Working From Home

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum right now - no oversight, no one paying much attention, left to our own devices (literally, for most/many of us I assume, me included). I wish I could relax and enjoy it but I am utterly incapable of doing so. I would actually like a *teensy* bit more pressure.

― brechtian social distancing (Simon H.), Monday, March 23, 2020 10:48 PM (yesterday)

i'm in the same situation. i need structure. i was having trouble getting out of bed when i did have to go to work, so now i'm just giving in and it's not making me feel any better. i know it would be a good idea to write down a plan but something being a good idea is not making me actually do it.

not surprising or anything but i believe we're about to get word that this will be formally extended through the month of april soon, so i need to get some kind of system going soon or i will lose my mind. may be worth it to spend some of my "work" time today cleaning my dining room so i will stop working on my couch or bed like a lump

I'm grateful my job is still running virtually but I don't think our leadership got the memo we're in a crisis.

Just heaped the aforementioned insane workload on us, but they seem to have forgotten everything is slower.

Dumped 90+ new hires on us, knowing the technical issues at the partner site would be massive. However, the IT line, due to absenteeism and volume, has a 75 minute wait just for web chat. Our HR is pushing service requests back a week.

And leadership constantly breathing on us asking how it's going, it's like CHILL THE FUCK OUT, we're already stressed by what's going on outside.

knuckling down and concentrating for more than half an hour at a time is so exhausting. if it was something where i could get some reasonable state of flow going that'd be one thing, but it's all these fiddly, not urgent but important, unrelated little doodads to knock out. i've finally moved away from needing to do all those doodads the second they come in because they are always more, but then i'm at the point where i try to motivate myself to actually do some of the fiddly bits before they get unreasonably old

I have that same problem. Lol...."oh, not due for two weeks? Well let me get a head start. WHOA, I don't know the answer to that, will look at it later."

I am lucky to have a job I can do from home, I know, but the bits of the job I like and get on with are where frontline staff email to ask "please fix/process this small thing!" and I can turn it around right away without any thought, or maybe within a day or two with a little bit of puzzle-solving. realtime, reactive, feels vaguely useful.

now the frontline staff are not in work and that element of my job is just not happening, and there's nothing left but the long-term projects where I can't see how to start and I get overwhelmed with worry about getting it wrong because I'm not smart/organised enough to think all the possible pitfalls through properly.

normally I ignore those projects until they're way overdue; sometimes it turns out they didn't need to happen anyway and sometimes it's just that nobody notices/cares, because that's the kind of unobservant incompetence-enabling workplace I work for and am too scared to leave because where else would people be so careless as to leave me to my own devices and not tell me to shape up?

also I am strangely annoyed at a neighbour lying in the sun on the communal lawn, even though there's nobody else out there or likely to walk within at least a metre so it's more or less fine, but my lizard/bureaucrat/toddler brain feels peeved somehow that someone is getting away with something I didn't want to do anyway while I'm working stuck indoors, staring at a screen, pretending to work, clockwatching

also she's probably the person that always leaves cigarette butts all over the communal garden, which is nasty

just because everyone is WFH that does not mean you can schedule a meeting for 8am, particularly not when you send the invite out at 9pm the previous night.

That is criminal lol. I refuse to schedule any before 10 and even then, only if I sent it hours prior to the end of previous day

my new morning routine is much more relaxed than before, because I used to have to make my lunch, my son's lunch, get him out of bed, harangue him for 45 minutes, drive him to school, then into work. I still get up early now but now I just shower, walk the dogs, get slightly high, then come back and work is tolerable until about 1pm.

I have that same problem. Lol...."oh, not due for two weeks? Well let me get a head start. WHOA, I don't know the answer to that, will look at it later."

― sorry for butt rockin (Neanderthal), Tuesday, March 24, 2020 11:49 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is the default setting of my brain so really not much has changed wrt that

the o/h is having a Zoom meeting next door and I guess rounds of congratulations are being read out because I keep hearing bursts of clapping, from him, on his own

8am meetings are evil no matter what format/medium, and ridiculous to have so little notice as well. I felt vaguely annoyed there's a 9am meeting tomorrow, even though I no longer have to get up to commute

Just want it on the record that WFH with demanding small children (who are also at home) is NOT a constant ballet of cute "woops, cute kid came into the webcam frame and was cute for a few seconds."

It is also sometimes being curled up with a laptop in the closet, with my feet holding the door closed while someone screams DAAAADAAAAA and pounds on the door for half an hour. And then emerging to find the room decorated with diaper contents and magic marker.

If the liquor stores close I am doomed.

just because everyone is WFH that does not mean you can schedule a meeting for 8am, particularly not when you send the invite out at 9pm the previous night.

ugh. disgusting savages.

"i'm a morning person, so that means you are now too!"

I'm teaching from home (secondary: 11-16) and my school, seemingly the only one in the country from what I can make out, gave us a week to come to terms with Microsoft Teams so we can continue to give our kids the education they need. It's been... surprisingly OK so far. The kids are happy to have a routine, somewhere to gather and chat, and - so far at least - pleased to be getting on with something. I've got a top set bunch of 15-year-olds and godammn they're keeping me on my toes. We're reading farty old An Inspector Calls and I'm getting more from it than any previous year.

