Working From Home

yeah I hit the library, bookstore, or nearest Starbucks when the power goes out.

My home Wifi is much more reliable than the office sad lol

that involves me putting clothes on!

the best wi-fi around here is the local McDonald's which I've sometimes used to work during a (gross) lunch there

there is a Panera, I used tow ork for hours from Panera intentionally some days....today however I have nothing to finish so i'm just gonna mobile hotspot it for a bit.

If it's brief, I usually just use my phone's hotspot

When there was a three day power outage a few years ago I lucked out. The office was closed, but my friend had recently moved and had several weeks left on her apartment she'd vacated so I drove over there and used the one remaining chair. My coworkers mercilessly joked about how I sounded echoey due to the fact it was an empty apartment.

power came back early. boss asking me what's on my plate today, I'm like "I'm about to take a two week vacation, and I finished all of the work I had left on Friday - are you really going to give me an assignment for half of the day?"

but it turned out to be something I was already doing anyway.

Hotspotting has saved me a bunch of times in crunch wifi situations, it can generally get me by unless I'm somewhere that I also have a weak signal.

If it's my power that goes out and not my internet, my battery backup keeps the internet chugging for a few hours

I really need to look into a Router that does that. my boss's boss told me about it the other day.

my mobile hotspot is much better than it used to be, but can't handle MS Teams meetings well. surprisingly good with almost any other function though.

Oh, it's not my router. I just have a UPS like this one and have my cable modem and wifi plugged into it. Just make sure you get one that lets you turn off the warning beeping in case the power goes out in the middle of the night.

oh cool!

now I'm having flashbacks to the prior era where you were supposed to plug all desktop machines into a UPS at home/work because suddenly killing the power to your computer would mean you lost files or they'd get corrupted

kind of nice that's less of a concern these days

Still have the shriek of my dorm neighbor seared into my brain when power cut on the floor and he lost his entire paper that he hadn't yet saved

The pre-autosave era was brutal.

Unlearning the tendency to slap ctrl+s all the time was healing

I’ve never had an outage that lasted long enough to be a serious problem, but if I did I’d probably have to head downtown to the local facility for the agency I work for and borrow one of the floater desks. (That’s a 30 minute drive one way in good traffic.)

mobile hotspot is all I have... I think it's on the verizon network, it works okay most of the time

$120/year, which my work pays for

Autosave is a tough one for me because my habit was always to open something created previously and start customizing.

I frequently forget to save it with a new name until it's a little too late - so I need to both (a) rename the new content to get it aligned to the current situation, and (b) go backwards to restore the old version for archival purposes

ooh yeah that's a rough one

You never have to "save as" if you just start with a duplicate. For most of my jobs I duplicate the file first, rename it, then get to work.

But I also command-S to save non-stop no matter what. That's a tough habit to break.

We had to show that we had both standard and backup internet - and they were both tested on the office VPN - before they let us all start WFH back in the EndTimes. I also have my data link and my phone data on seperate carriers so if theres somethhing more major (like our massive Optus outage last week), it wont take everything out.
So if my NBN fibre goes down, I can hotspot. If power is out, I can hotspot on the laptop (which has a suprisingly long battery life - these Lenovo X1s are great). Ive been able to last for 5 hours working on phone and laptop battery alone when we had a planned power outage a couple years ago.

Mobile outages are more problematic because every bloody thing in the world uses MFA passcodes now, and if your phone's out, your SMS is out, which has made things v difficult for me before. Companies need to offer 2-alternative MFA! So many are SMS only.

The other week I thought I lost my phone, which would have rendered me unable to log into either of my jobs (full-time and part-time, each with its own remote access app).

the funniest password thing was corporate IT having a password reset site that was crashing out and using microsoft’s version of captcha, which sucks ass

It wasn't Saviynt, was it?

I haven't a clue. It looks like a stock application that was deployed poorly

Dear Andrew ******,

You have 1 assignment that is 1397 days overdue.

