Working From Home

nothing like taking a wicked grumpy and realizing the conf call you're supposed to lead starts in 58 seconds.

"oops sorry, moving this meeting back a half hour, uhh...there...is...something urgent that came up with...budget"

*click two buttons, done*

I "had a power outage" when I overslept for a meeting one morning. I live across the country from the rest of my coworkers so they have no way to know if I did.

hey donna rouge, just want to say i'm glad you're ft somewhere and sad you're experiencing the wfh blues. weirdly i was wfh for a year before covid happened and that particular position was like you describe - weeks on end without human contact and just feeling like a zombie. it sucks. i know i bitch about work a lot but i do actually like accomplishing things at my job and putting effort in, so i get it. i hope things work out for you and your partner. but know how stressful it must be to be dealing with this for another, what, six months at least? hoping you all manage to get through this without too much more pain and misery.

thanks map <3

I've just been jotting down a timeline of all the things that I've binged on since March, dvds, Prime, Netflix, Youtube, and podcasts. Even though this whole event feels like it started not long ago holy shit it felt like years ago that I watched the entire Miami Vice series!

(sorry thought it was relevant due to none of that binging could have been possible without working from home)

Quarantine made it possible for me to spend four hours this week playing guest speaker to students from high school to graduate level and all I had to do was stay pinned to my seat and remember to keep the camera and the microphone on during class

So that’s kind of cool I guess

That is cool!

What did you guest-speak about, haircare?

oh shit, did El Tomboto used to be Deric W. Haircare? I did not know this

I had to present to a community planning group from home on Tuesday, which was even worse than a normal community planning group presentation because even though it's still 100% old angry white people, old angry white people on Zoom are apparently even less inhibited and even more likely to screech THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!!! at you when you're trying to show them what bike lane designs look like

No, he just has hair

Important: keep penis in pants, keep job

I guest-spoke on being a veteran, a bureaucrat and an experienced interagency authorities-knower

Plus, hair. Having seen its luxuriousness in person I can confirm.

We do a weekly all hands (40 people) zoom meeting. The topic of baking came up and the boss just said "I'm making huge brown loaves now".

hahaha

A month ago, without feeling obligated, I started working from my uni office on the days I teach. With the exception of the program manager down the hall, I've got the office suite to myself; I can close my door and not hear a peep for hours. To shower, dress, drive to campus, park, and walk to my building keeps a most welcome sense of normality.

stay on topic, man

I've barely been at my work computer for 30 minutes and I already feel mentally and emotionally depleted.

have been experiencing massive Zoom inflation lately. everything little thing gets its own meeting. it is cuh-razy making

Small victory today - my team has decided to start every meeting 5 minutes 'late' and end every meeting 5 minutes 'early' so that we get at least 5 minutes break between Zooms

i'm probably too ill to go into the office today, but the laptop's here so i'm working (albeit not very hard)

I am housesitting for my friend and his adorable tiny lil dog is keeping me company. i can dig this.

also first time not having to train anybody in a month.

meanwhile I got asked if I could swap a PTO day in Dec. our fresh hell will last at least through March, one solid year of no lull period, and being two people understaffed. at least the good thing about training is, there's no way to 'get weeded' on it. you only can teach one class at a time.

who in their right mind creates a tool that ONLY WORKS IN INTERNET EXPLORER I mean WHO THE FUCK

In 2020!!

yeah, was just using one. have to open this web-based database in IE only to fill in certain fields that occasionally come up because you have to type in it to make it search for a code and in chrome the fields will not populate. it's so STUPID. also pdfs that have several files inside them will open in IE but not chrome.

yes! and I don't mean in Microsoft Edge because it doesn't work in that, you have to pull up INTERNET EXPLORER

xpost that sounds like a kind of Hell

I agreed to sub for a coworker on my day off this week, thinking, "No big deal, it can't be as hard as normal subbing," and found that going through sub plans over Teams with groups I've never met for a full day was so exhausting I couldn't do anything else for the day and ended up falling behind on my own plans and teaching a crappy class the next day. I guess I'm still not used to how much online meetings take out of me.

my WFH complaint of the day is people should not email "hey do you have a minute for a quick call" and then when i answer yes, instead of calling immediately like the question implies wait a half hour while i ruminate over whether i can go to the bathroom or if they are finally going to decide to call while i am peeing

haha I fucking hate that.

my usual tack

"I tried calling, you weren't available"

"I *had* a minute. it expired."

