Working From Home

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

Outlook did one of its weird things this morning where I had a meeting scheduled that I didn't know about, and it was a Very Important meeting with my supervisor. I was in my pyjamas, putting the finishing touches on my plan for a class that was starting in 40 minutes, feeling like I had just the right amount of time pressure to get it all done. And then Teams went bloop and my post-observation meeting started, to my shock and horror. I quickly put on a shirt and joined the meeting and pretended like I knew all along it was happening, but I ended up with like 5 minutes left of my pre-class prep time and my class pretty much sucked.

Working from home: classic because you can forget about a meeting, attend in your pyjama pants, and still look kind of professional. But also dud, because everything about that is disorienting and terrible.

wait Teams can just start a meeting without you doing anything??

My supervisor started the meeting, so it popped up on my screen. Teams can't join for you, though - you don't show up in the meeting until you hit "Join." Thus my ability to take thirty seconds, throw on a shirt, and pretend I wasn't just chilling in my pjs.

Does Teams take up move bandwidth for video calls somehow? I use Zoom 99.8% of the time for work, that's what my employer uses and wants us to use but I have one contractor that sets up his meetings in Teams. I very rarely have any issues with the Zoom calls, but every single Team meeting the connection is absolutely lousy and I'm constantly getting bad network connection warnings.

Ugh, "more bandwidth"

Have I mentioned the "distracted by other people's home decor" thing yet?

Related: my competitive instinct to have the best wall portion behind me

I haven't used Zoom much, but I do find there's often a bad connection with Teams. I have pretty good internet and it's not usually an issue for me, but my students often have problems, and if I want to share my screen and show videos, I have to turn off my camera and mic in order to get a better connection.

had to do my self-assessment today. haven't laughed that hard in years.

lol -- the other day I had to negotiate with a customer service rep to get a refund for an annual subscription to project management/productivity software my co-worker signed us up for two years ago which we are cancelling because he hasn't used it ... and it was like, "sorry we don't have our shit together enough to use your software that helps us get our shit together" ...

surely some other software will work

yes, obviously!

all my walls are blank. my cubicle wall is blank (with a blank whiteboard on it). my home office wall is blank. i think i like it that way.

one nice thing about video calls is seeing people's cats

I definitely prefer blank to ... most decor, except for cats and dogs. ... Often I'm reminded of grad school where I took classes in tv broadcasting and we had a unit on "visual perception and cognition and why from certain angles, things in the background appear to be sprouting out of people's heads"

I think I may have mentioned this but I still need to unpack the boxes from my old office that have been in storage in my basement since 2018. I have all kinds of tchotchkes and books and crap in there that definitely won’t all fit in our home office, so I’m sure a lot of it will end up in the trash/donate bin, and it’s going to make me sad because I really liked decorating that little room with all the maps of countries I visited, the hanging pile of conference badges and lanyards, etc.

I’m going to probably miss that office the rest of my life, because the likelihood of my workplace even having dedicated cubicles again seems pretty remote after all this.

the hanging pile of conference badges and lanyards

this is the worst, why do ppl do this

That seems... unnecessary, given the spirit of El Tomboto's post.

I would love to have an actual office with an actual door someday.

I'm becoming slightly immune to it but for a while I really liked seeing other people's art in the background of video conferences.

Anyway ... completely non-snarky question: any ideas for supporting people to keep well when home working? I ponder this a lot but conversations about it always end up with "Let's do a quiz! On Teams!" And that makes me a bit stabby!

can't wait to put up a framed copy of my ma and a pennant of the ole alma mater, maybe some star wars bobbleheads on the desktop

in my first cubicle job i used the printer to print out black and white photos of people like sylvester and michel foucault and pinned them up everywhere. now i just don't care - i have no energy for anything that is not directly related to my work duties. i feel like a vagrant and tbh it feels good.

i'm not good at decorating, it hurts my brain and overwhelms me. just love it every time i'm on a webex and one of my managers who loves to dad joke is like "i love your blank wall."

i've thought about writing a backwards joke on my whiteboard to entertain people on calls

possibly stealing one from the Homemade Jokes thread

I could care less about decorating, I just want the ability to shut a door and focus on my work without absolutely pointless interruptions.

the worst was when my last job moved from cubicles to a new, improved building with an open office plan *shudders*

Open office plan is all I've ever experienced, in all three jobs.

that was my last last job. i actually had an office with a door at my last job! and i threw it all away for love, which turned out to be false (true story)

xp blech, my condolences

I don’t really want to go back at this point

I don't have any decoration in my cubicle other than at Christmas where I have a really terrible display of dollar store tat (there's a dollar store in my office building) which is sort of ironic but I'm not sure if my colleagues get it

now on my zoom calls my colleagues get to see my kitchen. as the dining table in my living room/kitchen is the only place I can work

i don't either. i can't imagine it. it doesn't help that i've never actually been to my office since i started in june. i don't want to have to buy any more office clothes or sit in a car for an hour either. xp

It’d be different if I had a kid or less space in my bedroom or a private office to look forward to back at the office but now it’s like how bout I just go in for occasional boss facetime, when we finally even are allowed back in

Oh yeah, to be clear, I have no desire to go back. But it would help slightly if I knew I could go back to somewhere theoretically quiet from time to time and not just trying to drown out people shouting at each other across the room or three competing conference calls with headphones.

i'm basically scared of showing my "real self" by decorating my cubicle at all because i will have to contemplate how off-putting it will be for my co-workers (who are mostly very straight-laced & some are mormon), and think about what is considered "appropriate" vs what i want to look at every day. so i've just given up and tbh i'm fine with it. the only problem now is that "empty cubicle" signifies as weird too. but i just don't have the heart to do a generic decorating job. i mean, in an ideal world i'd have a bunch of rocks and pine tar samples on my shelves & "gay eagle bar" posters on the walls. nb i'm splitting wfh with working at the office about 50 / 50 these days.

Yeah I mean we’d already gone all open office and shared workspaces with a very, very small number of dedicated offices before March, at this point when we return I’ll probably go in about once, maybe twice a week for meetings only and then gtfo.

I have two personal pictures, a drawing my kid did, a Lego astronaut figure and a poster of Thom Yorke's Suspiria soundtrack. The latter is only there because they handed it to me at the record store one day when I bought the CD and I didn't feel like trying to get it home without crushing it. Plus it added some color to the blah.

_the hanging pile of conference badges and lanyards_

this is the worst, why do ppl do this

i've always wanted more promo posters and such like, wouldn't mind my office or cubicle to look like the inside of a record store tbr

i had a coworker i hated who decorated way too much and loved pink everything, and she made the office hell by taking all calls on speakerphone with her door open and burning awful candles. she also was in a promotional video for her undergraduate institution as an accomplished alumna and had them film it in the office without asking or warning anyone. i looked up the video and they do some b-roll of her typing on her pink keyboard. i don't know where this is going i just started to become enraged thinking about offices.

o
m
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i can picture her exactly and i'm so sorry you had to deal with that

open office sounds hellish, I’d have to get back into drinking to deal with that

don’t mind wfh but i like having a cube.