Working From Home

hard agree

I absolutely agree that for those of us doing this easily theres no logical reason why we should go back to wasting an extra 2 hrs of our day, and money on transport/adding to pollution, leaving house to work.

But yeah also agree I cant do less hours - part of my job includes being available on a fucking rostered phone number between 8.30 and 5.30 ugh

wish studs terkel was alive to opine about this

class of only 9 people, and 6 of them have major audio problems that have lasted over a day (as they always do at this site). 4 of them are outright not participating at all, requiring me to call on them to make sure they're actually here (and sometimes I catch them napping).

and my co-facilitator might as well be named Led Zeppelin because all she does is ramble on - 90 minutes over the allotted time for the *first lesson*, and the class is lost.

at this point i'm just happy for the paycheck, but the perfectionist in me hates this nonsense.

wait.. she talked for.. an HOUR AND A HALF too long??

maybe you could have told her, "it's time for you to go... the autumn moon lights your way"

yes. we were supposed to finish the section at like....4:45 pm Eastern yesterday. we started at 9:30 am this morning - still not done.

I had to basically tell her to remember to watch the clock, because this lesson is one of the easier ones. how long is she going to take on teh longer ones? meh.

glad others gave gotten to a ‘phone it in’ mindset. i’ve been getting really burnt out, overall i prefer WFH to commuting and sitting in an office but its been four months now. i sleep way too much and am still exhausted most days. doesnt hurt that i had a really positive performance review last week. gives me some justification to go easy on myself

By my lights there's no gray area. People have busy lives. You have to stick to the advertised time. If you're not done, it's your fault.

Feeling that post, gt. It's been 4 months. I'm hitting a wall. Pretty much everybody I know is.

I’m working quite literally harder than ever, don’t know what’s wrong with me

usually that would be my response to stressful times. in my old job, I could lose myself for hours in writing customer care reference materials, doing technical configuration, and it would take my mind off of things.

but training people in less than ideal conditions when half of them are just as distracted as I am, oi. This was a dream job for me in quiet times - but right now? I'm frankly amazed I actually worked up the energy to be frustrated with how bad it's going at the moment, that's an improvement I guess.

Yeah I dont understand why Im also so fucking tired all the time, but I assume its complete lack of exercise and possibly the increased drinking (ugh and I'd been doing so well before covid too)

for me it's simply "not being able to sleep". lately though i've done better laying on my back at an incline, but that's when I snore wicked awful so I feel bad for my roomies

Half of the 8 people in my class have malfunctioning headsets (something that's been constantly happening with this partner site for FOUR YEARS), one learner left midday yesterday and told nobody.

Half of them still can't figure out how to mute and unmute their phones (because their site managers barely trained them on how to use it)

Our entire Citrix system went down for 3 hours this morning. Like it does because Citrix is garbage.

A problem we reported last December with server issues in our training environment is still unsolved and the IT team is so depleted there's little chance of it being fixed anytime soon.

I love this job really i do

Tough times don’t last, tough people do <- authorized graffiti on restaurant window in my neighborhood

hang in there bud

thanks - and yr right. I mean I've lasted almost 16 years here, so I'm doin something right.

You probably should figure out what you want to do next. It never hurts to have a plan to move on.

true. problem is, 16 years plus a load of huge merit-based pay raises and jumping from pay grade to pay grade = there are few companies who will pay me what I make here atm. last time I tried the market, I got offers that would be a 50% pay cut to do the same work at a competitor!

but...I also wasn't trying very hard.

I kinda wanna just roadie for a metal band for the rest of my life. but...lol COVID

It might be time to consider bossing

ugh

in a better mood today. we are actually having to pull my co-instructor from class for her performance. That isn't the happy part - I hate having to do that, and in fact, have never had to do it. She was woefully unprepared today and left the training on dead air for 15 minutes, so I asked to pull her, to give her time to re-review her materials, as she has to lead the same class next week, and I"ll finish the class solo. and I'm going to observe her and give performance feedback in her next class, as apparently, her classes have been getting poor feedback and nobody's ever formally observed her before.

took a problem and made it into a solution.

diversity day presentation over zoom. i am new here so i wasn't sure how mandatory this was. i logged in with the intention of just muting it and reading a book. then we got an email saying sorry some people couldn't get in, the presenter limited it to 100 people. i am taking someone else's spot who wanted to be here and i can't leave! i already know race is a social construct. i might leave at noon though.

Supposedly my last day of wfh is a week from Friday, then it's back to the office (unless we get another stay of execution, but I doubt it). What should I do on my last day? Pancakes for breakfast? B33r for lunch?

Wake and bake
Then breakfast of champions: Cheerios and Budweiser

took a problem and made it into a solution.

This sounds like something a boss would do.

yeah. I've never managed people before but I've been a project manager (two years). went from having a prodigious start where I took over a project before my training was completed and saved it from collapse, feeling confident, and loving my job for 2 years....

....to feeling dehumanized by nasty Executives and toxic business partners and having it wreck my mental health. i wasn't the only one - my peers were also miserable...and some left. was 100% the company, so maybe if I did it elsewhere, it'd go better.

