Working From Home

afaict re onenote there's some functionality that lets you tags docs for better cross-reference or some shit but rly it was def not worth the time taken to learn it let alone pay for the product or training or roll out or following up

essentially the same flaw with everything office has rolled out since pivot tables

like i keep arguing that theyd get more out of my salary by letting me sit in with each unit and after a day or two gently show them how excel does that for you than they do any ten salaries in IT or training at present

but i recognise that without that makework the people doing it could quite easily destroy the place. its the equivalent of handing king kong a maiden, yeah you hate to see it but the alternative would be briefly entertaining, long term devastating and not for one second would having done the right thing save you when the mob comes looking

the training I start next week = for a high profile client who met with our CEO to ensure we would meet their needs and we've been told there's "no room for error".

bitches...right now IT has 2 hour waits for CHAT SUPPORT and hangs up after 30 minutes on the phone, tickets go unresponded to. so when there's a problem, we have little chance of resolving it the same day. we also can't have people sit with other learners if their computer doesn't work because they're all working at home.

and VPN technology for our partner sites is notoriously spotty for WFH employees, to the point where the person I taught the other day got bumped out of it for two hours and screamed "JESUS CHRIST!" during my training the last time it happened.

there will be error. lots of it. you and the stupid client will have to deal with it.

― narcissistic sleighride (Neanderthal), Thursday, April 2, 2020 8:34 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's katy perry isn't it

that things she does during ur gonna hear me roa a a aa ar wasnt a stylistic choice it was just her crappy home wifi

Most jobs could be replaced by software but it doesn’t follow that they should be

2xp to d

yeah im with that

So my vision of the future of the bureaucratic sphere is you employ a great many people to be customer service reps who take requests by phone and email and so on and key stuff in to backoffice software of various kinds, but if the whatsit is too complex you escalate to a meeting with a Tier 2 person, who keys in the ultimate solution across as much software as necessary, unless it’s not a supported configuration and you escalate to the business analysts and programmers who figure out the need and implement it and the end beneficiaries don’t have to use a computer at all if they don’t want to

What’s key here is you have to hire dozens of reps, you want no waits at all times, that’s the employment guarantee part of this reform package

oh we do most of *that* we're the civil service, dear

i like onenote. you can organize it like an actual notebook. it's very searchable. you can throw in links and pictures and tables and stuff. i find it much easier than having a million small or a few super long word documents.

hmmm

whats yr hourly rate to give webinars

dmac my like underlying contention is that there’s too much emphasis on building the self-service frontend for everything, some things sure the students should be able to sign up for classes without calling anyone but there’s not enough UX designers in the world to make everything actually easy.

i used to use it a lot but it crashed all the time so i just use docs & notepad now

If end-user programming were a real thing people wanted to do we could just let everyone open up a database shell and have at but nobody actually wants to be an end user programmer. u.u

I’m with Silby here

I mean we’ve diluted generic website ux down to the most basic level, you got a hamburger and a magnifying glass and the scroll, and people will still never find shit without help. You need more help. People-on-people help.

hmmm

whats yr hourly rate to give webinars

― ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Thursday, April 2, 2020 9:43 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i promise you it is astronomically expensive

ok

what's my cut

What is teams? Teams is that thing that auto-opens every fucking time I open my laptop and click away faster than a speeding bullet. Is it actually good not bad?

its the next big thing man, get on it now

We had Lotus Notus until a few years ago, now we have Google Mail + Google Docs and Slack + the one thing no-one's mentioned so far, Google Hangouts, which seems to do us pretty good?

But soon we're getting Teams. No-one as far as I can tell is enthused about this.

Google hangouts or meet or whatever it’s called is very good. Better than zoom for just regular video calling and team meetings.

darragh as long as you're banning things can you also ban bullshit email signature disclaimers about "for your eyes only" or whatever suck bullshit compliance language people stick in there

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in the office today.

nobody else here.

zoom won't work on the Mac desktop I have here, left my work-issued MacBook air at home, so missed an hour and a half long zoom meeting.

two big monitors, office chair, wireless mouse vs sitting at my kitchen table hunched over a laptop with no mouse and a small screen.

bring it all home. We were told that today's the last day to bring equipment home from the office if we don't otherwise need to be there, I should've really gritted my teeth to bring my actual computer and monitor home but I've been getting by OK with ssh and a lot of port forwarding and so forth so I figured if it wasn't essential I shouldn't do it.

