constructively, be it for housing, parkland or given back to nature) are truly behind the curve.

What I'm interested in -- and I'm interested to know if there has been research in these areas:

(a) Has anyone done serious calculations of how much energy we could save (inter)nationally if everyone who *could* work from home did so and secondly,

(b) from a sociological point of view, the focus has been on the negative ("you can't get to know/work properly with people who don't see and physically interract with, ergo groups of home working people are doomed to failure") but shouldn't we also consider the flipside, that home working allows for people to be judged on their true merits, rather than the ad hominem nasty stuff that comes to the fore when people have to share a space?

Heh, my wife just started doing this full-time and has liked it so far.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a couple people at my office must have asked about the possibility because the partners sent out this really passive-aggressive email at the start of the year about how it will never be a possibility here because, basically, "it is impossible to believe that anyone could work productively out of their home". It was just laughably obnoxious and reductive about any possible benefits. (Of course, several months later one of the partners' favorites moved to Texas with her husband and was suddenly approved to work "remotely")

I don't ever want to do it

with my immunocompromised status and the virus terror, I may have to

BUT

the plantation I contract for, at a pitiful wage, uses a "VPN" that requires use of your

PHONE

which I do not have and do not want

fuck apps, fuck texts

is that app PingID?

no

Full time wfh since Oct 2012. Best thing ever. Makes work not suck. Def still look forward to the weekends but I no longer dread Monday. Limits my "advancement" options but I don't care; if I could maintain current position now thru retirement I'd be thrilled.

makes personal traveling mid-week possible. it's harder now that I changed roles, but when I was working in implementations, all they cared about is that I worked, not where I worked from, so sometimes I'd head out of town mid week and bring my laptop.

did manage to go to Vegas midweek last year because i had no classes that week

I’m starting to wonder whether spending £4500 a year on train tickets so I can commute to London, sit in an office and have web conferences with my colleagues and customers around the world is the most productive use of my time and money. The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

Full time WFH since May 2015. It is definitely harder to put a cap on the day, though I don't really have meetings or emails to answer (I'm a web dev)

Its the job content itself as much as the WFH but I've changed around my perspective to not see work in terms of hours or blocks of time like this, but blocks of stuff that I need to have built by the end of the week or month. This means the delineation between own time and work time is more entwined. Mentally I'm kind of always at work but also never at work, I don't know if its better or not but I don't miss my 90 minute each way commute!

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

WFH today. Probably one of many. Technically I am a 'remote worker' anyway, having been made one about a year ago, but I still come into the office as it's about 10 mins cycle away. Frankly I've nowhere to work at home - I have a small desk in my room that's uncomfortable to sit at, and my sofa and kitchen table are no better.

been asked to supply emergency contact info at work in case of

lol

"adverse weather closing the office"

politics is the art of what cannot be said etc

The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

We have a pretty flexible working culture with a lot of working from home and honestly it's great, but it only works if you're prepared to treat people like grown-ups. TBH I'd retain the same boundaries as you do in the office. I don't especially mind working a bit later if I'm not going to be commuting home, but if you do have a 7pm meeting what's to stop you taking a longer lunch break or similar. As long as you get the work done when you're supposed to, who cares?

International meetings make things harder, but one way psychologically to put a cap on the day is just to make a clean break by immediately doing something that absolutely says to yourself I Am Not At Work Any More. Cooking, opening a beer, playing a video game, whatever. If you just start tapering off it becomes very easy to get dragged back into it.

I'm a freelancer, about 80% of my work is on-site at various places, just had my first conversation this morning about an office shutdown, guessing that most everywhere else will follow, shit is going to get tight.

no wonder u ppl are on ilx all fucking day

Been WFH since 2017. Love it. Possibly starting a 9-5 office job on Monday, though, and not sure how I feel about that (besides “thanks for the money”)...

The lifeblood of ILX the entire internet is bored office workers, moreso without the office.

its a turning point in history

in a bad way

let's run all the megapolls we've been fantasising about

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

Looks like this will be me from next week, or even maybe tomorrow. My plan is to move to the conservatory and stock up on educational software / film downloads for them.

I cannot work with kids disturbing me, this is going to be hard.

turn child into book and board game zombie imo

my carrom board is finally gonna get some use, v excited to get good

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

― Yerac, Thursday, 12 March 2020 12:56 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

I wish I could find that faux-pamphlet from a few years back about an office building gradually turning into an overgrown post-apocalyptic ecosystem

I've worked from home for almost 19 years. I expect it to all come crashing down around my ears any day now.

i don't maintain much of a social circle outside of work (mostly just my wife, my parents, and my cat) so I do think I benefit from the social aspects of coming into an office every day and interacting with people. i'm lucky in my position that I typically don't HAVE to do much interacting in any given day if I don't feel like it, but if I do then there are always people around who want to shoot the shit.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

i do but there's always another carer around. she (child not carer) occasionally comes up to spin around on my chair but generally respects the sanctity of the office space.

that sanctity in full:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKxqy9SJ-0I

Spare a thought for us poor sods who can't work from home, we're dead.

