Working From Home

I have now worked through two hurricanes this year. downside to WFH I guess.

I could have lied and said I didn't have power, but I care too much about the class I'm teaching to let someone else take it over.

I'm sure this is the story in many, many cities:

https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2022/05/11/minneapolis-st-paul-metro-companies-ditch-office-space

So crazy. I worked in downtown Minneapolis since 1998, a quarter century of either driving and paying to park or having to take a bus to a train to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours and then reverse the process. But now other the rare concert or sporting event there is no draw to bring me downtown anymore. Return to work is still occasional and strictly voluntary for my company, but I have absolutely no desire. The day they require it, even hybrid, is the day I resign. I'm just done.

Really glad to be one of the 50,000 or so new downtown residents who now live in a ghost town

It's very much the case in SF. Hilariously when Musk took over Twitter and made his 'come to work' noises some local dude with grocery/market businesses in the building was quoted as all saying how great it would be for him, and now that this month has passed I suspect said dude probably figures he should have kept his trap shut.

There's still sort of something in the offing where I'd go back but coming up to three years I'm all "Eh." I do still go in to the main library on Monday and Tuesday afternoons briefly for some desk coverage and at least my regular location is just walking distance, twenty minutes or so, if it ever fully fires up again, though I suspect it may be more hybrid. All I gotta say is that on a rainy morning like this one I'm glad to be going absolutely nowhere.

This is going to absolutely kill city government finances, isn't it? Isn't business property where cities collect all their tax revenue?

Well, hence many cities (like mine) raising property taxes by double digits year after year, of late

So now you’re paying extra to live in a place with worse public services and half the number of restaurants?

Each mortgage crisis has its own subtle shadings.

The other piece of the puzzle is that a lot of cities had tax abatements for developers building residential properties in downtown areas. Those are usually 5 or 10 year, so the giant boom in the 2010s might not be taxed yet

there's actually some new office space developments being planned for downtown Oakland, and I'm like "Why?" Build cheap little apartments, that's all that's needed right now

I love (LOVE) skyscrapers, but we're long past the point of needing any new ones it seems

Taller apartment buildings in general would certainly help with the housing crunch. Office skyscrapers, not so much.

Apparently converting office space to residential is a big pain.. they're just not laid out the same

It is tough, mostly because your typical office skyscraper huddles all the plumbing in a central core or two near the vertical circulation, to leave the rest of the plate open to maximize office suites with window access. The plumbing extension necessary to provide individual bathrooms is a significant hurdle, unless you are gonna somehow sell communal bathroom experiences, but I don't think it's an impossible hurdle to overcome.

I mean, issues of scale aside, is it so very different from converting former warehouses into condos?

there's a role for government here methinks

It is tough, mostly because your typical office skyscraper huddles all the plumbing in a central core or two near the vertical circulation, to leave the rest of the plate open to maximize office suites with window access. The plumbing extension necessary to provide individual bathrooms is a significant hurdle, unless you are gonna somehow sell communal bathroom experiences, but I don't think it's an impossible hurdle to overcome.

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, December 1, 2022 10:52 AM (three days ago)

Yeah, that was basically the one sticking point I came to when I thought about this over the past year ... which is why I thought that they would be good to convert to transitional housing/homeless shelters rather than conventional residential, where people would need/require in-unit bathrooms and kitchens. There would have to be additional shower/bathing facilities installed alongside the existing bathrooms/plumbing, and maybe there would need to be a widening of pipes for additional water ... I think, depending on the layout of units, there might not need to be an increase in sprinkler density for the conversion? If the buildings are already sprinklered?

Agencies have been buying hotels around here, which is a quicker and likely cheaper route to creating non-congregate shelter while supplies last

same here, silbs, but here there are more unhoused people than there are hotel rooms ...

I looked for other jobs within my company a few months back, and nothing I was qualified for (or wanted to do) jumped out, so I paused it for a while. going to start it up again.

things are no longer stressful like they were here, but I have lost all of my passion for training when it became fully virtual all the time (previously, sometimes it'd be in office, sometimes virtual). we failed to properly adapt to the all virtual world, so technology issues constantly derail training, and then employees just disappear in the middle of class, thinking we won't notice.

looking for something analytical in nature, where I can essentially 'set my own hours' (meaning they won't give a shit if I have to step away to take dad to bathroom or if I do my job in front of the TV at 8 pm). one of my best friends has a job he loves that he's been trying to recruit me for but there haven't been any openings, so I think that's my play once there are.

until then, I'm massively phoning it in.

