Working From Home

"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

one of my friends who WFH lost a grandparent today and after making her wait for 20-30 minutes still hadn't approved her leaving early for bereavement so she told them she was done and just left.

proud. fucking companies, wtf man.

That's so sad and crap.

she got a new job today and is basically going to tell them Monday she's done immediately. lmao

literally taught a class while reading ILX all day. though in fairness, it was a refresher course for people that kind of already knew what they were doing and there's a lot of time where they do little simple activities that are so simple they're fairly bored by them.

I stopped wfh a couple weeks ago and there’s some days when I don’t have much work to do and I want to die. I basically drive 20 minutes to go read shit on my phone for 8 hours in a little room.

Could be worse?

I've definitely got an "Oh dear God, working from home is destroying me; the only thing worse would be working from the office" thing going on.

My company is hemming & hawing over what the future office will look like... they did an informal survey and were somewhat shocked by how many folks don't want to commute into San Francisco anymore. Fortunately they've hired a consultant to help with space use, so we're almost surely downsizing the square footage. My internet is kinda crap but it beats sitting in a dark bus slowly creeping through heavy evening traffic.

1 more week and i'm back in office for good, except we're allowed to work from home for the night shift and two days a week if we wish (I don't). can't wait.

I basically drive 20 minutes to go read shit on my phone for 8 hours in a little room.

feel this

Two more weeks of WFH before I go back in full time, getting very anxious about it, tbh. Ours is one of the only departments in the whole place that is not allowed any remote or hybrid work, we have been told to not even ask about it.

Last day today. Wish I wasn't extremely busy and trying to get things done before my folks come visit from out of town, so I could go out to lunch or something.

not having to go back to the office until september and then apparently will only have to go in 2 days a week. absolutely delighted.