Working From Home

That happens with our main internet-based system. Then the message is "you have been the portal!", leaving out the "logged out of" part. Really instills confidence in the 3rd party vendor who created and maintains it.

WebEx: "The meeting has ended."

Persons with approximately Catholic upbringing: "Let us go in peace."

Our online course curriculum timeout malfunctions.

It doesn't time you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. It times you out after 15 minutes... regardless!

So you are in the middle of presenting and the "you will be timed out" pops up even though you've been using it the whole time

― genital giant (Neanderthal), Friday, April 24, 2020 10:39 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is a weirdly common issue with videoconferencing/streaming for some reason

a supervisor has finally gotten her new email set up and just sent everyone a very confusing and badly written email as a google doc attached to the email, rather than just an email. another has sent out an invitation for a google meet with no subject for the meeting. then she sent another for the same time and it is called "wellness check." tbh i need more wellness checks when we are not working from home and doing nothing. i would probably cry at them though. lol i'm quitting this job soon.

On the positive side: I haven't had to commute by bus during all the rain we've been having.
On the negative side: Coping when there's no work and I'm longing to take a nap. Protestant Work Ethic FTL.

i gave in and took a mid day nap yesterday, don't want to get into the habit of that but it really was needed. and i ended up having to work until 7pm anyway, so it evened out

I have been taking FULL advantage of the ability to nap

That said I'm never as tired. Probably because I don't have the stress of 2 hrs of London transport to deal with!

These past two weeks have really been overwhelming and I've been working harder and much longer hours that I have in the past few years. Given that my position is tangentially involved in getting a campus ready for students to return into the fall, we are jumping through hoops and exploring worst case scenarios in how to plan for social distancing in the future. Which I get, but it's a lot. And I'm feeling the strain, compounded with any of the usual self care things having evaporated and the weather having been shit for the past four days so I haven't even been able to get out for a walk. Any free time gains I had by erasing my half hour commute on either end has been obliterated by my working hours extending 1-2 hours in either direction.

that's not fair. somebody else has got to help or your boss has got to understand that things will just go slower. we're living through an insane crisis. i know, easy for me to say, but really.

To be fair, my boss gets it, it's really our whole department that is overwhelmed and stretched thin right now. He's actually working to try and readjust expectations for the higher ups to be more reasonable, but it's the age old story. Orders come from above to figure out how to accommodate all of our students assuming 30% max occupancy in classrooms and they think it's adjusting a few lines on a spreadsheet, not actually pulling up floor plans for every building and doing multiple furniture layouts, etc etc etc. Summer is usually our busy time anyway, but this just adds to the stress. I'm reminding myself that I'm fortunate to even have a job... just this week in particular I can feel the cumulative effects catching up to me.

2 positives of zoom meetings:

- they start on time. or at least closer to when they're supposed to start than in-person meetings.

- tedious conversation dominators have less of an opening to ply their trade. it does still happen sometimes but their arsenal of f2f techniques for bulldozing everyone doesn't work nearly as well. with zoom/hangouts/teams etc the limitations of the technology encourage each person to have their 'turn', almost like they're holding the 'talking stick' at a hippie pow wow. it's much more obvious when someone gets interrupted.

Our Monday morning meeting always begins with 10-15 minutes of "how was your weekend?" talk, and always runs 30-60 minutes over time; it's supposed to be 9-10:30 and it sometimes ends as late as 11:30, wasting the entire morning.

Any way to politely ask for the invite to either be adjusted or the meeting to end on time? I get furious at stuff like this - it feels completely disrespectful of everyone's time. As if there's nothing else to do.

v glad there's a general culture of no-longer-than-needed meetings at my work. the standard meeting time is 30 mins.

I have been taking FULL advantage of the ability to nap

I will miss these siestas

I'm an inveterate napper and am taking full advantage.

I think I'm actually missing the fitness center at my workplace--my back has been bothering me, maybe because I'm not lifting weights currently?

goblet squats!

definitely been taking advantage of the ability to nap during the day, easy enough to make up the difference with work in the evenings/weekends since there's no sports to watch anyway. i even canceled my Sling a couple of weeks ago because sports was the only reason I had it anyway, though I am already regretting it a tiny bit because now I can't watch the Jordan doc series on ESPN.

I went for a piss during a meeting today and no-one noticed.

