Tag: office space

Cellar Dweller

My step son, Harry, is home! He was here when I got home from work last night and it was wonderful having him around. Having kids here makes me happy.

Him being home today means that I am working from the office desk in the cellar instead of the desk in his room. I am a cellar dweller again while he’s home. Today is Friday and I am working from home. Next week I will be in the office on Monday and then I am off for xmas eve, xmas day, and I took a vacation day for the day after xmas. So one day working in the cellar is all I need. I can handle it. Not that there’s any difficulty working in the cellar, I just like being upstairs more. That’s all.

I do have one thing planned for my lunch break down here in the cellar where no one can see me…

I setup a gift wrapping station. Let’s see how much of the remaining pile of presents I can get through while I eat my chicken patty and fries. Bring on the work day so I can get to it. Two working days left before Santa comes. Still much to do in that little amount of time. Let’s do this thing!

Frustrated

Dude, you need to calm down. I know you’re in a fragile state right now, what with the impending wake and funeral, but you have to relax. You have to stop stressing. You have to stop letting everything get under your skin.

So what if the person sitting behind you in the open concept office space doesn’t have their laptop muted and you can hear the alert every time they get a Google Meet chat message, and so what if that alert is happening 2-3 times a minute all day long.

So what if that other person sitting near you doesn’t have their phone muted and it keeps ringing at 100 decibels and it also has the same ring tone you use on your own phone and every time it rings you simultaneously jump through the ceiling and reach for your own phone to answer the call that isn’t coming to you.

So what if two hours ago you asked someone to move an escalated issue they are looking at to another application, where it clearly belongs, so that management doesn’t start hounding you with questions and requests for updates that you will not be able to give and they ignored you (why?) and now you are both getting hounded by management with questions and requests for updates that you cannot provide because the issue does not belong with you and yet still they haven’t moved the fucking issue to the other application.

So what if the only thing on this Earth that you want to do is leave this fucking office and go work from home but you cannot for at least another three hours.

So what?

Just calm down, you psycho. Calm the frick down.

Cellar Dweller

My step son is home for a few days so I cannot work from the desk in his room. I’ve been using that space for my telecommuting needs for months now. When did I move things there? I can’t remember. Was it last fall? Last August maybe? I could search the blog for it but I’m too lazy at the moment.

Not using the desk in his room means I am back at the desk in the cellar. I left it all setup for work use when I moved so the big question for this morning was would it all still work?

The answer? Yes. Yes it does. All of it. Excellent. I had to plug everything into the laptop, and plug the webcam into the USB hub, and turn the speakers on, and that was it. I am now 100% back up to speed. I’m all punched in and off to the employment races.

Technology, man. You gotta just dig it.

My New Desk

Just what I need, another desk.

The mouse pad, mechanical (clicky) keyboard, the coily cable of truth, the headset/mic, and the laptop stand are all my wife’s. The iPhone charger, the mouse, the USB C adapter, and the USB hub are mine (as well as the water bottle, the glasses case, and the box of tissues). The laptop and the monitor (and the chair and the desk itself) belong to the company.

It took almost five minutes for me to turn the workspace into a cable spaghetti horror show, but it’s going to be better than living out of a backpack (which is mostly out of frame to the right) every time I have to come into the office.

Desks

When I work at home I have a work desk in the cellar, and a work desk in my step son’s room. I also have a personal computer desk that doubles as my music nook in the cellar.

That’s a lot of desks.

Last year I had to give up my desk in the office. They told us that if we wanted to keep our permanently assigned desks we had to commit to working three days in the office. Nope. I was committed to one, but that was all I wanted to do. A couple of months from now that one day requirement is being bumped up to two days. Along with the two day rule is the option to have a desk assignment. I signed up for a desk with the caveat that if they go back to requiring three days I will un-sign up. My boss agreed.

While my new office desk won’t go into effect until next week sometime, I am actually sitting at “my” desk today. We are living in a screwy world, I tells ya.

