Working From Home

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.

nothing like taking a wicked grumpy and realizing the conf call you're supposed to lead starts in 58 seconds.

"oops sorry, moving this meeting back a half hour, uhh...there...is...something urgent that came up with...budget"

*click two buttons, done*

I "had a power outage" when I overslept for a meeting one morning. I live across the country from the rest of my coworkers so they have no way to know if I did.

hey donna rouge, just want to say i'm glad you're ft somewhere and sad you're experiencing the wfh blues. weirdly i was wfh for a year before covid happened and that particular position was like you describe - weeks on end without human contact and just feeling like a zombie. it sucks. i know i bitch about work a lot but i do actually like accomplishing things at my job and putting effort in, so i get it. i hope things work out for you and your partner. but know how stressful it must be to be dealing with this for another, what, six months at least? hoping you all manage to get through this without too much more pain and misery.

thanks map <3

I've just been jotting down a timeline of all the things that I've binged on since March, dvds, Prime, Netflix, Youtube, and podcasts. Even though this whole event feels like it started not long ago holy shit it felt like years ago that I watched the entire Miami Vice series!

(sorry thought it was relevant due to none of that binging could have been possible without working from home)

Quarantine made it possible for me to spend four hours this week playing guest speaker to students from high school to graduate level and all I had to do was stay pinned to my seat and remember to keep the camera and the microphone on during class

So that’s kind of cool I guess

That is cool!

What did you guest-speak about, haircare?

oh shit, did El Tomboto used to be Deric W. Haircare? I did not know this

I had to present to a community planning group from home on Tuesday, which was even worse than a normal community planning group presentation because even though it's still 100% old angry white people, old angry white people on Zoom are apparently even less inhibited and even more likely to screech THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!!! at you when you're trying to show them what bike lane designs look like

No, he just has hair

Important: keep penis in pants, keep job

I guest-spoke on being a veteran, a bureaucrat and an experienced interagency authorities-knower

Plus, hair. Having seen its luxuriousness in person I can confirm.

We do a weekly all hands (40 people) zoom meeting. The topic of baking came up and the boss just said "I'm making huge brown loaves now".

hahaha

A month ago, without feeling obligated, I started working from my uni office on the days I teach. With the exception of the program manager down the hall, I've got the office suite to myself; I can close my door and not hear a peep for hours. To shower, dress, drive to campus, park, and walk to my building keeps a most welcome sense of normality.

stay on topic, man

I've barely been at my work computer for 30 minutes and I already feel mentally and emotionally depleted.

have been experiencing massive Zoom inflation lately. everything little thing gets its own meeting. it is cuh-razy making

Small victory today - my team has decided to start every meeting 5 minutes 'late' and end every meeting 5 minutes 'early' so that we get at least 5 minutes break between Zooms

i'm probably too ill to go into the office today, but the laptop's here so i'm working (albeit not very hard)

I am housesitting for my friend and his adorable tiny lil dog is keeping me company. i can dig this.

also first time not having to train anybody in a month.

meanwhile I got asked if I could swap a PTO day in Dec. our fresh hell will last at least through March, one solid year of no lull period, and being two people understaffed. at least the good thing about training is, there's no way to 'get weeded' on it. you only can teach one class at a time.

who in their right mind creates a tool that ONLY WORKS IN INTERNET EXPLORER I mean WHO THE FUCK

In 2020!!

yeah, was just using one. have to open this web-based database in IE only to fill in certain fields that occasionally come up because you have to type in it to make it search for a code and in chrome the fields will not populate. it's so STUPID. also pdfs that have several files inside them will open in IE but not chrome.

yes! and I don't mean in Microsoft Edge because it doesn't work in that, you have to pull up INTERNET EXPLORER

xpost that sounds like a kind of Hell

I agreed to sub for a coworker on my day off this week, thinking, "No big deal, it can't be as hard as normal subbing," and found that going through sub plans over Teams with groups I've never met for a full day was so exhausting I couldn't do anything else for the day and ended up falling behind on my own plans and teaching a crappy class the next day. I guess I'm still not used to how much online meetings take out of me.