Working From Home

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.

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

Love 2 marvel at the efficient allocation of resources automatically engendered by capitalism

I've commuted to the office a few times in the last couple of weeks to do a few things in anticipation of going back in September. At first I was kind of giddy to be back after so much time, but after a few hours the novelty wore off and I just got this sinking feeling in my gut that hasn't really gone away since. On top of having to readjust to the commute taking two hours out of every day, there's been huge turnover in the company and just a lot of people I know are gone with a lot of new people coming in. They also really haven't made any changes since the office has been closed. It's still a mess. They've had so much more money and time to make major changes and they haven't. They were supposed to replace the whole HVAC system and declutter the place to pave the way for "hotel desks", do something about the immense dust problem, but I guess that plan got scrapped when they decided they could just force the majority of people (who haven't already fled the area) to go back.

Maybe it'll be good - I don't know. I'm trying to keep a positive frame of mind about it. There are some really shitty things about WFH, too. I don't have an office, so I'm using a make-shift space and it's been killing my body from an ergonomic POV. I'm really not all that worried about going back from a safety point of view, at least, so maybe after a few weeks I'll readjust to it.

WFH has been the best thing that ever happened to me. No longer had a four hour commute and I’m fatter but happier. I listen to music all day at what ever volume I want. Maybe the worst thing is my cat sometimes tries to walk all over my laptop and rub his face on the touch screen.

that sounds like the best thing

I've been wfh since before covid and aside from the fact that I don't get any exercise any more I wouldn't change it for the world office. Latest bonus is wfh while watching the tdf.

Its been positive for us, even though our place is pretty unideal

so i'm really very lucky in that my work from home experience has actually increased this summer. slc has some of the worst air quality in the country, so the state government has implemented a program whereby eligible employees are mandated to work from home on "surge remote work" days, which happen when the air quality forecast is above a certain threshold. the forecast includes ozone pollution, which goes crazy in the summer months due to a/c. because i'm already scheduled to wfh for half the week, and the other half has been mandated by surge remote work days for the past month and a half, i've been out of the office for weeks at a time. the announcement for monday comes on a saturday, so i get the pleasant experience of knowing i get to wfh all week with a text on saturday.

this morning was my first regular trip to the office in forever, because it's cool and rainy and there was no announcement. the whole experience of commuting by car is so terrible it just really hit me how bad and forced and arbitrary it is this morning after not doing it forever.

It really fuckin is, i hope to never routinely experience any type of rush hour again tbh

The last year made me realize to what extent I dislike working from home.

I'm currently suffering a bout of "full-time freelancer broken brain" because I've had to start turning down work, which always fills me with a certain amount of terror as I tell myself "You're showing them that you're unreliable — now they'll never hire you again!" even though I'm currently working on 5 or 6 different assignments for the exact same client. Times like that I think about trying to get another regular full-time job, but I don't think those offer any more security than what I'm doing, so fuck it.

commutes are not all bad but all car commutes are bad is how i break it down to an extent

My commute is minimal, half hour walk, 15 by bus, 10 by bike. Still prefer rolling out my bed minutes before work starts.

cat was being a dick and waking me up multiple times through the night. slept in by an hour. nobody notices. i love you wfh

so we're still all in WFH mode and now they're not even requiring people to pick up equipment for WFH at the office anymore, but they're shipping (which is the right move, of course).

But nobody at my company can fucking pivot, or ever wants to acknowledge potential obstacles, so they based the whole strategy on the idea that everybody would get their package on time and there'd never be any delays/issues, ever. so now we wind up with learners who on Day 1, have zero equipment and can't do anything besides log in and listen.

some of these people don't get their equipment for two full days, so they fall two days behind. they won't let us bump start dates of class, of course, so these people wind up two days behind and some of them get frustrated and quit. or, we have to move them to another start date class weeks in the future (which means weeks without income for them that they expected to have).

the "radical thinking" of sending the equipment a day earlier met with resistance from just about every leader. "what if they open it early, before their hire date?"

well, for one, they won't be able to log into anything. and is this not preferable to having 20% of a class quit or get moved to a later class?

and then these same assholes ask why we have such high attrition.

so we shipped someone everything but the actual PC. monitor, mouse, etc. they're on Day 3 of training and have no computer still.

gee wonder why people quit.

also one of the other ones was sent a defective machine, and at least 3 people in the last week indicated we sent them the wrong cords.

going in a few times a week and it's getting painfully obvious that I really do not need to be in this particular building whatsoever to get my job done!

other than to justify the stupid office space this makes zero sense

is there any way to bring that up? like, okay, i trialled this. here are the advantages to me and to the company of doing this (not much), here are the disadvantages, let’s be sensible.

yes, my boss who works remotely from his home in ANOTHER state tells me he is looking into some kind of compromise for some of us that don't benefit greatly from in office work, so we'll see.

Here are your Great Moments in Classist Bullshit for today.

My company, for its agents, has an unplanned absence line, has been in place for years. You're going to be out, you simply call it.

Very easy.

Welp, now they're changing to....a cell phone app, for Android or iPhone. Old line is being retired for the teams going on the new interaction platform.

This assumes the agents (who are the lowest on the pay totem pole) all can afford or desire to have the latest and greatest phones, and people who use older, cheaper phones with outdated iOS/OS won't be able to download it.

In fact, got my first agent today that said they had a very old iPhone that could not download the app because it required iOS 13 or higher. so I was told they just have to tell their manager when they're out and it might delay notification to Workforce Management of their absence.

So.....everybody with the right cell phone gets to avoid talking to anybody and just submit their absence online, and everything's taken care of ASAP. People who can't afford or don't want the newest fancy gadgets might have to call and talk to a manager who might try and talk them out of calling out, and will temporarily show as a No-Call No Show in the system.

that is fucking bullshit. I already shared my concerns with my boss's boss but trying to find out who I can escalate this to. it's discriminatory

That is awful, glad you are pushing back on that.