Working From Home

xpost thank goodness for 3 PTO days bookending a weekend

... or I print the room schedule out and compare it to the planset on the screen (which is actually easier because I don't have a large-format printer at home)

I love having so much monitor space that I lose my cursor, 2screens4life

the dual monitor thing hurts more during screen shares, since we train virtually, the students have to share their screen, and often when they're in their console and click to launch GUI, GUI always opens on the other screen, so they have to drag it over, or we can't see it. so it's five minutes of "try clicking and dragging...so....ok so click on the GUI pan...ok ok you got it, hold your mouse. No not LITERALLY 'hold' it, I mean keep your finger on it. I know your finger is on it but keep the left clicker down. are you holding the left clicker down? Ok you say you are but I don't think you are....ok ok now slide the mouse to the left. THE LEFT! The....ok, is someone else able to do this instead?"

btw...you'd think Outlook is the most intuitive email client in the world, but how many of you have had this convo like I did yesterday (exaggerated a wee bit):

"Rob, I can't find the meeting invite to get into the MS Teams training"

"have you checked your calendar?"

"my what? No, I was accessing it via email, but then I clicked Accept, and now it's not in my email anymore".

"Yes, because it's in your calendar."

"My what?"

"The thing that says CALENDAR in Outlook. do you see it?'

"Yes - ok I see a blue meeting now, but I still don't see the link"

"You have to double click it to actually open it"

"oh - is that blue underlined thing that says Link the link?"

"Who dresses you each morning?

"My mother does it."

I would not think outlook is an intuitive email client! The motherfucker has so many buttons.

well but the calendar, I mean....shouldn't be that hard to find!

the out of office auto-reply feature is in a place that isn't intuitive, that i will admit

But I read my work email by synchronizing it to local maildirs over IMAP and using command line tools to filter it and open messages in less(1) so what I consider “intuitive” is suspect

outlook fucking sucks and its calendar sucks and now mine defaults to opening emails without the reply and forward buttons showing it's so dumb

dual monitors are a must for writing/editing sry

or at least "very very handy" yes otm

Outlook is intuitive if you have used Outlook for a very long time -- and even then ... idk people's intuition is different obv considering we have a fundamental difference in terms of monitor usage.

I guess I just don’t remember what it’s like to be able to turn my head as much as I want all day long

I am glad that I don't have to use Outlook.

I like to focus on a thing that is right in front of me, then finish that thing, and then pull up the next thing so it's right in front of me, then check to see if I have emails or texts or calls to return and then deal with that ...

my peeve about Outlook are the times when Microsoft Exchange freezes up and can't connect to server so no emails come through, and then finally hours later it starts up again and now oh hey 30 emails at once, some asking for stuff today

When my job means focusing on one thing (say, writing) one monitor is fine.

At other times, my job involves comparing one thing to a different thing, usually while viewing both. Dual monitors (or a really wide one) are helpful for that.

fuck work, i hate work, why do any of us have to do this useless shit. i get by with as little effort as possible and so far it's working out just fine and i love it. thank god my 25% is everyone else's B-.

same. i take so many breaks during the day and constantly getting, "you're doing great!" i mean what is everyone else doing? we don't *all* need to be doing this all day.

lol that's about where i'm at right now. i miss being a project manager cos I could outright disappear for parts of the day. even as a requirements analyst, my productivity was so good that I'd....read ILX all day

word

here's to low expectations, making up numbers because who has time to measure all that shit anyway (and no one is ever going to check), doing the things that make other people happy, and then just stepping the fuck back and leaving people alone.

in 100 years, when they're sifting through the rubble of the entire world, they sure as fuck aren't going to ask why I didn't finish my time card one week in 2017

high frequency alt tabbing is not optimal

fuck work, i hate work, why do any of us have to do this useless shit.

Well, yeah, but I still have children who want to live in a house and wear clothes and eat food

Then we get to my own needs, which include guitars and weed

alt-tabbing to the oldies

I hear you all and I value this perspective but man I feel like shit if I’m not trying to do a good job

Not that that means I’m on task 8 hours a day but that’s physically impossible, programmers get paid 40 hours a week for about 4 hours of intense thinking

clothes AND food? it's a binary choice in my house

I feel bad about it insofar as every bit of my self-esteem is tied to how good I am at things.

Well, yeah, but I still have children who want to live in a house and wear clothes and eat food

Then we get to my own needs, which include guitars and weed

― mouts and shurmurs (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 6:01 PM (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

hi, i'm talking about work as in jobs, in this thread titled "working from home"

I hear you all and I value this perspective but man I feel like shit if I’m not trying to do a good job

i do relate to this tbf but i guess i'm just ... tired. my field is very underpaid and i've been doing it for 10 years and i just don't gaf anymore. i will do what it takes to keep my job and keep that paycheck coming in but i literally don't have the energy for anything more than that anymore.

