Author Topic: Working from home advice  (Read 10266 times)

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #25 on: 17 March, 2020, 07:51:54 pm »
One of our offices has a thing called an owl. It's not an actual owl (contain your disappointment), it's a magic conference webcam thing that points at whoever is speaking in a conference room.

I want to know what it does if the entire meeting erupts spontaneously into Bohemian Rhapsody.

vorsprung

  • Opposites Attract
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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #26 on: 17 March, 2020, 07:57:53 pm »
I have Slack running all the time.  I just say hi good morning to a few people when I start up in the morning.

During the rest of the day I use Slack for a mix of chat and tech discussions

At 3pm our team (about 10 people) have a short video conference

Most work is tracked with Jira

Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #27 on: 17 March, 2020, 09:27:27 pm »
I love all the answers of having a seperate area etc. Pingu & I have both been despatched home today. We have a teeny 1 bed flat, no kitchen table anymore, well, no table at all.

I've commandeered the cheapo scabby tiny desk in the unheated loft (Pingu seems happy slouching on the sofa, my back won't cope with that all day).
There's room for 1 screen and the laptop (but not open as a 2nd screen) but now no desk space to write or lean on so I suppose I'm going to have to buy a folding table somewhere. I think I'm going to freeze up there when it gets cold again this week.
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #28 on: 17 March, 2020, 09:31:33 pm »
I love all the answers have having a seperate area etc. Pingu & I have both been despatched home today. We have a teeny 1 bed flat, no kitchen table anymore, well, no table at all.

Many of the grads are in houseshares, some even sharing a bedroom with a partner so they don't even have exclusive use of the bedroom (let alone the shared kitchen or lounge).

Of course, the policy of "find a nice dedicated area" often comes from the senior management who happen to have a choice of study, spare bedroom, summer garden house or kitchen-the-size-of-a-two-bed-flat.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #29 on: 17 March, 2020, 09:40:46 pm »
Soz, I'm rubbing it in by living in The Asbestos Palace (I won't mention my office sofa bed). I guess you just need to demarcate space and if you are close, make sure there are no weapons in easy reach. Of course, here we are both work at home a couple of days a week, so we're kitted out with homeworking survival in mind. I get that it's not an option that everyone has, but it's the sort of 'if you can' advice.

I have an oil-filled radiator for keeping my feet warm without heating the rest of the house. My wife's office is upstairs and stays modestly warm. She has the company of the cuddly mustelid collection.

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #30 on: 17 March, 2020, 09:48:25 pm »
I love all the answers of having a seperate area etc. Pingu & I have both been despatched home today. We have a teeny 1 bed flat, no kitchen table anymore, well, no table at all.

I've commandeered the cheapo scabby tiny desk in the unheated loft (Pingu seems happy slouching on the sofa, my back won't cope with that all day).
There's room for 1 screen and the laptop (but not open as a 2nd screen) but now no desk space to write or lean on so I suppose I'm going to have to buy a folding table somewhere. I think I'm going to freeze up there when it gets cold again this week.

I've done two days on a wooden chair at the kitchen table. I usually use a standing desk, so my first job tomorrow is to find an appropriate pile of books to try on the kitchen work surface. Or the sofa.

My colleagues get to monitor the changes in the bottles lined up behind me.  ;)


Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #31 on: 17 March, 2020, 09:50:52 pm »
If it weren't for the good of the masses I'd be saying FRO to WFH. Some of my colleagues have done just that.

My wife's office is upstairs and stays modestly warm. She has the company of the cuddly mustelid collection.

I took a photie of my new office mate today, Batty Bat (I know, nil points for imagination) hanging from the apex.
2020-03-17_09-46-56 by The Pingus, on Flickr

Tomorrow I may find the box of plush pinnipeds & penguins and get them out for shits & giggles.

Do we need to resurrect this thread? It's not been posted on since 2008...
https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6504.0
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.

"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Freidrich Neitzsche

bhoot

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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #33 on: 17 March, 2020, 11:28:53 pm »
How to do video conference calls
https://youtu.be/lTTTuBSYgHA

barakta

  • Bastard lovechild of Yomiko Readman and Johnny 5
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #34 on: 18 March, 2020, 01:24:17 am »
I work from home 2/3s of the time anyway and happen to have a pretty good ergo setup. As Kim is often home we have to compromise on what spaces we use. My ergo setup is in the computer room, but so is the sunlight which affects my ability to read (thanks migraine!) so I sometimes use the dining room which is the 'cave' but has poorer ergo.

I am now self-isolating and am going to try a video call with boss tomorrow, which is a bit stressful as I'm deaf and I've been refusing voice conference and video calls for years cos "too audio". I reckon I can manage a short video call with boss IF the system is quick enough for viable lipreading and it's got to be better than her stressed dyslexic emails of actual incomprehensibility...

I am sending small kind emails to colleagues to check in cos boss isn't good at the social skills side of things. I'm also taking no shit from management and when they act like twats in public, I have taken to telling them it (it's very cathartic, I'll probably never meet the twat in person now).

ElyDave

  • Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society member 263583
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #35 on: 18 March, 2020, 06:12:09 am »
All great points, and bats, some that just don't really spring to mind if you've been doing it for ten plus years already.

Keeping contact is really important, I have half a dozen or so people I talk to several times a week if not daily. I do like the idea of a Friday afternoon glass of wine by vc. Seems I'm very lacking in cuddly toys though, my teenage daughter has commandeered all of mines and I'm left with funky maps of pipelines, and maturing homebrew. I do get the wine stocks though as my office is unheated.
“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” –Charles Dickens

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #36 on: 18 March, 2020, 10:18:24 am »
We're using MS Teams and having daily catch-ups using video chat.

