Working From Home

Man, I got up from my home office mid-morning and made the most delicious omelet with bacon, broccoli, and mushrooms, and rye toast. Work from home is the best.

We were called into the office three days a week a few months ago (for no reason other than the company leased a new office), and the latest annoyance is that a group of bucket drummers started busking outside our building two weeks ago. We're nine stories up but hear it perfectly. Even 30°F temperatures haven't dissuaded them.

Dear Andrew,

You have 1 assignment that are 968 days overdue.

You must complete the following assignment(s):

- Executive Series: Securely Working From Home with Quiz

Hey, the housing problem got solved

Elon Musk's business confidants are sleeping in new bedrooms at Twitter HQ that have been converted from unused offices. Musk is having one made for him. https://t.co/Y3rq9WWEtC

— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) December 6, 2022

After maybe a decade of mostly or fully remote work, I recently took a job that is in person M W F and remote Tuesday and Thursday. The (reverse) commute is 15 minutes.

The salary is ridiculously high - too good to pass up. Easily 3x what I thought I could ever earn with a degree in English with a minor in philosophy.

Here's the thing, though: it's a bullpen-style open office. I probably would not have accepted it if I'd known that my desk is just... out there in a big space with eight or ten other people. Everyone passing by can see my monitor. I'm not really trying to get away with anything (like porn or ilx or playing Minesweeper or whatever) but the environment still rankles.

It's not even that I want an office with a door (I have had those, and it isn't as great as you think it will be). Just that the open-office plan solves nothing for workers, and also solves nothing for political purposes.

xp - pretty sure that's a code violation tbh ... or if he actually legally converted them that would be SF Dept of Building and Planning working at record speed ...

i'm in a doctor's office w/ my dad (routine checkup), I disconnected from the work network, and yet Outlook is still sending me work emails.

can't figure out how that's happening

office365? could be that they don't lock online office crap to the work vpn/network

possibly. it only ever works sometimes is the weird thing.

so today, I have a meeting with someone and they're still not back from their appointment at that time. so I close the meeting (or so I thought) and start doing work, and figure I'll wait for her to ping me that she's back and restart it.

so I'm talking to myself, using my usual profane self-talk, and all of a sudden I'm startled by the voice of my trainee joining the session that I apparently DIDN'T actually close.

the words I think I said out loud were "fuckin' perv" related to something not even work related, right as she was joining. hoping she didn't hear them, though she definitely didn't react like she did.

musta been reading the bassnectar thread or something

This seems like a valid point:

Despite the heavily politicized and fractious debate over working from home that both sides participate in, for the most part the actual main benefit of working from home is weirdly under-discussed by both its supporters and critics.

So I’ll say it: the primary benefit for remote work for a lot people, if not most of them eventually, is that it makes balancing career with family much easier.

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/remote-work-is-the-best-thing-to?r=2jqch&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

one of my best friends works for my company (in fact, I met him there 18 years ago), and he loves his job, and he let me know that there's an opening for the same position he has right now. I'm qualified for it AND my salary is only in the median of the pay range (meaning I could get a raise upon hire and annual raises again), so I just posted.

I don't hate what I'm doing now, but it's hard to lead 8 hour trainings with the unpredictability of dad, whereas this role would let me work a more flexible schedule, where if I miss an hour here or there, I can log on later at night to catch up. not to mention I love math and this is a pension-related job, working with a partner site that I already know and have a good relationship with.

I am nervous because my head isn't what it was the last time I did a job like this, but the fact that I have my friend to lean on a bit helps. and I can always bail if the job sounds less like a good fit. financially i think it'd be ridiculous to not try for this.

good luck - sounds like a great opportunity!

Good luck! You're sure you don't hate what you're doing now?

lol I know my posts make it sound like that. the actual act of training people, I actually do still enjoy, it's mostly the other nonsense politics I don't. I'd be free of them cos I'd be in a completely different wing of the business for the first time since....well...ever.

this friend of mine isn't exactly a mega-positive person so when he says he loves it, that's a p good endorsement for me. not to mention the money.

basically, the customer care wing hired a complete dolt 8 years ago, and inexplicably, he's kept the position and run the unit into the ground. I'd be leaving that wing to a non-customer care side.

Is there a good thread where the conversation is about people being miserable at work, possibly post-Covid era, possibly related to being burnt out, possibly related to office use or under-use?

Here would work

Work situation: knackered at work and conscious that most of those around me are also. Burn out gets mentioned a lot, without any obvious solutions. The office was previously (pre-pandemic) a decent place to (do difficult) work. Lots of very legitimate reasons for working from home (often around childcare, sometimes about saving money on commutes and/or saving time, sometimes about working preferences). Lots of reasons legitimate reasons for working more in the office (support, functioning work). I suspect "the Covid Years" changed something and people are a little broken. Stuck on what might resolve things, even a bit.

The thing that helped me when I was burnt out from work was a month of leave

I'll take two

lol otm

I have been seriously burnt out for two years, but no amount of time off will solve it tbh.

