Labor Day [DOT 6/9/21]

6/9/21 MegMegMcGee 26

It’s Labor Day, a holiday for (most) of us, which signals the official end of summer.

I’ve spent the long weekend cleaning up my basement and preparing for a bulk trash pick up on Wednesday.

Feels good to get some of this crap out of my basement and it’s been super productive.

Today I’m also going to make some homemade ice cream. I spent $50 on ingredients when I could have just bought some ice cream and saved myself the trouble, but where’s the fun in that?

‘Merica gonna ‘Merica, even on a holiday.

Former Marine wearing body armor fatally shoots four people, including baby in mother’s arms, Florida sheriff says
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/us/florida-shooting-infant/index.html

Police identify three people killed in Northwest D.C. shooting
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/dc-shootings-saturday-brightwood-park/2021/09/05/6480efb6-0e3c-11ec-882f-2dd15a067dc4_story.html

#sorrynotsorry

The stonk market is closed today.

Sprots!

The Brazilian health authorities entered the pitch after Argentina included three English-based players who contravened quarantine rules
https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2021/sep/05/brazil-v-argentina-world-cup-qualifier-live

Turtle content:

#RIP

Sarah Harding’s heart-on-the-sleeve energy made pop look like fun
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/sep/05/sarah-hardings-heart-on-the-sleeve-energy-made-pop-look-like-fun

Have a great day off!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

26 Comments

  1. Since it’s Labor Day, would anyone care to take a quiz about laboring during the pandemic? How many of you go to a workplace, how many days a week, and when did you return (if you ever left in the first place?)

    I was at that party last month (my second in 19 months; you can just imagine how well I’m dealing with this) and one of the attendees said that they closed down and went WFH in March, 2020, and then they all returned right after Memorial Day, 2020. I was incredulous. This is in Manhattan. Wasn’t that illegal? Weren’t there rules about airflow and transmission mitigation (like plexiglass screens) and mandatory masking and elevator density rules…

    The company had thought of everything. Very “warm bodies in seats” operation. The funny thing is she’s a designer so she sits in solitude working up ideas and working against deadlines, etc., and if anyone not only could but probably should work from home, pandemic or no, it is she.

    • other than a couple times having to stay home waiting for the results of a rona test ( with everything being a symptom of rona calling in sick means getting tested and then being stuck till you have the results regardless of if your feeling better after a day…its annoying)
      ive been at work 5 days a week for the duration…and it took the workplace about 5 months to get hand desinfectants or enforce some kinda social distancing rules….. they’ve been really on the ball about this whole thing….lol

    • I started my current job two weeks before everyone got sent home, which was another dumb-luck thing because this job got reclassified as “permanent WFH”, whereas my previous job couldn’t be done remotely as easily–and my previous boss was very much in that 1980’s management mode that if people aren’t in the office then they must be screwing around.

      Anyway, “permanent WFH” doesn’t mean “100% WFH”.  Starting…in October I think, we’ll all be coming in every other Wednesday.  Which is…fine, I guess.  Wednesdays are the days when we have the bulk of our meetings, and it’s also the day of the week when Mrs. Butcher is off (aside from Sundays), which means Butcher Dog won’t have to deal with her own commute to Mrs. Butcher’s workplace and can stay home all the time.

    • Have been working from home since March 12, 2020. The company was moving to a hybrid schedule that was supposed to start this week, but that has since been delayed. There’s no major need to go back, but what I’ve found is a) my job is fully doable anywhere and b) I don’t miss the commute in the least but c) I do miss the hard lines of “I’m at work” and “I’m at home.” 

      • I think, because I used to work from home when I was in audio, it’s been easier for me to draw those hard lines.  I log into my remote desktop at 8:30, I take lunch at noon, and I log off at 5:00.  There are only a very few instances when I go past 5:00 (if I’m right in the middle of something that I can’t stop, but that usually only goes another 10-15 minutes in those cases; or the once-a-year CMS update when we have to wait until 6:00 to do it), but 95% of the time my schedule is rock solid and helps me keep things separate, so that I’m just working from home and not living at work.  Some of my colleagues are…not quite as disciplined.