The commute in this morning was a bit rough. Lots and lots of accidents and break downs, and one cop who was pulling people over in the middle of a traffic jam. Not sure what he was doing, other than purposefully making the gridlock worse? Who knows.

It is supposed to rain all day today, but the blue sky broke through a few times during the drive.

132/365
132/365

Okay, back to work with you, Mr. Robert. 

Good to Go

I still need to bring a headset mic upstairs to use for conference calls, and I need lightbulbs for the two little lamps on the shelf. Other than that I am good to go. The swapping between monitors didn’t work the way we’d planned, but I found a work around that is almost as good. I am going to work here tomorrow and see how it goes. If nothing else, I will be a ton warmer than I am when I work down cellar.

I have a few more changes I want to make to this setup, but for now it’s good enough.

ADDENDUM: Light bulbs, candles, a foot rest, and iTunes.

Weekend Project

I mentioned in a post a few days ago (so… like… 100 posts back… I post waaaaaaay to much) that I am going to set up a new office space in one of the kids’ rooms. I am going to put together a new desk and a work-from-home workstation to use with my work-issued laptop. I was also thinking of putting a personal machine in there just for schnitzengiggles. I figured it would be a windows box and I could put some games on it or something. Mostly it would just be used for youtube, but who knows.

Today I had a crazy idea.

If I am going to have a desktop machine that isn’t a Mac (I am 100% a Mac user outside of work)… why not a duel boot with a version of Linux? Debian or Ubuntu? Something like that?

That could be fun, right? Get a little swagger for my Computer Science degree going? Yeah… we’ll have to look into that more once everything is setup and running.

Home Office

Back story: When the pandemic first hit and we all started to work from home, Jen and I both had a desk in the same home office. Quickly we realized that we were in each other’s way and I moved my desk to our bedroom. We stayed like that until I had a minor covid scare in September of 2021. At that point I moved into my step son’s bedroom to quarantine. I slept and worked there for a few weeks and then moved back to the bedroom.

In the spring of 2022 we had our cellar redone and in April I moved my desk downstairs. I’m still there. Over the course of this working from home journey, both of my step kids have moved into apartments in Burlington, VT. I promised them that they would always have a place in our house if they needed it, and that includes a place to sleep when they come to visit. Due to that, their bedrooms will remain their bedrooms forever.

When my step daughter moved out she left most of her furniture here. When my step son moved out he took all of his furniture with him. Jen and I have been trying to figure out a way to re-furnish his room. So far we’ve only put a day bed in there. He used it when he was home for a visit last week. That worked out well. What else can we do though?

The next move is going to be adding a computer desk to his room. In fact, I think I am going to move my work from home office in there. My plan is to work from the desk in his room when he’s not here, and work at my current desk in the cellar when he is. That means I am literally going to have two home office spaces. I will keep my music nook setup in the cellar as well. I make all of my guitar noise there as well as doing all of my morning exercise. That’s too much ruckus for upstairs next to Jen’s workspace, so that clearly stays downstairs. Everything for my work space though is going to be duplicated upstairs.

We found a desk online that looks like it will be perfect. We have a couple of monitors we’re not using that will be perfect. Jen has a keyboard and a laptop stand I can use. We ordered a wireless mouse and a webcam and a USB hub today. It’s going to take a week or two to put all of this together so I will keep working from the cellar for now, and then right about the time it will all be setup my step son will be on Christmas break so he’ll be coming home for part of it. While he’s home he can use the desk too. I might even look to put a cheap desktop machine there for him to use and for me to use for any non-work stuff that might come up while I’m in there. That seems like a decent plan.

Now we just have to make it all happen.

Office Space Flashback

Remember the movie Office Space? Of course you do, it’s a freakin’ classic.

Remember the scene where they steal the printer and exact some awesome revenge upon it?

Remember the song that’s playing during that scene?

That’s what was playing in my head when I stomped on this little bugger.

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