Working From Home

i am in dire need of a better ergo setup - my chair & desk arent cutting it anymore

Mine was so bad, I was pretty seriously considering returning to the office voluntarily. I finally got creative and moved enough stuff around to make room for a small desk. It has been a game changer. My focus has been so much better since doing it. Just knocking down tasks that have been lingering for months. It still isn't perfect, but so much better than before. After a few weeks, it no longer hurts to stand in one place for ten minutes.

I was asked to go in 3x this week due to some kind of executive summit taking place at the office. Day #1 was kind of fun. Pretty novel as a lot of people I hadn't seen in years were in to schmooze. So, I caught up with a few people and a couple of the interactions didn't make me feel depressed afterward. I just finished #2 today, and it was way suckier: Felt headachy a few hours into the day after overdoing it on coffee. Chair won't lock in place, so the back keeps leaning back until I realize this and readjust. The sun started glaring in this window right next to my desk after a few hours making the headache worse. Day 3 is Friday which I imagine will be super dead, then hopefully I won't have to come back for another month or two.

I work with you people. I don't want to also eat lunch with you.

With Microsoft Outlook, I get how some people see a blank lunch zone on multiple calendars and think "AHA! That's when I'll have the meeting.", but agreed, that's MY time, not OUR time. Any lunchtime meetings, it's acceptable to flex that time and leave early. Even when lunch is provided, a working meeting is work, not a lunch break. We get a fair amount of "learn at lunch" opportunities, which are thankfully optional.

rookie mistake not to have a recurring lunchtime weekday "meeting" in your diary that only you are invited to

meeting with the big cheese

getting into some chewy subjects

y'know, the one down side of WFH is when i was office-bound, today would be a day off thanks to hurricane. instead, I'm working.

I've been told I can take breaks and very aware that I can lie and fake a power outage. opting not to right now as I wouldn't look forward to the make-up work I'd have to do upon return, but may peace out early.

the real reason execs don't like working from home is because it's a lot easier to control and mistreat people when you can see them.

I mean, just one story, but was talking to a parent at one of my son's baseball games who said she was absolutely horrified to hear how nasty and abusive her husband was to his employees when he started working from home.

Xpost
The first blizzard during the pandemic, the president of the company told everyone to take a snow day even though we were all working from home. I don’t agree with all that’s been done since then but that was a cool gesture.

well i didn't get that in-office job. just as well since it's hard to give up 3 wfh days, especially through the winter.

Going in to the office 2 days per week seems about right for me. It's amazing to think about all the hours I spent commuting 5 days per week over the years.

I have now worked through two hurricanes this year. downside to WFH I guess.

I could have lied and said I didn't have power, but I care too much about the class I'm teaching to let someone else take it over.

I'm sure this is the story in many, many cities:

https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2022/05/11/minneapolis-st-paul-metro-companies-ditch-office-space

So crazy. I worked in downtown Minneapolis since 1998, a quarter century of either driving and paying to park or having to take a bus to a train to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours and then reverse the process. But now other the rare concert or sporting event there is no draw to bring me downtown anymore. Return to work is still occasional and strictly voluntary for my company, but I have absolutely no desire. The day they require it, even hybrid, is the day I resign. I'm just done.

Really glad to be one of the 50,000 or so new downtown residents who now live in a ghost town

It's very much the case in SF. Hilariously when Musk took over Twitter and made his 'come to work' noises some local dude with grocery/market businesses in the building was quoted as all saying how great it would be for him, and now that this month has passed I suspect said dude probably figures he should have kept his trap shut.

There's still sort of something in the offing where I'd go back but coming up to three years I'm all "Eh." I do still go in to the main library on Monday and Tuesday afternoons briefly for some desk coverage and at least my regular location is just walking distance, twenty minutes or so, if it ever fully fires up again, though I suspect it may be more hybrid. All I gotta say is that on a rainy morning like this one I'm glad to be going absolutely nowhere.

This is going to absolutely kill city government finances, isn't it? Isn't business property where cities collect all their tax revenue?

Well, hence many cities (like mine) raising property taxes by double digits year after year, of late

So now you’re paying extra to live in a place with worse public services and half the number of restaurants?

Each mortgage crisis has its own subtle shadings.

The other piece of the puzzle is that a lot of cities had tax abatements for developers building residential properties in downtown areas. Those are usually 5 or 10 year, so the giant boom in the 2010s might not be taxed yet

there's actually some new office space developments being planned for downtown Oakland, and I'm like "Why?" Build cheap little apartments, that's all that's needed right now

I love (LOVE) skyscrapers, but we're long past the point of needing any new ones it seems

Taller apartment buildings in general would certainly help with the housing crunch. Office skyscrapers, not so much.

Apparently converting office space to residential is a big pain.. they're just not laid out the same

It is tough, mostly because your typical office skyscraper huddles all the plumbing in a central core or two near the vertical circulation, to leave the rest of the plate open to maximize office suites with window access. The plumbing extension necessary to provide individual bathrooms is a significant hurdle, unless you are gonna somehow sell communal bathroom experiences, but I don't think it's an impossible hurdle to overcome.