Downsides: it lacks the core element of teaching English - discussion and human heat; they've worked out how to mute the teacher and each other; they can gatecrash lessons; the chat function is amenable to all manner of filth and exotica; they're essentially unaccountable. I expect next week to devolve into the internet version of shitting in one's hands and throwing it around the room but for now, it's OK.

the lack of commute suddenly means that 10am meetings feel insanely late. i'm like, wtf do i do before then? the kids are already bored and drilling holes into each others' thighs by like, 7:50. joe wicks saves us for a half an hour before we all start yelling at each other again. by the time that day's 10am meeting rolls around i'm already fucking exhausted.

considering wearing a sombrero to my meetings from now on, unrelatedly (i think)

i did manage to do some work. i cleaned the table off. after i took a trip to the office, the grocery store, and target. target was to get two storage totes, one for knitting stuff and one for sewing stuff, because that was what was occupying the table. i have done more work than anyone else on a particular group project so i'm sure everyone thinks i've been working all day and only started after i did my own work. lol. i also am not used to typing on my laptop because i have a dock at work with an actual keyboard and i keep accidentally deleting half the things i type when my hands hit the touchpad. i'm just glad there's no diaper contents around me :)

the meme content of my workday has increased exponentially. i'm ok with this; have to cope with stressful skype meetings somehow. someone shared something by The Oatmeal and I responded by making a joke about the Chemical Brothers album "Dig Your Own Hole". I'd never actually gotten around to listening to the Chemical Brothers before. turns out Dig Your Own Hole is a pretty good record!

my home desk chair is going to give me permanent back and ass pain for the rest of my life but i'll be damned if i spend one red cent for the sake of this job

Good DN Simon H.

there's definitely been a bit of trenches spirit in this so far, with my work. zoom can make things feel really formal, nobody knows exactly when to talk. it's more important than ever for somebody to bring a joke or just chat shit for a good 5-10 minutes.

I am starting to get really good at this. Did I already brag about the setup? I have four screens, three keyboards, two phones, it's ridiculous in here. I feel like I spent last week getting all the sources of avoidable distractions out of my system and now I'm actually able to focus and get a lot of work done as long as the unavoidable distractions (home schooling my daughter, escorting contractors to fiddle with the HVAC, shit like that) don't disrupt too much of the day.

my "home office" is vastly more pleasant than my "office office", especially after I've made some long overdue rearrangements to improve both the aesthetics and functionality

having the rest of the family around gonna be a challenge now kids are doing school at home but although day 1 was a horrorshow, day 2 was vastly smoother - let's see how day 3 is

one thing about WFH is that it really does highlight when people aren't pulling their weight - a colleague whose sketchy reliability was easy enough to carry in the pre-plague days is now shaping up to be a real source of difficulty for remote work - I'm semi-sympathetic because they are freaking out about their living circumstances viz the lockdown, but we are also lucky to be in meaningful work at the moment and to keep it viable it's gotta be all hands to the pump

my worksite computer is the USS Enterprise, i'm flying the Galileo shuttlecraft here

all alone

When my work was mostly writing I could do it at night, after kid bedtimes. Now that it is mainly meetings everyone schedules meetings during the same daytimes that they would have ordinarily scheduled them in, which blows.

I finally got my big monitor hooked up
omg my eyes are so happy I can seeeeeeee again

we had a zoom meeting last wk & it was funny to see everyone’s different setups, one coworker was standing up, and staring down at the laptop camera the whole time & the resolution was super low & it looked like someone’s found footage of their final moments before being murdered, i was trying so hard not to laugh

There is a real crazy intimacy these meetings engender.. you see the inside of everybody's house!

I really like the people I work with - and some of them are interstate - so it's pretty cool to be having the virtual hangs

so far work hasn't required me to use video, which currently is a good thing because my microphone has yet to work after a reformat

(that said the dissonance between the force of the flood of "if you care about the economy right now you are basically hitler, satan, and trump as one individual, and support murder, slavery, and eugenics" and the terror I feel every morning around 9 and every afternoon around 5 at whether my income will exist for another day is making me lose my mind)

everyone deserves protection from the consequences of this thing - medically, and financially

also, trump is a moron

these things can be true at the same time

I will say this positive thing which is that my roommate and I have so far managed not to murder one another after suddenly being together 24/7

some idiot clicked on a malware link overnight and our whole network is now shutdown. we have also been blocked from another network we need to use. whoops. we have been told for MONTHS not to click links in emails due to repeated phishing attempts, such as "your sexual harassment training is going to expire in 24 hours." great job, everyone.

It's now prescribed that whenever someone coughs on a video call, they have to say "don't worry guys, it's not coronavirus!" and everyone else has to laugh at the joke.

civil service has initiated split shifts for working from home because load on the network or w/e i dunno

wife is on earlies, im on lates, this has plusses this has minuses in a one bed, one living space apartment

lucky we back onto the park, as long as the hysteria around people going outside at all doesnt get that closed too.

my worksite computer is the USS Enterprise, i'm flying the Galileo shuttlecraft here

all alone

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, March 24, 2020 9:46 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hang in there morbs, we're here

I'm glad you're not going in any more, deems, but sorry yr employers have found a way to complicate things yet again

went back to office to retrieve my ergo trackball mouse & facilities mgr let me bring my chair home too
fkn YES finally bloody comfortable again

xp ty, we'll take the good from it to start.

one person on calls or w/e at a time, our preferred exercises arent mutual, leaves one guilt free to cook each meal, and we both have v v good noise cancelling headphones. we'll survive it.

Hooray for good chairs

hip hip support

Three chairs

ergonomic me conseated

How much would someone want for a set of ergonomic chairs?

if you backed me into a corner?

Two adults - who work in very related jobs at the same university - and two kids under 5 = neither of us getting masses done. Snatching the odd hour or two each day to answer emails and do video conferences. Thank god we turned on microsoft teams at the end of last month.

if you backed me into a corner?

Ach, it was a Castle reference. Tell him he's dreaming...

Glad I remembered to take off the creationist tshirt I was wearing ironically before teleconference

Ach, it was a Castle reference.

ach it was a reference to why one might need an ergonomic chair ;)