Working From Home

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 ;)

My partner has made me set a timer for every 1/2 to get up and stretch, which has been essential tbh.

thank you, I'm gonna do the same rn

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

Ach, wasted on me, lad ;)

stop

i really will get conseated

You're off your rocker, mush.

seriously d'Eames

the best thing about working from home is that if i randomly decide i want some toast, i can just go to the kitchen & make some

the worst thing is too many goddamn meetings

anybody use WebEx and have it be really terrible with sound quality for people dialed in thru internet this week?

anybody's VPN get toasted?

otoh i am kinda loving that I'll get paid time and a half solely because of how bad things are.

I don’t actually need to use the VPN for anything it turns out, can get by with our internet-facing ssh bastion and port forwarding, and none of the web-based stuff i need to deal with has any IP-range restrictions. An upside of the web SaaS era I guess.

i can do a significant part of my job without VPN, but they're putting us on Workday soon instead of Peoplesoft for time card and we're entering a blackout period, so I decided to be safe and filled out hours through 3/31 today

both my work vpn and my lol just for fun home vpn are doing fine

teleconferencing has been a struggle, we don't actually have enough licenses for everybody to be talking to each other all the time through conferencing it looks like?

im rather staggered that our citrix system not only worked first time and flawlessly all day

well i say all day but look

but that it has an android app and that also works p well on my moveable phone well cya offive it was nice knowin ya but i think our relationship has moved on bye now bye