        • Less me interrupting myself than my school-age child (about which I cannot complain) and my wife (who is generally good about it but I’ve had to have the “look, I know I’m technically home but think of it like I’m at work” chat a handful of times)

    • My company went full wfh March 2020 and made feeble attempts to trickle back in (all voluntary) this summer, but it was all set back by Delta. I’m still at home and practically feral by now. 

    • I started working from home full-time last October. I’d already been doing it part-time since late in the summer, after a recruiter found me on LinkedIn and invited me to apply for a position. But by then, the agency where I’d been working had taken some measures against me that were possibly retaliatory, like no longer allowing me to assign myself appointments (supposedly owing to a scarcity of work early on in the pandemic) and then sometimes leaving me with one or days a week with no whatsoever (supposedly as a way to keep track of the appointments better from their end, even though the workload had been picking up by then). So, on the Friday before I was due to start full-time (and after two days of no other work), I finally let them know that I wouldn’t be interpreting for them anymore and would only be translating documents for them from now on. I didn’t explicitly say that I was quitting, although that was how HR must have interpreted because a couple of weeks later I was sent an exit interview questionnaire that wasn’t formatted to allow for answers longer than the lines allotted. A couple of mine ended up overlapping each other – not that they probably paid much attention to it anyway.
       
      Every so often, I do get called to interpret in person for court or whatever, but I’ve started saying no more and more because the hearing usually conflicts with my working hours (which can be a pain in the ass to change or use PTO for) or the courthouse is in one of the rural counties where the whole mask thing hasn’t really ever caught on.
       
      Actually, no. I’ll go to those rural counties because I get three hours paid minimum instead of two, but I sure as hell don’t stick around after I’m done.

    • Our place shut down around mid-march when the emergency order for all non-essential stuff to shut down came through.  We were given something like 3 weeks of special COVID leave, and just used that for the first week.  After that, they found some old data entry stuff to distribute so we could all do some version of “work-from-home”  I think right around the beginning of June, we went back to work in person.  I think it was mostly just them filling out the appropriate paperwork with job descriptions, risk assessments, risk management, safety procedures, etc., and waiting for approval from various leaders and what not.
       
      But, yeah, something like 90% of what we do is hands-on and isn’t really applicable to remote work.  The work environment is pretty open, I’m outside most of the day, and even our inside areas have lots of open doors and windows, and big open areas that are well-ventilated.  And there is like maybe a half dozen of us, spread through out a pretty big area, and no contact with the public.  we wear masks, everyone is fully vaccinated, and prior to the vaccination, we were required to get weekly testing, with additional testing and isolation to cover potential contact with infected individuals, travel, etc.
       
      I think I’m the only person who doesn’t drive, and at the start, I was taking public transit in the morning, and bicycling home.  I was early enough, and in a counter-commute direction, so the train cars weren’t crowded at all.  Starting in February this year, I managed to start a full bicycle commute, and only took public transit when it was raining or I got a flat tire.  I live alone, and am not social at all, so I think that might compensate for any increased risk from taking public transit.

    • My company does telecom work and were super major big dickbags about letting us work from home despite all our office jobs not needing to be in person at all. 

      And then people on the interwebs started mocking them for it. Which was awesome. So around late May early June my company was finally like OKAY FINE WE’LL LET YOU PEASANTS WORK FROM HOME ON A ROTATION. My team at the time rolled up to a Sales org, so it was alternating week in office, week at home. It really felt like that scene in Shrek where the king says “some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take.” Meanwhile, a few floors below me the teams that rolled up to IT groups were working 1 week in office, 7 weeks at home. 

      I change to an IT group team earlier this year, and then we were 2 weeks in, 6 weeks home. Now we’re up to 50/50 in office vs work from home. They were expecting us to go back 100% in August, but hey delta variant happened so who the fuck knows now.