There is no finish line; there is no "done." It is a matter of finding a series of more or less tolerable situations until I can embrace a reasonably dignified death

...and on that cheerful note, how b out them Mets?

had to withdraw my application, apparently there are multiple versions of this role open, and the one I posted for was not the one my friend's division is posting. it's in a division where they work crazy hours and are work-obsessed, so I'm going to wait for my friend's division to post theirs and re-post. he works 40 hour weeks and takes vacation literally all the time.

re: burnout, yeah - sometimes even time away doesn't work, though I wouldn't refuse it if someone told me to take a paid month off (Narrator: It wouldn't be paid).

I'm a teacher and hell yes to burnout. I think 'I'm too old for this shit' probably 10 times a day. If I knew of a way out, I'd chew yer arm off/be like a rat up a drainpipe/move like shit off a chrome shovel. (Is writing poor figurative language a job option?)

Chinaski: my friend, I was in a job interview today and I literally said "this is your baby, and I'm the midwife."

And then I paused to wonder if I had really said that out loud, and it turns out that I had.

Fortunately it went over well - I can easily imagine it going the other way.

Welp.

These are the fortunes of someone with an English/philosophy double major trying to survive in business. Every once in a while, I choose a metaphor that lands wrong, and I find myself jobhunting again.

I don't even like the Groundhog Day metaphor anymore, but everyday at my kitchen table is just like the last one, and the one before that

Sometimes a package gets delivered... sometimes I'll do some laundry. Some afternoons I'll have an iced vermouth, or walk around the neighborhood for twenty minutes.

I can't believe it's been three fucking years

I've grown thoroughly comfortable with it, but it helps I have my routines, and while part of me wishes I didn't have to go in on Monday and Tuesday afternoons briefly it does provide some scheduled variety. Honestly if you told me this would be what I'd need to do for the next decade or so, say, I'd be perfectly fine.

reapplied for the correct job. apparently it's not exactly in my friend's division but it's not in the 'insane' division either.

going to ask for a $30k raise, wish me luck

(not really but might as well aim high right lol)

xpost Ned - yeah, I actually don't want to go back to the rat race at all, just grumbling. We kept our San Francisco office (SOMA) but it's a total shambles with boxes and junk lying everywhere. No one will have their own desk or office anymore.. it'll just be all common space. But there are days where literally NO ONE goes into the office, not even the skeleton support staff (Operations, receptionist etc.). I don't know what the future is but it won't look anything like the past, every again.

For awhile our CEO was going on about 'I know that everyone is really psyched to get back in the office in person' but then she moved to Florida (thanks DeSantis) and she's dropped all that. Nobody talks like that anymore.. it's all vague talk about future events, summits, in-person scrums and team meetings, stuff like that

X-post to Ye Mad Puffin: please tell me you were going for a job as an actual mid-wife.

This:

everyday at my kitchen table is just like the last one, and the one before that

Sometimes a package gets delivered... sometimes I'll do some laundry. Some afternoons I'll have an iced vermouth, or walk around the neighborhood for twenty minutes.

And this:

No one will have their own desk or office anymore.. it'll just be all common space. But there are days where literally NO ONE goes into the office, not even the skeleton support staff (Operations, receptionist etc.)

... seem so familiar.

xp YMP, your metaphor cheered up this miserable prick. Perhaps we could form a metaphor-writing company. The profundity apparatus. Needs some work; might fly.

The Profundity Apparatus must surely be a novel by Nicholson Baker.

reapplied for the correct job. apparently it's not exactly in my friend's division but it's not in the 'insane' division either.

going to ask for a $30k raise, wish me luck

Get it. Pound the table till you get it. You deserve it.

Yup.

cosign

I was pleased as punch when my current position was moved to WFH in 2016, well before the pandemic happened. Now we're a fully WFH company with no local office to even go into.

Not sure I could ever do the commute to and from an office gig again. I'm broken in the best way.

It's not a skilled position, and I really only make enough to keep my mortgage paid, but more $$$ usually equals more stress and, with no family obligations, I just want to live the rest of my life with as little stress as possible.

xpost thanks all.

agree about y'all making the pun company too.

but what would you...name it

Metaphore on the Floor

JF I am also (recently) 100% WFH and I am loving it

Chinaski, I am totally down with launching an artisanal metaphor store.

Metaphors from my working world that I am pretty tired of:

- "Big rocks" to mean "problems we need to solve"

- "The long pole in the tent" to mean "the thing we need to figure out before anything else can get figured out"

- "Shark in the water" to mean "unsolved problem"

- There's another one that I sometimes hear that's like "the wolf that's closest to the wagon" that means "the most urgent problem we have right now."

This business-speak is interesting because it's all about a fantasy of wilderness survival (which makes exactly zero sense for suburban IT workers). It's a little bit better than war or sports metaphors, but not by much.

In my ideal world, businesspeople would have a wider range and could draw from less macho realms. Like, "this reminds me of the My Little Pony episode where Twilight Sparkle needed to use the power of friendship." "Folks, we need to have a solution meeting about this - let's go into the Barbie Dreamhouse conference room."

Just once I'd like to hear "I think this executive summary needs more smize." Or "can this proposal get more pizazz?"

THE MERCHANDISE IS PIZZLED

(sorry)

oh and: best of luck to our favorite protohuman, Neanderthal. hope things go well.

I used a Marie Kondo reference at work today.

lol, this budget item does not spark joy

"The long pole in the tent"

Jeez don't let me boss hear these, he loves a good 'everything looks like a nail' or whack-a-mole reference