Our Monday morning meeting always begins with 10-15 minutes of "how was your weekend?" talk, and always runs 30-60 minutes over time; it's supposed to be 9-10:30 and it sometimes ends as late as 11:30, wasting the entire morning.

This is indeed the worst. We have a department meeting every other week that is often interminable. It was originally scheduled for an hour, but it kept running way over. The organized bumped it up to 90 minutes for the invite and now we routinely pass two to two and a half hours. There's probably 30 minutes of good material every week, the rest is small talk, idle complaining and the rest of us essentially sitting in on conversations that should be one-on-ones. Unfortunately this is my entire department and run by my boss' boss, so little more than just grinning and bearing it every two weeks.

I hate small talk in meetings band often bail when meetings run over even if i don't have another scheduled after

I went for a piss during a meeting today and no-one noticed.

pro bathroom break tip: turn off your wifi and turn it back on when you return. "oh my wifi blipped"

do y'all work at places where it's not ok to say "sorry i need to step away for a minute?"

Oh yeah, we can step away - I do that during the current Zoom versions, and during the real ones. But since it's our entire department, it's really frowned upon to skip out on a portion of the meetings.

I write "brb" in the chat

do y'all work at places where it's not ok to say "sorry i need to step away for a minute?"

― call all destroyer, Monday, 4 May 2020 15:58 (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I could do that but two guys were talking at/past each other and with all the lack of social cues and accidental interruptions that audio only brings - so I figured correctly that I could step away unannounced.

But even when i forget, unless I'm on the agenda as presenting, nobody cares if i step away to take a leak. If somehow i got called on in the 2 minutes i was gone, i answer it when I'm back

My Webex app froze up today and I had to force quit - when I came back two minutes later nobody had noticed. I'm sure I could take a bathroom break and upon my return, blame technical difficulties, if needed.

The dude leading my webex infoshare right now has apparent never heard of consonants, so he sounds like he's chewing on taffy.

It got so bad Chief Keef joined the meeting to complain.

we're getting pounded right now due to COVID fucking up our staffing and upper management unable to accept that things can't be business as usual due to a global pandemic. We usually had a practice of having a week off of training whenever a class ends, to give us time to rest our voices, prepare for next class, special projects. And, this is typically our slow part of the season.

Instead, we've all been in back to back classes for over two months, were told we couldn't take any new PTO in March or April beyond what was already approved before shit hit the fan. and they told us not to expect it to slow down anytime soon, and filled our schedules up for May and June before most of us could find time to take PTO. I lucked out and am taking a week in late June.

by the time we get to busy season in September, we're all going to be gassed. thankfully travel is banned for the year due to budget.

I just can't take it anymore. I would take an unpaid leave at this point if fucking Florida's unemployment wasn't a mess. I've had to loan my mother $3k (no fault of her own) to help pay rent and bills due to FL DEO still not paying her correctly.

we keep getting thrown into these impossible situations where they mash 7,000 people into one class and where we'd normally have someone on site to help, we obviously can't, but no adjustment to the schedule is permitted, we still have to finish on time. So this leads to a bunch of people complaining during the training, results in more technical issues which means I have to be a babysitter and keep detailed logs on every learner who has a problem, and means multiple people interrupting me and barking my name all day. all fine during a normal time of year, but when my anxiety is already bad enough to where I am not sleeping well and breathing heavily all the time, I can't take the constant "brain fry" that happens to me every day where I mentally check out by 2 pm.

oh and our "busy season", starts next month, oh oh oh oh lovely

I've voluntarily come to the office three days in a row after nearly having a mental breakdown trying to work from home. Like the closest I have ever felt in my life to an actual breakdown.

probably a wise idea. i had one of those at work 5 years ago where I wailed on the floor and was having nonstop palpitations....not fun at all. also sometimes just good to see other people around even if they're 700 miles away.

