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

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?"

he also likes to make acronyms of things and pronounce them as words, so, I could see "eye-suh" being his term for "Innocent Smoothies Aesthetic" ... Like, "Do we have an 'eye-suh' issue?"

xp - lol! This co-worker would combine that with, "and by the way, I went to school with the Deschanels, I know Zooey Deschanel."

Neanderthal, I hope it didn't slow you down. And that you kept on movin'.

never let another class like mine
work me over

so my work directory apparently does what some search engines do, and searches not just for the name you searched for, but also similar words with the same meaning.

an incredibly stupid feature because you're searching for people BY A SPECIFIC NAME, but I did giggle when I searched for "semen" as a lark and it pulled up several people with the surname "Cummings".

you better say something nice about Raymond now!

Do not read if you hate introvert musings.

So I just realized something. I sort of want to go back to the office in order to use the fitness center (and maybe see Nick or other men). But I don't want to deal with coworkers who want to chat while I'm doing something. (I'm the sort of person who despises small talk BECAUSE I'm so bad at it.) At least I don't have an imminent return to the office.

I'm back in today for the first time since September, it's 'pleasant' and quiet.

Thinking of going in for a day or two a week this summer just as an excuse to get a good walk in every once in a while.

took a wellness day because I have been so stressed out this week. realized I have 220 unused wellness hours that keep rolling over year to year and that I'm near the cap, so why not.

it always feels weird taking it when you work from home, like, even if you're sick, they're like "but you can still log in right?"

they say that? damn. anyway good on ya.

Take more! Surely that’s what they’re there for. And no, you can’t log in.

#ffs

my colleagues don't say that, but friends of mine who work for shittier employers have told me they've basically been bullied over taking days off. glad that's not my scenario - I literally just log in and say "I'm not fuckin' working" via email and log out.

pff you didn't say that

of course not, it's that George Costanza thing where you fudge the details to make yourself seem cooler!

well let me tell you this, it's working

Washingtonian's CEO harps on workplace culture and threatens employees who don't want to go back to the office.

In 2017, she paid me and other interns minimum wage, offered no healthcare for full-time work, and gave zero paid time off. https://t.co/oI9GQk4AsP

— Noah Lanard (@nlanard) May 7, 2021

As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today.

— Lauren Bulbin (@laurenbulbin) May 7, 2021

my work has been so quiet that ive been watching anime on crunchyroll half the time. bliss.

we are definitely getting made to come back in the fall. which sucks. im not even worried about covid - although i won't be fully vaccinated by september - just don't want to have to go into my office ever again

We are proposing that our team will agree to one week in the office a month so any face to face meetings can be scheduled for that time. We will see what they say about that.

I think my office will be doing some kind of hybrid model - i.e. we won't have our own desks anymore, and we'll probably have less square footage overall. A lot of folks have moved out of state in the last year (oregon, montana, etc) and they can't be expected to come in all the time, so hopefully they won't expect me to come in all the time either.

I used to take casual carpool from Oakland to San Francisco every morning, god knows when/if that will be ever be coming back.

We're switching to that "hybrid" model where no one gets their own desk anymore and you have to reserve a desk before coming in. This assumes that most people will be working from home. Too many people like working from home to try to get everyone back in the office. We've had quite a few people move to various parts of the continent, as well. I have to say, I'm a lot more productive when working from home.

i do not enjoy the sounds of drilling next door, or sitting hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table, or paying for heat in the middle of the day in the cold months, or making my own lunch and washing the dishes every goddamned day

but i also don’t like commuting

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i do not enjoy the sounds of drilling next door, or sitting hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table, or paying for heat in the middle of the day in the cold months, or making my own lunch and washing the dishes every goddamned day

have you got any scottish ancestry, tracer? haha.

yeah my apartment is too loud (and will be too hot in the summer), my work setup is the opposite of ergonomical, and i not only do my own lunch and the dishes but most of the time my wife's as well. but otoh i just never want to have to go into work ever again

WFH over a 3g tethered phone has been surprisingly ok.

but friday there was a forced macos upgrade which failed at 4.5GB and then went ok that night. but there's a 1.5GB security upgrade and others that now need applying. it's downloaded another 3.5GB of *something* so far this morning.

and vim is broken. 8(

(brew seems to need python 3.9 to update vim, python 3.9 wants 'xcode command line tools'. it's telling me '6 hours to complete' so it'll be another overnight job. laptop makes a nice nightlight if you turn the brightness down to about 10%)

my work keeps telling me i need to change my password and then their little password changer app just times out every time i try. and then some things don't work because they say my password's expired but it doesn't accept the one i was trying to change it to 😔

Can’t you just call the help desk on the trunk line on the subcontinent and have them give you a temporary password, assuming you can understand it through the bad connection?

still drives me nuts that after people turn off the banner notifications in chat, people are still so poorly versed in how to share just a Window vs their entire screen. so they'll share the entire screen, and if you try to private message them with something minor to aid them while presenting, it'll show up on the screen. Whereas if they shared a Window, they could read them without anybody noticing.

and while no, we shouldn't be inundating a presenter with messages, sometimes over the course of an 8 hour day you want to shoot the presenter a message about something that you don't want to ask out loud (i.e. if you're giving someone a time check that they're over time for a section). when they just ignore all the messages, you have to awkwardly break in and either ask them to read them, or just tell them out loud, which is what we were trying to avoid by being discreet. I don't have this problem, I multitask!

I like Teams overall though - and find it easy to use with some features being less easy than others. it just seems that since we moved to it, we have this new behavioral problem.

it's actually easier for me to share my whole screen. i turn off message previews (in teams) and just get a number notification or whatever it's called. i move all my private windows to my other monitor, away from the monitor i'm sharing. but yes, if you don't tweak your setup, it always looks weird when we get to see people's private messages and emails

I never thought I’d miss the office, but here I am. 14 months of WFH and I hate it with every fibre of my being. If I just had some spreadsheets to work in or something, I’d probably like it, but since my whole job is talking with people, every single workday feels exactly the same: an endless parade of meetings with nothing to differentiate each day from the last.

I recently realized that part of the reason I’m having trouble retaining any information is that I’m lacking all the environmental cues that I used to have that helped me remember conversations. Things like what room we were in, who was there, where they were sitting or standing, what the light was like, etc. With all of that gone, I’m basically Dory from Finding Nemo.

Thats absolutely a thing, yeah

I often wonder how many memories of this year I will have, since like you I've been finding that there's nothing to hang them on.

I wasn't happy about going back to teach in person, since it involves hybrid teaching and an unworkable schedule and it's hard on the students and all that, but my god it's good to do some of my work out of the house.

hd that’s a really good point. i had never really thought about that.

my mother's outbursts at menial frustrations today are loud enough that I can't keep my train of thought and I had to pause class to ask her to keep it down.

really the ONLY thing I don't like about wfh, the things I can't control in my environment. animals fortunately not an issue but used to be when i lived w/ dogs

maybe if I say "hey, if I get fired, we won't be able to pay rent" that'll work