I never have a minute for a quick call, all calls must be calendar invites

i usually demand to know what it's about. I got ambushed too many times in the past to let people blindly call me.

lawyers love to ambush people. i hate phone calls but i double hate it when opposing counsel wants to schedule a call about [vague topic] because it just means "i'm going to gain the upper hand by not telling you what we're going to talk about." i will then have the upper, upper hand by saying as little as possible on this call.

xpost the entire reason I stopped being a project manager was the micromanagement of meetings. I was good at leading them and only scheduled them when necessary and generally tried to only invite those people that needed to be there.

but people would micro-manage. like I had a director of a project who demanded we adhere to a cap on how many of our own employees we invited to a client meeting (it was something ridiculously small, like 6, one of which would be eaten up by me, another two by the director and the implementation manager). her belief was that this would make for better meetings and that if there were people who I couldn't invite due to the 'cap' that really needed to be briefed on what I discussed, that I could just do that on my own time. So actually holding a one hour meeting, then disseminating the same message to the remainder who got left off. Who sometimes would then ask questions that I couldn't answer and would have been best asked in the meeting. This happened over and over again - and I loudly complained about how stupid it was to set an arbitrary cap, rather than to just ask that we keep meetings to necessary parties rather than indiscriminately inviting the entire world (which I wasn't doing).

She also demanded we not call meetings on Fridays (why - are we not working on Fridays)? So then I'd struggle to schedule them because how we had an entire day unavailable, so everybody's calendars filled up the other four days.

eventually, I decided I was leaving that post and at that point, did whatever the fuck I wanted for my last two months in the job.

xpost I always wondered if lawyers did that. now I have my answer.

they do and this particular attorney really faked me out this time because this definitely could have been an email. you set up a conference line to tell me you are emailing me something. thanks for that.

my WFH complaint of the day is people should not email "hey do you have a minute for a quick call" and then when i answer yes, instead of calling immediately like the question implies wait a half hour while i ruminate over whether i can go to the bathroom or if they are finally going to decide to call while i am peeing

― superdeep borehole (harbl), Wednesday, 18 November 2020 15:55 (five hours ago)

If I get asked that and I do have a minute I dial them immediately. If they don't answer then I no longer have a minute.

i accidentally did this today. said hey can i call u in 10 mins and they’re like sure, and then i get caught up in something, call like an hour later, they decline the call and text immediately saying “i can’t talk”. i’m like, fair enough. c’est la vie. everybody’s just doing the best they can. except the people who aren’t. and cmon don’t we all deserve to just take our foot off the gas a little?? fucks sake

My stock phrase for non-urgent stuff is "at your convenience," meaning "call me when you can," but not promising that I'll wait by the phone or computer or whatever.

instead of calling immediately like the question implies wait a half hour while i ruminate over whether i can go to the bathroom or if they are finally going to decide to call while i am peeing

seriously! this is annoying as fuck! I end up either immediately calling the person (if it's something on my list of things I want to deal with now) or just assuming it's a theoretical minute, that may or may not align with the minute they attempt to actually call me, and if I happen to be making an 'ilarious post to me ilxor chums' at the time the person calls and stare at the phone next to my laptop until it shows "missed call" ... well that is just the nature of the universe.

also, idk if it's a feature of airbuds or whatever those wireless white things people put in their ears to talk on the phone are called -- but i swear, whenever my co-worker is using them when he calls me, it sounds like there is a fancy espresso machine operating in the background and I envision he is drinking very fancy coffee, whereas I am not, but that's okay, but it still reminds me of fancy coffee drinks from cafes near the office.

Maybe he's like one of my former colleagues, who worked at my company out of the coffee shop she owned

got a headphone DAC/amp for my desk and I love being able to turn the small talk before a zoom starts down with a big ol knob

... categorizing tasks by "can I efficiently have laundry going while I work on this? y or n?"

n.b. I live in an apartment building w/shared laundry -- obv people who live in houses w/their own laundry machines don't have this issue the same way

Our laundry apparatus is in our kitchen/living room/office so we have to make a call likewise