Working From Home

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.

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%)