I don't know if I'd even go in if my class was in Orlando, given how many people are probably coming to work sick.

everybody keeps talking about how we're in a crucial period (cos we lose so many clients) and it's like, do they really think any of us are focused on what we're doing right now? even in a less fucked-up work scenario, our attention would be divided, but throw in my company's bullshit of overloading everybody while dangling the diseased carrot of layoffs in front of our noses , and most of us have just snapped.

even one of the most kip colleagues yesterday flipped out on her class for being disrespectful, which at least told me it isn't just me.

what does your company teach? what are the classes? ... I have a complex mix of jobs right now (some due to PPP loan issues) and I do have an office to go into, which has helped, because I get to interact in person with a couple of colleagues who are also personal friends. ... Though the location of the office has made it such that sometimes it is not a good idea to go there because it is right near where many protests take place.

like, one of my great fears is driving to the office and having to extricate my car from the middle of a crowd after work and losing my shit because "I just wanna go home ..." ... so on the days when major demonstrations are planned, I either work from home (most of the time) or park somewhere a few blocks away where people are less likely to congregate/march.

we administer health, 401k, and pension benefits for companies who outsource the recordkeeping to us. I'm responsible for teaching people health, 401k, and pension. I like the job, hate my company, but 15 years brings me a salary and benefits here that I'm unlikely to get elsewhere.

I'm good at it and know the material front to back and in normal circumstances, I usually make it a fun experience for all, but right now, it's hard to put on a faux cheery demeanor when I'm miserable outside of work. and stressed out by the endless disorganization of my firm, who is just hiring hundreds of people to start on the same day without realizing that requires like 4 or 5 people to train them (and there's only 6 of us).

on the plus side, at least my job ends at a specific time each night. fuck being salaried during COVID....so happy I'm hourly.

one of my great fears is driving to the office and having to extricate my car from the middle of a crowd after work and losing my shit because "I just wanna go home ..."

lol otm, I used to hate that

Sympathies to Neanderthal and man alive.

For me, working from home with small kids (who are on track to be out of regular school for at least a year) is the main hurdle. If I am on a conference call, my non-neurotypical son gets jealous and will follow me around screaming for attention. If I go to a room with a lockable door (of which we have precisely two), he will park outside the door and pound on it, screaming. So I stay on mute until I have to say something, and then whatever I say includes an undertone of anguished screaming. Or I go outside, and whatever I say includes an undertone of traffic and birds.

In the past, much of my work was writing, which I could do at night after the kids were asleep. Now a lot of my work is managing and collaborating, which still tends to take place within traditional business hours.

Obligatory acknowledgment of privilege: my wife and I very privileged to be the kind of workers who can work from home. We are privileged to have decent jobs in the first place, and to have as many resources and options as we do. But it is still a challenge.

xp oooooooh does your company also do the thing where they are the employer of smaller companies' employees (I am momentarily forgetting the acronym)? ... A few of my clients work for small tech startups and their w-2s list a corporation in Florida as their employer ...

Trinet! that's the Florida company

yeah YMP I feel that. my 5 yo son gets really excited to see people on a call & he loves to fight with his sister whenever I've got something going on. WFH & WFH with small children are two totally different things, not comparable in the slightest

ha speaking of that -- one of my colleagues has a 4 year old -- he was working from home one day and I called him, and there was silence and then the sounds of footsteps and then a loud high=pitched squeal (this was after a few minutes) ... the child had picked up her dad's phone and had answered it and was presumably trying to "be like dad" by walking around carrying the phone.

no need to acknowledge your privilege, YMP, anyone on this board who would try and toss that at you given what you're dealing with is a fucking asshole.

during our (fairly informal) team meetings there are frequently pets in the background, which my kids of course get very excited about, which leads to everyone on the call showing off their pets, which leads to my kids thinking every call is full of people who just wanna show them their dogs

xp well that sounds actually one notch harder than working from home with my two kids who just like attention a lot like most kids

no need to acknowledge your privilege, YMP, anyone on this board who would try and toss that at you given what you're dealing with is a fucking asshole.

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Wednesday, July 1, 2020 12:45 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I'm a bit tired of the internet scolds sounding more than a bit like mom reminding you there are kids starving in Africa -- sometimes it's ok to just express your unqualified frustrations

I appreciate your considerate replies, evol and man.

But at the same time I can't stop thinking about people who a) aren't working at all or b) can't work from home.

I see a lot of glib "just stay home, mfers, it's not difficult!" stuff from people who haven't appeared to consider how difficult that might be for someone whose family's financial survival depends on e.g., a in-person service-sector job. Not here on this board, but certainly in my social media orbit.

i have found some of the "stay at home, assholes" msgs come from people who turn out to not have stayed home themselves.

not like, going out partying per se at packed bars, but a few I've known have taken out of town trips or gone to bars. with masks, distancing, etc, but that's kinda why I don't bother lobbying grenades when I know I haven't had a spotless record (even though I largely barely leave the house).