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2018-03-09 14:56 from wizard of aahz @uncnsrd
I always laugh when I hear someone say "Oh my husband is working from
home today.. He can do some laundry and make dinner.." I point out
that's not working from home, that's doing housework while checking
email. It's a very different mindset.
My wife doesn't respect "working from home". One of the reason I rarely do.
My wife and I had a long conversation one day because she kept asking me to do things around the house when I was working from home. I had to explain, that when I am working from home, I am not home. I am at work. Yes I am physically in the house in my office, but I am not playing games, I am not sitting around doing nothing. I am working. So it is the equivalent of me not being there, and I would proceed to ignore her till I came home for lunch or was done for the day. She finally got it.
Though sometimes when I work from home she still forgets, and I just ignore her till she is either standing in my office, or I "come home" for lunch.
When someone in the household requests your attention while you are WFH, you ask two simple questions.
1. Is the house on fire?
2. Are you on fire?
If the answer to both questions is no, they must leave you alone; you're at work.
So far, it appears that the !WFH policy is not being consistently applied, so I intend to find my way out of it as soon as possible. My cat is a better companion than most of the people in this office.
Melvin seems to mostly get the whole working from home thing. I rarely have problems with him about it.
But then, I worked from home for quite a while at my last job, and had to make sure that got settled. Heh... I remember him talking with his mother or something, "No, when he's working from home, it's like he's not really home, but at work. He really is working from home." I suppose Melvin's folks had more difficulty grasping it than Melvin.
This said, he decided to park himself behind me and eat ... something ... and it started to drive me even less sane than one might argue about me already.
Smacking his lips, making these sounds that became magnified in my mind like the most disgusting consumption of god-knows-what ... I wound up pulling up some music to help divert my attention from it, lest I risk exploding for seemingly no reason.
I've been spending most of the time at my old desk, because it's next to a sunny window and the only other person in that part of the office is someone I enjoy being around. Today I spent the day in my broom closet, and didn't see another human being all day.
Bottom line, I love my job but there's absolutely zero benefit to being in that office. Everyone I actually work with is on the other end of a wire.
Heh... likewise. Even moreso these days.
I feel a bit like our office pushes the boundaries of this company. Before us, the company insisted that everyone had to come to an office to work. But they went easy on us, because they closed our office down, moved us to an office that isn't even remotely close to where any of us live, then did it again. They didn't want to lose everone, so they let us work from home.
And.. it works. At least, when the VPN isn't shut down because the cable modem lives in a closet that occasionally loses power.
(... and isn't on a UPS, for reasons known only to Isis or some other imaginary thing).
Someone added an LGPL library to a tool he created for us.
*sigh*
We're closed source.
This creates something of a mess for me, I think. I am probably going to need to find some place where the code of the library we're using can be downloaded to be recompiled (since the terms don't allow us to just provide a link), which just kinda gets under my skin.
I hate using LGPL stuff in closed source applications. It's just... messy.
So after a few weeks of the nonsense, I'm more-or-less back in my home office. It was explained to me that the new policy came from "some pinhead in [another city] who doesn't know how we work". My boss doesn't care, his boss doesn't care, and although they can't officially reverse it, they're both ok with a "don't ask, don't tell" approach. They know I'll willingly go to the office if there's an actual need.
I do have to stop turning on my camera during conference calls, however, until I can change the background behind me. The room I use for a home office, doubles as a guest bedroom. During last week's trip I met some people for the first time who recognized me from conference calls, and poked fun at my "boudoir office". So I'm going to have to find a room divider or something that looks like a cubicle wall.
Boudoir office indeed.
You could probably just purchase a freestanding cube wall.
At a cost of about $200 that's a bit spendy for my purposes.
If I could find software that does chroma key on a webcam (and this is for work so it would have to run on 'doze) then I suppose I could get a roll-down green screen that I could pull down from the ceiling.
Another thought I had a little while ago was to just buy a rolling whiteboard.
Those are pricey too, though ($160-180).