"I'm being extremely lazy, my productivity is absolutely in the toilet. I don't give 2 fucks tbh.

Yeah lately I've just been phoning it in. If ever there was a time to do C minus work, this is it."

I genuinely think this is okay and is about looking after yourself.

I took the rest of this afternoon off. the assignment I was supposed to start on isn't ready, I didn't sleep well, and I would rather just nap

"Yeah I dont understand why Im also so fucking tired all the time."

This but ... it's crap working from home. I resent the lack of division between home and work. I resent work filling my brain when I've stopped. I could go for an hour's nap in the middle of the day and would still be actually working harder than any time I'm in the office. I miss the pottering to the work kitchen for a coffee and a natter. I miss going for a lunch break, even though my lunch break was only ever wandering around Wilkos and probably buying nasturtium seeds. I miss my colleagues, even the ones I only quite like. Also, alcohol starts at 1700 instead of 1800, now.

(Disclaimer: really grateful that I'm not being made to work in a risky workplace).

I held a Psych game night on Zoom for 4-5 people last week and one of my friends couldn't get in (issue with the link) and after 5 minutes I almost called it off cos it felt too much like work helping him troubleshoot. but he got in.

"I'm being extremely lazy, my productivity is absolutely in the toilet. I don't give 2 fucks tbh.

Yeah lately I've just been phoning it in. If ever there was a time to do C minus work, this is it."

I genuinely think this is okay and is about looking after yourself.

― djh,

^ this. I was trying extra hard the first couple of months but now I am slowing down a bit.

I'm still working too hard lol, nothing else is interesting to me rn

My org had some incredible things to say as the pandemic was hitting and we were working from home.

The HR chief gave a presentation and there was a slide with the following on it:

Working Remote - COVID 19 Principles
1) You are not "Working From Home," you are "At your home, during a crisis, trying to work."
2) Your personal physical, mental, and emotional health is far more important than anything else right now.
3) You should not try to compensate for lost productivity by working longer hours.
4) You will be kind to yourself and not judge how you are coping based on how you see others coping.
5) You will be kind to others and not judge how they are coping based on how you are coping.
6) Your team's success will not be measured the same way it was when things were normal.

I can't describe to you how much relief this slide gave me, and as a result, I became more productive because I wasn't stressing about how much I was fucking up during the pandemic.

I'm lucky to work where I do, but I hope that maybe some of you will be able to take a couple of these principles and apply them to your situation. Especially point #1, which is a reframing that helped me be a lot kinder to myself.

That's nice! We never got an explicit acknowledgement of this kind but I suspect managers received something to this effect, because they've been patient and hands-off throughout.

Ctrl-F "vodka," no results found. Hmph.

djh, your post - it me

yeah our company/HR have been very good to us around all this - they were ready to send us all home by the middle of March and hit the ground running on that front (new laptops, headsets, chairs, the lot).

We have weekly video quizzes and regular competitions (best pet, bakeoffs, that sorta thing). I havent felt micromanaged, we're all trusted to just Get Shit Done (this can be a bit deadly for me though, I can slide a little when someone isnt whacking me at least occasionally lol)

"Video quizzes" - to be fair, this would make me resign.

(Sounds good, otherwise).

My office is closed until April and there's discussion at the moment, within my team, as to whether we ever go back. Colleagues have taken the opportunity to move to the US and Europe and work closer to their families and there's not much of a pressing reason to make them come back. The interesting discussion is going to be, come April, what happens if half the team wants to work from the office and half doesn't. There's a fear that it could disrupt collaboration and the team dynamic if you have a core group who see each other every day and a bunch of people who don't. I imagine it'll be optional but the idea of forcing everyone to work from home to put them all on an equal footing has been mooted.

Where I work we’ve been told that wfh in another country isn’t on the cards for tax reasons. Some staff have ill parents elsewhere and would really like to be with them medium-term but it ain’t happening.

Hello. This is a Teams/Skype/Zoom etc question.

We're currently working from home and need to do some work via video conferencing rather than in person.

We want to do two things

a) Have conversations with clients, who can't have our email addresses

and

b) Have conversations with groups of clients, who can't have our email addresses or each other's email addresses.

In an ideal world, this would be free (but doesn't absolutely have to be) and very easy to use (particularly for the client).

Any obvious service?

A colleague had set up Skype accounts but it seems that once you've had a "conversation" anyone would have your address.

zoom is easy to use (and is there anyone in the world who hasn't used it through lockdown? oh you, apparently) and doesn't require email sharing (though you have to send them a link somehow); the free version is limited to 45 mins though.

Thanks Ledge.

Microsoft Teams looks like it's a bit more faff to set up but is also free, don't require email addresses for video con, and doesn't have the annoying 45m min restriction. Been using it at work and the collaborative working tools work surprisingly well ime.

Video quality on Teams is better than Zoom as well.

Teams is great

I liked Skype for Business (ex-Lync) a little more for ease of use, but I am okay with Teams.

I shall now go and ritually scourge my flesh onnaconna praising a product of the evil M$ corporation. Mea maxima culpa

We're supposed to be switching to Teams next year campuswide and a few of us are vaguely using a general space for it in the meantime. Reasonable enough from what I can see!