My first day of working at home. Not without its downsides, but I did watch an episode of Kojak during my lunch hour, and so without coronavirus I would possibly never known about this meeting of the titans

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1346970079_6.jpg

like i keep arguing that theyd get more out of my salary by letting me sit in with each unit and after a day or two gently show them how excel does that for you than they do any ten salaries in IT or training at present

but i recognise that without that makework the people doing it could quite easily destroy the place. its the equivalent of handing king kong a maiden, yeah you hate to see it but the alternative would be briefly entertaining, long term devastating and not for one second would having done the right thing save you when the mob comes looking

the training I start next week = for a high profile client who met with our CEO to ensure we would meet their needs and we've been told there's "no room for error".

bitches...right now IT has 2 hour waits for CHAT SUPPORT and hangs up after 30 minutes on the phone, tickets go unresponded to. so when there's a problem, we have little chance of resolving it the same day. we also can't have people sit with other learners if their computer doesn't work because they're all working at home.

and VPN technology for our partner sites is notoriously spotty for WFH employees, to the point where the person I taught the other day got bumped out of it for two hours and screamed "JESUS CHRIST!" during my training the last time it happened.

there will be error. lots of it. you and the stupid client will have to deal with it.

― narcissistic sleighride (Neanderthal), Thursday, April 2, 2020 8:34 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's katy perry isn't it

that things she does during ur gonna hear me roa a a aa ar wasnt a stylistic choice it was just her crappy home wifi

Most jobs could be replaced by software but it doesn’t follow that they should be

2xp to d

yeah im with that

So my vision of the future of the bureaucratic sphere is you employ a great many people to be customer service reps who take requests by phone and email and so on and key stuff in to backoffice software of various kinds, but if the whatsit is too complex you escalate to a meeting with a Tier 2 person, who keys in the ultimate solution across as much software as necessary, unless it’s not a supported configuration and you escalate to the business analysts and programmers who figure out the need and implement it and the end beneficiaries don’t have to use a computer at all if they don’t want to

What’s key here is you have to hire dozens of reps, you want no waits at all times, that’s the employment guarantee part of this reform package

oh we do most of *that* we're the civil service, dear

i like onenote. you can organize it like an actual notebook. it's very searchable. you can throw in links and pictures and tables and stuff. i find it much easier than having a million small or a few super long word documents.

hmmm

whats yr hourly rate to give webinars

dmac my like underlying contention is that there’s too much emphasis on building the self-service frontend for everything, some things sure the students should be able to sign up for classes without calling anyone but there’s not enough UX designers in the world to make everything actually easy.

i used to use it a lot but it crashed all the time so i just use docs & notepad now

If end-user programming were a real thing people wanted to do we could just let everyone open up a database shell and have at but nobody actually wants to be an end user programmer. u.u

I’m with Silby here

I mean we’ve diluted generic website ux down to the most basic level, you got a hamburger and a magnifying glass and the scroll, and people will still never find shit without help. You need more help. People-on-people help.

hmmm

whats yr hourly rate to give webinars

― ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Thursday, April 2, 2020 9:43 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i promise you it is astronomically expensive

ok

what's my cut

What is teams? Teams is that thing that auto-opens every fucking time I open my laptop and click away faster than a speeding bullet. Is it actually good not bad?

its the next big thing man, get on it now

We had Lotus Notus until a few years ago, now we have Google Mail + Google Docs and Slack + the one thing no-one's mentioned so far, Google Hangouts, which seems to do us pretty good?

But soon we're getting Teams. No-one as far as I can tell is enthused about this.

Google hangouts or meet or whatever it’s called is very good. Better than zoom for just regular video calling and team meetings.

darragh as long as you're banning things can you also ban bullshit email signature disclaimers about "for your eyes only" or whatever suck bullshit compliance language people stick in there

(The information in this post is intended for ilxor dot com only. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. Please notify the poster by ilxmail, and then destroy all copies of the post and any attachments.)

in the office today.

nobody else here.

zoom won't work on the Mac desktop I have here, left my work-issued MacBook air at home, so missed an hour and a half long zoom meeting.

two big monitors, office chair, wireless mouse vs sitting at my kitchen table hunched over a laptop with no mouse and a small screen.

bring it all home. We were told that today's the last day to bring equipment home from the office if we don't otherwise need to be there, I should've really gritted my teeth to bring my actual computer and monitor home but I've been getting by OK with ssh and a lot of port forwarding and so forth so I figured if it wasn't essential I shouldn't do it.

