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

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?"

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.