In utopia the state ships everyone a guitar and some weed once a month

The feeling that silby and Neanderthal - that of enjoying being good at something there is a German word for it (of course): funktionslust. Joy at being of use, joy at doing things well. It's one of the emotions that is easiest to ascribe to nonhuman animals.

My cat jumps effortlessly onto the top of the fridge: funktionslust. I play a decent mandolin solo: funktionslust. I get through cooking a decent pasta and then folding the laundry: funktionslust.

There are lots of places to scratch that itch that don't center around your job.

yeah this thread is way too chipper for me rn. yall enjoy your funktionslust though, wishing you all the pats on the head.

the flip side of that coin is misery over failing, which explains why it took me years of training to crack it as a singer, because I'd go to voice lessons, my teacher would get exasperated at my lack of progress, I'd go home to practice alone, hit a few bad notes, and give up, depressed.

favorite bit of dream-slaying

"why do you want to be a singer, Neanderthal"
'cos I love it'
"do you? idk that's not the impression I get"

then I hit her with my club

that's harsh

on both your parts I guess

she then said I was a beat late with the clubbing and that I needed to count rhythm better

phbbt Germans. the Dutch have this figured out:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niksen

might have something to do with the fact that stroopwafels are my favorite new cookie

at the start of WFH i had two PT jobs. i got laid off from one of them, but the other one kept me on and eventually hired me FT, which i'm super-thankful for. i have to handle a lot of physical items in my line of work so for the past couple of months i've been going into the office one day a week, and WFH the other four days. i pretty much spend all my WFH days looking forward to the day i work in the office. i'm about 1000x more productive than i am when working from home and i get to actually converse with other humans. some WFH days i have absolutely zero contact with anyone i work with and while for some people that might sound dreamy, i find it alienating and kind of sad. (there are all-company zoom calls on mondays where i at least get to see people's faces and hear their voices, which is nice.) and even though the commute wasn't the best, it was still a time for me to zone out on reading/music and kind of just dig into myself a little, and to enjoy being out in public with other people on a train or bus, in a way that i don't get to do anymore. and i'm just way too distracted at home. being in an office with other people who are working makes me feel like i'm part of something and fosters some accountability - at home i get none of that feeling so i'm just dicking around online all day. idk maybe that makes me some sort of mindless drone or whatever but i also like taking pride in the work i do.

but i still feel pretty lucky all things considered compared to my husband, who is a college professor and has been teaching remotely all semester. he's only teaching two classes but his workload seems to have doubled compared to a normal in-person semester, since he's teaching both live and asynchronously and has to prepare classes the "normal" way plus record talks/prepare slide decks, which he never really had to do before. he's miserable, the students are miserable, he's had a number of dropouts and it sounds like a lot of kids may not come back next semester if classes are taught remotely again in the spring (which seems likely) - and frankly, i don't blame the students one bit, and neither does he. imagine being a teenager and looking forward to starting college and getting away from your home environment and learning to be an independent adult and then....you get this bullshit, instead.

so idk, we're both comfortable all things considered but neither of us is happy. i really hate this.

I did a job in my 30s where I travelled and wrote for maybe 10 days a year and the rest of the time languished in an office where I could pretty much get away with doing a few hours work a day. The money was alright but damn was I unhappy. One morning I laid down to do some sit-ups and couldn't get up. Now, I'm a teacher and my job is fucking insane - to the point of nearly rubbing me out altogether. There are days when I long for my cosy office corner, dicking about on the internet and slowly rotting in the heat of a hangover but, although it's taking way to much of me and my life, on balance, my soul is in much better working order and I'm happier being useful and purposeful.

I hated teaching remotely; the fact that I'm seeing 200 people a day in the midst of a global plague is something I try not to think about.

"i get by with as little effort as possible and so far it's working out just fine and i love it. thank god my 25% is everyone else's B-."

Ha same. One of the biggest revelations I had about the "work world" back in my 20s was how extremely low the bar had been set by everyone else, allowing me to step over it with little effort. I mean jfc we had this 6 question survey that management asked us to complete. 95% of ppl completed it. I'm thinking wtf how can there be 5% that didn't bother to do it?! But mgmt sends out an email saying "wow 95% completed the survey, great job everyone!".

Neanderthal - if it helps, one of your posts made me laugh out loud. With you, not at you.

I'm hating working from home. Doesn't suit me at all. I'm wearied by those conversations about staff well-being that end up saying "We could do drinks! On Teams!"

Zoom social meetings all end up as the same two guys doing all the talking, and in fed up of listening to those two guys. irl you could walk away and form a smaller group and chat amongst yourselves but with zoom you're kinda stuck.

"I'm fed up", sorry.

Autocorrect FFS, has anything been so inaccurately named?

hoo boy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCm0_ZzpBDE

Hey that was in Infinite Jest

off from work for four days. was tempted to make my out of office message "suck it, bitch"

one of the "exciting" things about working from home is that you can more easily cancel meetings at the last minute.