We were strictly forbidden to bring our desktops home, fortunately I have a company issues Surface and had an extra monitor at home so I've been able to make do as much as I can.

yeah I am going to bring stuff home. wireless mouse, mouse mat, second monitor, monitor risers.

office chair I don't fancy pushing for 16 blocks so that will have to stay here

oh and my keyboard

I think we were told to not take furniture

my colleague took her chair. but accidentally dropped her monitor off her chair while wheeling them to the elevator and shattered it. a nice newish Mac monitor not a shitty old dell like mine

I decided to sleep in today and burn the PTO and of course someone was out unexpectedly and they were looking for me to jump in.

I get Friday and Monday off next weekend and I am so looking forward to 4 days off

Agh, any chance of taking PTO is at least two weeks away for me. I had like 8 weeks of nothing to do but kept coming in to the office, then I got uber-busy right when the world went to shit. Since 3/13 I have had no chance to get bored or binge Netflix or undertake a baking project - every day has been full of kids, work, school, house. It's like five full-time jobs divided between two frazzled stressed-out people.

Some time to just focus on the kids, the house, the garden, music, and sanity would be luxurious if it ever happens. I am aware that we are very fortunate. But it does rankle when people in my social circles post that they're bored.

I'm not even close enough to anyone with kids that are old enough that I could offer to take a kid for a day, if that were even wise under the circs, probably isn't.

technically speaking I am working fewer hours but fortunately, so far, there's been enough freelance to make up the shortfall

yeah silby don't take a kid

Need a kid?
Take a kid

Have a kid?
Leave a kid

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/35/Babys_day_out_poster.jpg/220px-Babys_day_out_poster.jpg

how the fuck do you deal with people coming at you from a bunch of different directions simultaneously

skype and juggling two or three text conversations and every five minutes another "bing!" from the email, and i don't even have to deal with phone calls really!

i'm trying to remain social to keep my sanity, but the Urge to tell anybody who talks to me to fuck off i'm already having three conversations is pretty strong

we have now been banned from using zoom for work business because of its security problems

rush now add two bored kids into the mix 💀💀💀

Fuck me, Teams is SICK. Intuitive, audio/video quality are good, you can paste inline images in your chat sessions (which was a huge gripe I had with our previous software), and easy to share/upload files. Thumbs up!

last week, just about every one of our new classes had awful starts (I wasn't part of any of them), so they decided to start this week's classes half a day later to give them more time to work out their Day 1 logistical issues.

It was just as bad. Nobody could get into WebEx, nobody was listening, and of 20 people in the class, only 60% of them could get their credentials to work in Citrix, and of that 60%, only 1 got past the EPA scan, whereas everybody else was denied access due to failing said scan. and I'm betting it's because virus software and recent scans are required to access my company's network, and these hires are so underpaid, I bet none of them HAVE Antivirus software on their home machines, other than the pre-installed Windows Defender. What are you gonna do, lay all these people off a day into the gig?

so we got just about nothing done. I'm glad to have a job, but I would prefer if said job didn't make me want to scream. this class lasts until the 30th of April ffs.

🤯

🤯

🤯

Third time is the charm - jackpot!

Teams isnt so bad - someone was talking to me the other day and got frustrated he couldnt explain what he meant and said "hang on a sec" and just started sharing his screen in the chat window and showed me.

The group videoconf in it is also pretty solid, we've been using it for daily standup meetings in our little team, which usually devolve into "I cant by any flour" "I keep telling you, go to the indian grocers" every morning.

Sitting on the sofa behind the other half as he has a work video call.

Carefully shuffled over to the side of the sofa that should be just out of view, but intermittently find myself nodding my head along to music on headphones or rubbing my nose (don't touch the face! and definitely don't do it in a way that might look like picking yr nose on someone else's video call) and having to remind myself not to do that, just in case