I mean, issues of scale aside, is it so very different from converting former warehouses into condos?

there's a role for government here methinks

It is tough, mostly because your typical office skyscraper huddles all the plumbing in a central core or two near the vertical circulation, to leave the rest of the plate open to maximize office suites with window access. The plumbing extension necessary to provide individual bathrooms is a significant hurdle, unless you are gonna somehow sell communal bathroom experiences, but I don't think it's an impossible hurdle to overcome.

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, December 1, 2022 10:52 AM (three days ago)

Yeah, that was basically the one sticking point I came to when I thought about this over the past year ... which is why I thought that they would be good to convert to transitional housing/homeless shelters rather than conventional residential, where people would need/require in-unit bathrooms and kitchens. There would have to be additional shower/bathing facilities installed alongside the existing bathrooms/plumbing, and maybe there would need to be a widening of pipes for additional water ... I think, depending on the layout of units, there might not need to be an increase in sprinkler density for the conversion? If the buildings are already sprinklered?

Agencies have been buying hotels around here, which is a quicker and likely cheaper route to creating non-congregate shelter while supplies last

same here, silbs, but here there are more unhoused people than there are hotel rooms ...

I looked for other jobs within my company a few months back, and nothing I was qualified for (or wanted to do) jumped out, so I paused it for a while. going to start it up again.

things are no longer stressful like they were here, but I have lost all of my passion for training when it became fully virtual all the time (previously, sometimes it'd be in office, sometimes virtual). we failed to properly adapt to the all virtual world, so technology issues constantly derail training, and then employees just disappear in the middle of class, thinking we won't notice.

looking for something analytical in nature, where I can essentially 'set my own hours' (meaning they won't give a shit if I have to step away to take dad to bathroom or if I do my job in front of the TV at 8 pm). one of my best friends has a job he loves that he's been trying to recruit me for but there haven't been any openings, so I think that's my play once there are.

until then, I'm massively phoning it in.

(the bestie works for same company, but he jumped out of customer service years ago and he said it was transformative)

phoning it in

literally

I mean if you count MS Teams calls as phone

Working from home has no end in sight for anyone at my workplace pretty much

But talking about Teams and phoning it in, a PM almost had a breakdown and she phoned me before I was in at work and raised her voice at me when I told her I hadn't even started on tickets on Friday for a project that was due ASAP on Monday. I kept telling her I would get to them when I was in and she was like "Why do we even do anything?" And I was like, "Well, I got pulled into another meeting and project where a couple things needed to be fixed." She couldn't grasp the idea that you need patience working for this client and that priorities fluctuate and change rapidly. She ended up putting in her notice for a leave of absence yesterday and now the PMs are scrambling, because one other one called in sick and today two called in sick. I love how the client we do work for has millions of customers that see our work and we operate this way

Fun times!

i'm back in the office 3 days per week now and loving it, minus the part where i can't take a nap whenever i want

i'm back in the office 3 days per week now and loving it

You freak

I would die in my sleep if I had to teach three or four days from home.

my job is so much easier when i can be in a room w/ or easily talk to my coworkers w/o having to call/text/slack someone

also i'm more productive at work due to lack of distractions, i keep more normal hours and i'm naturally more active... but those are just personal problems

xp same, which is why I generally go in 3 days a week, thankfully this is entirely optional

best part of working from home for me? My own bathroom, with no one else doing weird shit in there

Best part of working from home is teaching from the shitter

taking a 15 min break from work to sit on the toilet doesn't hit the same at home tbh

i gained weight in my 30s when I was office-bound because there are snack machines everywhere and i get munchies when I work on any project or teach and I would hit those machines five times a day and get the least healthy shit out of em. on 12 hour days, sometimes i spent more than I did for a meal on snacks and stress ate (I don't work shifts that long anymore)

at home I'm limited to what I have and usually we don't have much here.

otoh, I have to worry about shitheaded kids walking by my unit screaming crap like "HOLY FUCK SON GET OUT OF MY FACE" when I'm unmuted and leading a class.

or the few times my mother has literally screamed across the house when dad fell. I'm always honest when that happens because what's the point of lying. everybody's sympathetic and in turn I don't give people grief for the occasional accidental mic-slip, esp after my accidental George Carlin routine in 2019.

also i'm more productive at work due to lack of distractions

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, December 6, 2022 11:21 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's interesting. see, at my workplace, everyone is much more distracted onsite than working from home. when i was in-office, people constantly visited us and chatted with us and we would go on hour-long coffee breaks, not including lunch breaks

I like the rituals of going to work -- driving, parking, walking to my office. I'm privileged, I know (I live five minutes from campus).

I find productivity to be zero problem at home. I'm only doing this one new joint project slowly because there's no deadline and if I do in a short burst each day it goes more quickly.

I live twenty minutes walk from where I normally work so I'm kinda relaxed.