Boyfriend is now also working from home as of today - though he has a study/office in the flat anyway, so we can work without annoying each other too much.

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #37 on: 18 March, 2020, 10:57:16 am »
I think divorce rates may go up after this.

(We're fortunate enough to have offices at diametrically opposite sides of The Asbestos Palace. We met working together in the same office, but the suggestion of working together now is met by a mutual no fucking way!)

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #38 on: 18 March, 2020, 11:22:06 am »
One of our offices has a thing called an owl. It's not an actual owl (contain your disappointment), it's a magic conference webcam thing that points at whoever is speaking in a conference room.

I want to know what it does if the entire meeting erupts spontaneously into Bohemian Rhapsody.
Do you really expect us to believe you don't know?
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #39 on: 18 March, 2020, 11:27:24 am »
I think divorce rates may go up after this.

(We're fortunate enough to have offices at diametrically opposite sides of The Asbestos Palace. We met working together in the same office, but the suggestion of working together now is met by a mutual no fucking way!)
And if divorce rates go up, with everyone wfh and self-isolating or social distancing, there might be a dearth of new coupling. Presumably it will be boomtime for dating apps, but at some time (I presume) the idea of those is that you actually meet in person. Or maybe we'll have fully fledged online romances with everything from swipe right to marriage done online. There won't be any babies though.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #40 on: 18 March, 2020, 11:45:52 am »
One of our offices has a thing called an owl. It's not an actual owl (contain your disappointment), it's a magic conference webcam thing that points at whoever is speaking in a conference room.

I want to know what it does if the entire meeting erupts spontaneously into Bohemian Rhapsody.
Do you really expect us to believe you don't know?

Sadly, there only seems to be one in our Virginia office and I've not been there since they got it. Plus they're probably keen not to let me near it. I think there should be more video conference singing though. That said, I've long thought of living my life as a musical.

The best teleconference ever featured the Man Who Wouldn't Stop Snoring. That was brilliant, the host got more and more frantic, too panicked to figure out how to mute an individual as the SNORES kept coming, unstoppable like big waves against the shore in a storm. Bigger and bigger. By the end, the twenty or so people on the call were sobbing with laughter and the poor organizer was a wreck on the shore of those snores. The guy still hadn't woken up and in a moment of perfect timing as she called an end to the proceedings he unleashed the most titanic snore, the sort of self-aware monster of a snore that realises what it is half way through, stops for a moment of glottal self-reflection, then finishes with the volume set firmly to eleven.

As for singing, there was a chap once delivering some boring powerpoint about Q2 revenue or somesuch at our sales conference. The entire audience was lost their in phones, laptops, or whatever. His soul wilting in the inattention, he simply burst out with pitch-perfect and sonorous rendition of I Will Survive. The entire thing, took a bow and exited stage left. We never did find out how we did in Q2.

Wowbagger

  • Former Sylph
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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #41 on: 18 March, 2020, 12:11:06 pm »
Our choir director is planning to do an on-line live-streamed choir practice this evening. If and when I can find it, I will join in.
Quote from: Dez
It doesn’t matter where you start. Just start.

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #42 on: 18 March, 2020, 12:17:00 pm »
Today's episode of Working From Home has been rendered a bit more challenging by having no power (important maintenance work on the local substation scheduled before the coronapocalyse), though they've just texted me to say they're making good progress and the power might be back by 2pm. I'm actually impressed (for once) by the level of communication. If it were BT, well I don't need to tell you.

Down to 52% battery though.

Mr Larrington

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Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #43 on: 18 March, 2020, 12:48:51 pm »
If it weren't for the good of the masses I'd be saying FRO to WFH. Some of my colleagues have done just that.

My wife's office is upstairs and stays modestly warm. She has the company of the cuddly mustelid collection.

I took a photie of my new office mate today, Batty Bat (I know, nil points for imagination) hanging from the apex.
2020-03-17_09-46-56 by The Pingus, on Flickr

Tomorrow I may find the box of plush pinnipeds & penguins and get them out for shits & giggles.

Do we need to resurrect this thread? It's not been posted on since 2008...
https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6504.0

A bat :o  They were the bastards who started it all!
External Transparent Wall Inspection Operative & Mayor of Mortagne-au-Perche
Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime

ian

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #44 on: 18 March, 2020, 12:52:42 pm »
I don't have a bat. But I want one now.

I do have a sea otter I liberated from Monterey called Rick.

ElyDave

  • Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society member 263583
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #45 on: 18 March, 2020, 01:06:03 pm »
Our choir director is planning to do an on-line live-streamed choir practice this evening. If and when I can find it, I will join in.

I'm wondering how we can do livestreamed yoga
“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” –Charles Dickens

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #46 on: 18 March, 2020, 01:07:28 pm »
I don't have a bat. But I want one now.

I do have a sea otter I liberated from Monterey called Rick.

That's pretty cheesy.

Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #47 on: 18 March, 2020, 01:09:15 pm »
I gotta heffalump


Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #48 on: 18 March, 2020, 01:17:56 pm »
My daughter usually places her fluffy dog from the RNLI shop (https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2615/2196/products/monte-the-dog-plush-toy-rs470078-4539332329561_x700.jpg?v=1583894114) on my desk before she goes to school.

"Patch" has been used for Rubber Ducking more than once. Any more sitting on my desk and Patch may also end up being a fully qualified Agile Practitioner too (saves me from doing a lot of the training).
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
    • Twitter
Re: Working from home advice
« Reply #49 on: 19 March, 2020, 04:19:40 pm »
Team meeting. Clearly these animals are not following the social distancing advice.

2020-03-19_03-52-29 by The Pingus, on Flickr
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.