You must complete the following assignment(s):

- Executive Series: Securely Working From Home with Quiz

in the office today, second time this year (but the first where it's not been all-day meeting). things i don't miss from the office, a list:

a) the terrible coffee
b) colleagues overdoing the deodorant
c) colleagues using their outside voices even though they are only 3ft apart (and only 5ft from me)

d) he's been here 10 minutes now and is still arranging things on his desk to be optimal. desk is attached to mine so when he shakes his, mine also shakes.

e) shared toilets
f) back-ache-inducing chair (probably from just having to sit up properly after 3 years on the sofa)

how’s Corporate Wireless working out for you today koogs

ha, i'm in LH and that has special network ('interwebs') for R&D reasons. it's slower than i remember it but...

g) too light in here and too much is moving

h) the snacking / lunch options

can be well worth it to walk to Japan Centre in Westfield, as user Fizzles kno

i) n people, n-1 desks. people who booked desks have been gazumped by the people who didn't know they had to but just sat down randomly. other people have booked desks and have been sat in meeting rooms all morning not using them.

j) zoom meetings where 80% of the people are within hearing distance anyway.

The plot thickens. Today I'm at work and the only other colleague from my team has just left... It's not a big team, but we're still twelve I think.
If the experience is almost the same, what's the point ? I hear the rent is huge and I can't say the same for my salary.

k) four people stood around the desk next to mine. two are actually working.

after a couple of years of trying to encourage employees to go to the office, it looks like my employer has given up and decided that it actually is a waste of money to pay for office space that is barely used. I only ever went once, but from what I heard, even the people who were in teams that regularly went always had to do the meeting through teams because there was always at least one person who was not there in person, so basically nobody got much of the benefits of actually being at the office. Coffee at that office was really good though.

the last time i had an office job, the coffee was great, but that was because i worked for a local branch of a food service company and the locals were snobs about coffee.

i just get coffee from any of the coffee places around my office 🤷‍♂️

(i left at 14:00, having been there since 06:45. another one of these next month, but i have holiday to burn...)

e) shared toilets

this one is big for me... there were some odd shit happening in our shared bathroom pre-pandemic, and not nearly enough stalls for how many people were in the office

Here at home, I have an old magazine and quality TP

for me the benefit of tinkling at home is a bidet and cheap washcloths (i can't just shake it and shove it back into my pants anymore, and toilet paper tends to get stuck to it).

of course a lot of places you also have _gendered bathrooms_. all of that trans bathroom shit, you don't get that here so much, and even if you did i got passing privilege, but god gendered bathrooms are fucking stupid. i'm sorry. they just are.

i don't want a lady to hear me taking a crap, are you crazy

that's why when my wife and i are both working at home i use the outhouse

obviously not a subscriber to the henny youngman school of gender studies

In my dream home (not yet a reality), the bathrooms and showers are outside and can't be reached without leaving the house

lol rush i did think that just as i hit "submit".. i guess that simplifies things

we had an earnings call and we had a fairly disastrous year, rumors of layoffs swirling.

pro: layoffs result in severance, get 2 weeks for each year of service (I have 19)
con: i am likely the highest salaried in my department (excluding the managers) - easy target
pro: i know how to do things nobody else does on this team
con: this company has proven nobody gives a shit about that
pro: i've survived every round of layoffs before
con: i've survived every round of layoffs before

office much nicer today with exactly 0 people in it. coffee still gak though.

it is just a coincidence that today is the last opportunity i will get to use the company bandwidth to download episodes of doctor who ahead of them turning off desktop downloads and me being on holiday for a week.

Neanderthal: that is almost exactly my position, right down to the years of service! Town Hall next Thu. I guess I would hear something before that.

Most teams now have "anchor days", where they're required to come on-site once a week. I'm not included in this requirement (in fact, no one has spoken to me about WFH/office policy in over a year). We've greatly reduced our physical office space (it started pre-covid) and now - for generic hot-desk set-ups - it's a single floor (100 capacity) in the western hub (industrial estate, Z4), and a single floor (65 capacity) in the central hub (old Victorian building, Z1). Canteen in former closed permanently spring 2020. If it's free food truck day, the place is packed. The Z1 office is generally pretty full, judging by the booking app. There are also activities in this business that can't be done (easily) remotely, and those teams have always been coming in (different wing of the Z4 office).

I choose to go the Z4 hub on quiet days, once every few weeks, and never to the Z1 hub. Better ambient lighting and temperature than I have at home, especially in winter. Monitor and chair lottery, however. Free coffee, tea, toast, etc. I feel like a bit of a ghost.

I think the return-to-office was much more keenly pursued in other locations.