Good Things Post [NOT 6/6/21]

6/6/21 brightersideoflife 15

Hi, friends!

Tomorrow starts our 50% capacity office schedule and I am bitter and cranky about having to do 2 weeks in/2 weeks home. In probably August we’re going back to 100% office capacity and no work from home and then I’m gonna be real fucking bitter and cranky. I’ll get over it, because I don’t want to change jobs and it’s a decision coming from the CEO etc and none of my bosses want to be back in the office that much, either.

Anyways.

I don’t want to think about how I need to wear real work clothes all week now. At least I never stopped wearing a bra when I have been wfh, so that’s one hurdle I won’t have to get over. I’ve been doing the food prep today so I have my lunches and snacks figured out.

So, let’s talk about good things so I don’t dwell on my stupid work schedule.

Tell me something you’re excited about, proud of, etc.

I’m a very boring person, as I’ve mentioned before. I’m super fucking excited because next week I make the final payment on my windows!!! I financed them in 2019 because I couldn’t afford it all in one lump sum and they had a good rate and I’ve been super aggressive with paying it down and it’s gonna be done!!! DONE!!!!!!!

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15 Comments

  1. I’m guessing your CEO is one of those dinosaurs who seems to think that Work from Home means Shirk from Home.  Lots of companies are getting a rude awakening when trying to force their employees back to the office–their employees are just saying “fuck that” and quitting. 

    Ah, windows!  We need to replace ours very badly, but probably won’t get to it for at least another year because of the cesspool and the sinking sunroom.  I wasn’t planning on doing the windows before some of the other projects in the queue, but I think we need to bump the priority on them because it’ll save us money in the long run, and we’re spending money like crazy just to deal with all of the stupid emergency bullshit.

    Anyway…something good…my workplace has finally joined the 21st Century and they aren’t mandating 100% office time.  It remains to be seen how the specifics will shake out for me, but if I had my druthers (which, when I was a kid, I thought that word meant the same as dungarees) I’d be 100% WFH and also be able to get hooked up with one of the sweet rigs they’re offering people:  laptop and a docking station with monitor.  That way I could finally stop using my personal laptop for work stuff.

    • Old white dudes whose ideas of “business” come from the 1980s.

      Also, the fancy fancy people live on Long Island and take their yachts across the sound to the harbor and get a ride from there to the main office. I guess if I owned a yacht I’d have a harder time working from home too?

      • I often think that offices in the 1950s would adjust a lot better to work from home than offices run under modern MBA rules.
         
        Back in the day big offices had very well defined structures and chains of command. When a memo was written it had a specific set of objectives and a defined distribution, and decisions followed a predictable pattern and schedule. There is a reason why offices were on a regular 9-5 schedule.
         
        The modern MBAs weren’t exactly wrong in pointing out problems — many offices were very rigid and hierarchical places, and there was a lot of unnecessary paper pushing. But the modern office is way too far the other way, and there is so much wheel spinning and avoiding decisions and bosses who feel that they are supposed to just fumble their way through processes and handle things by haphazardly inserting themselves as the whim hits.
         
        There are still too many bosses who subscribe to the Tom Peters 1980s theory of “Management by Wandering Around” which turned out to be a complete abdication of what managers should be doing — building the structures and institutions that let their workers do their work in the best ways possible.

    • This was the sentiment I was expecting when I introduced the WFH/Return to Work topic in yesterday morning’s DOT. A friend of mine works for a very large company where, granted, the vast majority do their jobs without need for supervision or assistance. Think talented tech people who can design and test products that develop over months, but that’s not remotely what they really do. The CEO sent out a company-wide survey fo the 3,000+ employees. A whopping 3% responded they’d like to go back to the office 5 days a week. Another 15% or so would like to go in occasionally, and of those who picked that option, the most popular on-site choice was “1 day per week.” As for the rest: “Yeah, um that’s OK, I guess I’ll see you on Zoom at some point?” The CEO took that seriously and announced a month or two ago that they would open 1 floor of their sprawling Midtown office tower (they occupy 18 floors) and people could go there, subject to restrictions. They can’t require proof of vaccination so the workspaces will be spread out and since they’ll be shared they’ll be “deep cleaned” frequently, at least for now.
       
      In pandemic-ridden 2020 the company had its best year since the go-go mid-90s, adjusting for a few factors.
       

  2. Well, as I mentioned the other night, I opted to switch companies late last year and work mostly from home (barring little in-person engagements like the one I had on Friday, in which I had to drive three hours round trip for something that took more time than a rest stop but less time than a lunch break). And you know what? As I ran the numbers and projected what my income should be by the end of the year, I realized that that was the right fucking decision because I’m seriously on track to make more than I ever have before. So far, I’ve mostly been using the cash to pay off debts, doing things like making two car payments in one and including an extra amount for the principal on my mortgage bill every month. But at this rate, I can probably afford to splash on other things as well, like a patio door that doesn’t fucking stick when I try to open it or a new kitchen sink with more space on the side with the garbage disposal. And if I can get some fucking PTO this year, maybe I can even travel once or twice.
     
    This is probably why I’m so late to the reading and TV party where it seemed like everyone was last year: I think I was in survival mode back then, and now I’m giving myself permission to consume entertainment again now that I can deal with all the other crap.

    • I think I get this.  I recently went from being about a month away from homelessness, to having an okay job where for the first time in my life, I’m not constantly stressed about financial stuff.
      It’s just a weird feeling, like when I’m shopping around for something, to realize that I can make a mistake, buy the wrong item, and then get rid of it and buy a better one, and it won’t fucking financially break me.
      I also went and paid off some debts, and put my rent on autopayment, and that’s something I’ve never really been able to consider before.
      But, there are a lot of weird, potentially self-sabotaging habits/behaviors that I’ve picked up over the years that I’m going to have to try and recognize and unlearn, and some of them are just really fucking weird, and almost impossible to explain to someone else who hasn’t been in severe financial stress before…

  3. its almost 3 am
    i need to be up at 5
    im fresh out of fucking good things
    i guess the silver lining is i can do this
    ima feel like fucking shit….but ill make it
    everythings copacetic here
    FUCK

    • I’m at something of a low ebb at the moment too.  Fortunately, I’m old enough to have been through these before, and I know I’ll eventually come out on the other side.
      Take care of yourself, @farscythe.  You’re essential around here.

      • thank you 🙂
        i just bravely pulled a sickie
        is staying at home worth getting me brain poked?
        apparently so!
        oh my lawd nurse….its so big!
        give me every inch of it!
        oh yeah….i can do this all day

  4. I am in the middle of scanning old family photos, some as old as from 70 years ago.
     
    Actually, I am not in the middle, I have scanned about a million and have about nine million to go. But as long and tedious as this is, it’s still pretty cool to see photos from the days before digital. I’d definitely recommend at a minimum tracking down old family albums and flipping through them, if not actually scanning all of them.

    • Have you come across a phenemonenon where there are far more photos of the first-born and then the numbers decrease as the novelty of child-having wears off? That’s how my family is, or was when you needed to get out a camera and couldn’t just snap stuff on your phone. My oldest brother’s pre-adult life is so well-documented I could almost create a daily diary of him; going by the photographic evidence, it was as if I, the second youngest, was put up for adoption and my birth parents didn’t keep in touch. 

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