We were strictly forbidden to bring our desktops home, fortunately I have a company issues Surface and had an extra monitor at home so I've been able to make do as much as I can.

yeah I am going to bring stuff home. wireless mouse, mouse mat, second monitor, monitor risers.

office chair I don't fancy pushing for 16 blocks so that will have to stay here

oh and my keyboard

I think we were told to not take furniture

my colleague took her chair. but accidentally dropped her monitor off her chair while wheeling them to the elevator and shattered it. a nice newish Mac monitor not a shitty old dell like mine

I decided to sleep in today and burn the PTO and of course someone was out unexpectedly and they were looking for me to jump in.

I get Friday and Monday off next weekend and I am so looking forward to 4 days off

Agh, any chance of taking PTO is at least two weeks away for me. I had like 8 weeks of nothing to do but kept coming in to the office, then I got uber-busy right when the world went to shit. Since 3/13 I have had no chance to get bored or binge Netflix or undertake a baking project - every day has been full of kids, work, school, house. It's like five full-time jobs divided between two frazzled stressed-out people.

Some time to just focus on the kids, the house, the garden, music, and sanity would be luxurious if it ever happens. I am aware that we are very fortunate. But it does rankle when people in my social circles post that they're bored.

I'm not even close enough to anyone with kids that are old enough that I could offer to take a kid for a day, if that were even wise under the circs, probably isn't.

technically speaking I am working fewer hours but fortunately, so far, there's been enough freelance to make up the shortfall

yeah silby don't take a kid

Need a kid?
Take a kid

Have a kid?
Leave a kid

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/35/Babys_day_out_poster.jpg/220px-Babys_day_out_poster.jpg

how the fuck do you deal with people coming at you from a bunch of different directions simultaneously

skype and juggling two or three text conversations and every five minutes another "bing!" from the email, and i don't even have to deal with phone calls really!

i'm trying to remain social to keep my sanity, but the Urge to tell anybody who talks to me to fuck off i'm already having three conversations is pretty strong

we have now been banned from using zoom for work business because of its security problems

rush now add two bored kids into the mix 💀💀💀

Fuck me, Teams is SICK. Intuitive, audio/video quality are good, you can paste inline images in your chat sessions (which was a huge gripe I had with our previous software), and easy to share/upload files. Thumbs up!

last week, just about every one of our new classes had awful starts (I wasn't part of any of them), so they decided to start this week's classes half a day later to give them more time to work out their Day 1 logistical issues.

It was just as bad. Nobody could get into WebEx, nobody was listening, and of 20 people in the class, only 60% of them could get their credentials to work in Citrix, and of that 60%, only 1 got past the EPA scan, whereas everybody else was denied access due to failing said scan. and I'm betting it's because virus software and recent scans are required to access my company's network, and these hires are so underpaid, I bet none of them HAVE Antivirus software on their home machines, other than the pre-installed Windows Defender. What are you gonna do, lay all these people off a day into the gig?

so we got just about nothing done. I'm glad to have a job, but I would prefer if said job didn't make me want to scream. this class lasts until the 30th of April ffs.

🤯

🤯

🤯

Third time is the charm - jackpot!

Teams isnt so bad - someone was talking to me the other day and got frustrated he couldnt explain what he meant and said "hang on a sec" and just started sharing his screen in the chat window and showed me.

The group videoconf in it is also pretty solid, we've been using it for daily standup meetings in our little team, which usually devolve into "I cant by any flour" "I keep telling you, go to the indian grocers" every morning.

Sitting on the sofa behind the other half as he has a work video call.

Carefully shuffled over to the side of the sofa that should be just out of view, but intermittently find myself nodding my head along to music on headphones or rubbing my nose (don't touch the face! and definitely don't do it in a way that might look like picking yr nose on someone else's video call) and having to remind myself not to do that, just in case

had to fight myself from snapping today. i have a hard time with constantly being interrupted and there was zero flow today because WebEx audio was so bad, and still not everybody's tech working.

would be nice if I could chuck whatever curriculum I felt like but now we're four hours behind in a mere two days which i somehow have to make up.

i stopped caring mid-day and just phoned the shit in. then my mom tells me she quit her job and my brother is messaging me frantic worried she won't get her unemployment and I'm just like...you gotta wait bruh.