(the bestie works for same company, but he jumped out of customer service years ago and he said it was transformative)

phoning it in

literally

I mean if you count MS Teams calls as phone

Working from home has no end in sight for anyone at my workplace pretty much

But talking about Teams and phoning it in, a PM almost had a breakdown and she phoned me before I was in at work and raised her voice at me when I told her I hadn't even started on tickets on Friday for a project that was due ASAP on Monday. I kept telling her I would get to them when I was in and she was like "Why do we even do anything?" And I was like, "Well, I got pulled into another meeting and project where a couple things needed to be fixed." She couldn't grasp the idea that you need patience working for this client and that priorities fluctuate and change rapidly. She ended up putting in her notice for a leave of absence yesterday and now the PMs are scrambling, because one other one called in sick and today two called in sick. I love how the client we do work for has millions of customers that see our work and we operate this way

Fun times!

i'm back in the office 3 days per week now and loving it, minus the part where i can't take a nap whenever i want

i'm back in the office 3 days per week now and loving it

You freak

I would die in my sleep if I had to teach three or four days from home.

my job is so much easier when i can be in a room w/ or easily talk to my coworkers w/o having to call/text/slack someone

also i'm more productive at work due to lack of distractions, i keep more normal hours and i'm naturally more active... but those are just personal problems

xp same, which is why I generally go in 3 days a week, thankfully this is entirely optional

best part of working from home for me? My own bathroom, with no one else doing weird shit in there

Best part of working from home is teaching from the shitter

taking a 15 min break from work to sit on the toilet doesn't hit the same at home tbh

i gained weight in my 30s when I was office-bound because there are snack machines everywhere and i get munchies when I work on any project or teach and I would hit those machines five times a day and get the least healthy shit out of em. on 12 hour days, sometimes i spent more than I did for a meal on snacks and stress ate (I don't work shifts that long anymore)

at home I'm limited to what I have and usually we don't have much here.

otoh, I have to worry about shitheaded kids walking by my unit screaming crap like "HOLY FUCK SON GET OUT OF MY FACE" when I'm unmuted and leading a class.

or the few times my mother has literally screamed across the house when dad fell. I'm always honest when that happens because what's the point of lying. everybody's sympathetic and in turn I don't give people grief for the occasional accidental mic-slip, esp after my accidental George Carlin routine in 2019.

also i'm more productive at work due to lack of distractions

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, December 6, 2022 11:21 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's interesting. see, at my workplace, everyone is much more distracted onsite than working from home. when i was in-office, people constantly visited us and chatted with us and we would go on hour-long coffee breaks, not including lunch breaks

I like the rituals of going to work -- driving, parking, walking to my office. I'm privileged, I know (I live five minutes from campus).

I find productivity to be zero problem at home. I'm only doing this one new joint project slowly because there's no deadline and if I do in a short burst each day it goes more quickly.

I live twenty minutes walk from where I normally work so I'm kinda relaxed.

I like the rituals of going to work -- taking a shower, eating breakfast, sitting on the couch, putting the TV on mute, plugging in my headphones, opening my laptop. (Seriously, I've been working from home since 2017 and wouldn't take an office job under any circumstances at this point, Covid or no Covid. When recruiters call -- and oh, do they call -- I tell them "remote only" before we even have any other conversation.)

Man, I got up from my home office mid-morning and made the most delicious omelet with bacon, broccoli, and mushrooms, and rye toast. Work from home is the best.

We were called into the office three days a week a few months ago (for no reason other than the company leased a new office), and the latest annoyance is that a group of bucket drummers started busking outside our building two weeks ago. We're nine stories up but hear it perfectly. Even 30°F temperatures haven't dissuaded them.

Dear Andrew,

You have 1 assignment that are 968 days overdue.

You must complete the following assignment(s):

- Executive Series: Securely Working From Home with Quiz

Hey, the housing problem got solved

Elon Musk's business confidants are sleeping in new bedrooms at Twitter HQ that have been converted from unused offices. Musk is having one made for him. https://t.co/Y3rq9WWEtC

— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) December 6, 2022

After maybe a decade of mostly or fully remote work, I recently took a job that is in person M W F and remote Tuesday and Thursday. The (reverse) commute is 15 minutes.

The salary is ridiculously high - too good to pass up. Easily 3x what I thought I could ever earn with a degree in English with a minor in philosophy.

Here's the thing, though: it's a bullpen-style open office. I probably would not have accepted it if I'd known that my desk is just... out there in a big space with eight or ten other people. Everyone passing by can see my monitor. I'm not really trying to get away with anything (like porn or ilx or playing Minesweeper or whatever) but the environment still rankles.

It's not even that I want an office with a door (I have had those, and it isn't as great as you think it will be). Just that the open-office plan solves nothing for workers, and also solves nothing for political purposes.

xp - pretty sure that's a code violation tbh ... or if he actually legally converted them that would be SF Dept of Building and Planning working at record speed ...

i'm in a doctor's office w/ my dad (routine checkup), I disconnected from the work network, and yet Outlook is still sending me work emails.

can't figure out how that's happening

office365? could be that they don't lock online office crap to the work vpn/network

possibly. it only ever works sometimes is the weird thing.

so today, I have a meeting with someone and they're still not back from their appointment at that time. so I close the meeting (or so I thought) and start doing work, and figure I'll wait for her to ping me that she's back and restart it.

so I'm talking to myself, using my usual profane self-talk, and all of a sudden I'm startled by the voice of my trainee joining the session that I apparently DIDN'T actually close.

the words I think I said out loud were "fuckin' perv" related to something not even work related, right as she was joining. hoping she didn't hear them, though she definitely didn't react like she did.