      *because per the FCC telecom is an essential service, the company can theoretically have us work whatever they want and really it was more the threat of mass quitting that made them accommodate any sort of work from home rotations

    • THANK YOU for that prompt/quiz, and  for the “making me think” reality check, @MatthewCrawley!😉💖
       
      Now I KNOW exactly why I’m so damn tired all the time!🤣🤣🤣
       
      Here, it’s been full-steam ahead at the grocery store, since March of 2020, minus a week or so last November when my transmission went out…. 
      And aside from that first March-June  distance learning at the school (but as staffers we were still going in to complete tasks & prep take-home stuff), and last Thanksgiving-through-Christmas break, when *again* we staff were going in a few days a week to 0rep the send-home stuff, there’s been *no* real break for Covid…
      So most weeks, it’s been a minimum of 48, up to 60+ hours of work… plus a full credit-load this past spring & summer (no WONDER i had to withdraw from so many classes & felt like it was all a massive struggle!😖🤪🙃)
       
      Last week-ish, when I took vacation time was the first time all pandemic, when I had more than 3 days OFF-off at a stretch.

  2. Oh, PS, I’ll go first. I’ve been freelancing/working for myself for a decade. Mostly WFH but every so often a client, sometimes the one I work for most, would want me on-premises because they had over-promised something and things had to go quickly and somewhat chaotically from A -> B -> C -> D, and I’m C and I don’t know what B wants, and B says it wasn’t their idea talk to A, so I always saw the point.

    The Better Half has a Global Economy job and a condition of the job was he stay right where he is in the New York Eastern/Time Zone. He’s been doing this for about four years. This pandemic-related cozy togetherness that so many are newly experiencing and is ruining so many relationships and marriages is old hat to us. The only thing that changed for him is he used to travel a lot, and sometimes I got to tag along, but there hasn’t been any of that in 19 months.

  3. Went work-from-home ten years ago; entire company does so, huge savings in overhead. The only pandemic change was moving from conference line meetings to Zoom meetings. I much preferred the visual anonymity of the conference line (not showing one’s face when the rest of the meeting does so is a distraction).

    • That’s another thing I love about my new job.  My boss, and his boss, don’t really give a shit about having cameras on.  My boss puts his on, and one of the other people in our group has hers on, but that’s typically it.  The only times when we turn our cameras on otherwise are when a new hire has their first day, or when we’re meeting with another group that typically has their cameras on.  So it really is like an old school conference call, with occasional screen sharing.

      • I sometimes sit in on BH’s meetings and act as stenographer. When the camera is on I sit off to the side but if I do it just right I can kind of glance around the edge of the screen out of camera view. I was signaled to discreetly take a look.

        BH works in financial, so there’s a lot of screen time. It’s like they’re all playing poker with each other and no one completely trusts anyone else, at least in the beginning. So they want the face-to-face. But there’s a huge tech component to all of this. The money doesn’t just sit around. It wants to move in different and exciting ways.

        In some parts of the world people are dressed to the nines and chipper but all business. Some enjoy chit chat and there’s general joviality.

        There was one call though where the tech guy had set it up so that three people were sharing a screen (three different locations). The way it was set up the tech guy himself was front and center, he couldn’t have been more bored in his black hoodie, and in the split screen you got a shot of the CEO’s left arm on the left side of the split screen and the account rep’s right arm on the right side of the screen. The tech guy said not a word, so when you saw a hand/arm move that was the indicator of who was speaking. 

        It was fabulous. Almost Dada-ist. 

    • Gov. Abbott doesn’t give a fuck.  Plus I’m pretty sure he doesn’t open his own mail so it’s very likely he’ll never have to deal with it.  When I lived in NM, the state was suing TX because TX got caught illegally pumping water out of NM.  A local DJ asked listeners to send drinking straws to the station so they could box them all up and ship them off to the governor at the time to tell him to build his own pipeline.  It was a funny stunt, but word at the time was that the straws got intercepted at the mail office.

Leave a Reply