Tag: telecommuting

I’m Freezing

I am working in the office today. That’s going to be a regular Wednesday thing going forward. For now at least. It’s 47 degrees out, which on February 8th is an absolutely glorious heatwave. I wish I was outside in the back yard filling up the bird feeders and taking pictures in the woods.

Nope, I’m at the office instead. Not that I would have been away from my desk at home, but you know what I mean. It’s a symbolic thing, dig?

The main point of this post is not to bemoan working in the office, but rather to bemoan the fact that I AM FREEZING MY ASS OFF while working in the office. No one else has complained about the temperature, so it’s probably just a side effect of losing 200 pounds worth of insulation which has left me feeling as though I am on the verge of frostbite 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and somehow that just seems to be exacerbated by being away from home. If I were at home I’d have a fleece jacket on and maybe, though probably not today, a space heater.

Instead we’re in a conference room 40 miles away from home and I am feeling so cold I am almost shivering.

Also, I want to play my damn guitar. Why haven’t I played my guitar in like 2-3 months? What is wrong with me??

Shakes

It’s cold in our basement. My office space is in the basement. I am wearing a fleece jacket but I’m still a little cold. I have a space heater near my desk but I don’t like to use it too often. I sometimes turn it on around lunch time and let it go for part of the afternoon. It’s running right now.

Two hours ago our biggest, scariest customer had an issue blow up on them. It’s something that happens now and then and the case was assigned to me when it started. I got pulled into it and for some reason it freaked me out. I think (hope) I was able to stay on top of it and the issue is no longer occurring, but it got to me. I haven’t been bugged by a problem at work like that in a very long time. I can’t tell if my hands are shaking because it’s cold or because I am freaked.

Weird.

The take away here though is that it’s not happening anymore and I did stay on top of it and I kept everyone up to date on all of the latest as it progressed. I did okay with it. Why did it freak me out so much?

Weird.

Now I get to go into a 2.5 hour meeting and I didn’t really have any lunch. I snuck in a protein bar so I should be good to go, but I was hoping I’d be able to have a break during my lunch break. You know how it is.

Happy Tuesday, good people.

Why Working from Home is Better than Working from the Office

Here’s just one small reason why working from home is better than working from the office.

When you’re working from home and you take a gulp of water out of your water bottle and somehow, magically, end up spilling it all over your shirt, you can just change your shirt and no one ever notices.

Not so when you are working from the office.

Ugh, I am a friggin’ slob.

Monitor Stand

I bought a nice little monitor stand for my desk at work. I’ll be bringing it there tomorrow.

Just after it was delivered we found out we are probably going to be giving up assigned desks in the name of working remotely.

Figures.

Wake Up

When the pandemic started I declared that I was still going to get up at the same time each workday morning that I did before the company sent us home. That means I would have to be up and ready to go out the door by 7:30am.

I stuck to that for a while but eventually the snooze bar started getting pressed an extra time or two. Today I got out of bed at 7:00am. Last week there was a 7:15 and a nearly 7:30. Soooo. Nope, not sticking to that particular lock down promise to myself.

Today is the day that my company is trying to reopen the buildings. This is their second attempt. The first was last summer. We’re going hybrid so we are only supposed to be going into the office a small percentage of the time. Last week they gave us the option of delaying our come back to February 1st if we were worried about Omicron. Am I worried about Omicron? You bet your viral ass I am. So I won’t be going back today.

Still, with the hybrid return on its way I should really try to start getting out of bed earlier again. It would be the smart move. I should really do it. Will I do it? No, probably not.

I Don’t Want to Work Tomorrow

It’s getting nearer and nearer to bedtime on Sunday January 2nd. When today ends, the holiday season ends with it. You know what that means, right? That means we go back to work tomorrow. Ugh.

I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow. I should have taken this whole upcoming week off. I have so much vacation time banked that I am going to stop accruing more if I don’t start using it. I have one day off booked already mid-month, but I really should have taken January 3-7 off.

Change of subject…

Homework assignment for myself: Research Maastricht University, including the city it lives in, and everything about The Netherlands that relates to it that I can find.

Get to work, fat boy.

Coming Home Tomorrow

My step son is coming home tomorrow. Have I mentioned that? Do you/they know it’s christmas time at all?

Jen just came into my bedroom/office/work nook and said that to her, today feels like Friday. It was a great minds think alike moment because I had been thinking the same thing all day. It’s only Wednesday but it totally feels like Friday. That’s going to make the next two days suck. I checked my work schedule tomorrow and it’s blank. I don’t have any meetings booked at all. It’s almost creepy.

My christmas wrapping is almost done. Did I mention that? I’ve still got a couple of things on the way (package delivery, a symptom of ‘Covid Christmas Too’) but as of now, everything I have to wrap is wrapped… and there are still 10 days left until christmas. That is also almost creepy.

I was going to do car music this morning, but I didn’t. I did a couple of errands instead. I snaked the drain like a faux plumber. As it turned out, I was able to sneak in everything I had left to do during lunch. You may have noticed that there wasn’t a lunch break blog post (no you didn’t. No one did. No one should). Two songs need both rhythm and lead guitar parts. Four just need lead guitar. Two more are already ready to mix. Music, ya know?

Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden has a podcast. World class fencer, airline pilot, novelist, metal god. The dude has range. It’s called Psycho Schizo Espresso. It’s Bruce and a psychologist talking about stuff. Okay, I’ll give it a spin.

Four minutes until the work day ends. Fingers crossed nothing comes my way during those four minutes, because I am cooking dinner tonight and the oven is already pre-heated. Chicken and Quinoa. They should call Chicken and Quinoa, ‘The Robert’ because it’s pretty much the only dish I am capable of making.

Three minutes to go…

Okay, clicking Publish now.

A Weird Day So Far

My prediction of this being the slowest work day of the year hasn’t really come true, though there is still half a work day to get through. Lots of customer stuff has come in today. Nothing really involving my application directly, but we’re involved in a sort of tangential way. Lots of questions, lots of updates, lots of discussions. It’s enough to keep the perception of the day moving, and some of it has been a tad annoying, but these are good things compared to staring at the clock and watching it not move.

Two odd health-type things to note for future reference. First, my back hurts. Usually my back pain flares up when I’m moving around or being somewhat active (as active as my gargantuan fat-assed self gets at least) but today it’s pretty much constant. That’s annoying. The second thing is more sporadic, but equally annoying. I sort of feel like my left calf is constantly on the verge of a charlie horse. If I’m walking around and I put my left foot down in just the right way, bang – charlie horse. If I am standing in just the right way, bang – charlie horse. It only lasts a few seconds at most and then I correct whatever I did and it’s gone… but it’s always there. Stupid charlie horse.

As I mentioned in a post last night, I came up with a really simple musical idea to add to the November music thing, now that we’re down to less than a week and still miles away from finishing. Today I came up with another one. Now I just have to wait for my MacBook Pro to get home from that fact finding mission to Guyana. I’m sure everything there is fine and it will be home soon. I hope to spend some quality recording time this weekend.

Okay, folks. We’re half a work day away from a four day weekend. Let’s get to it and get through it and at around 5:30 tonight the sigh of relief you hear will be me.

Crazy Day

As crazy days go, today was definitely one. There’s a situation at work that has had a bunch of us running flat out all day every day for a full week. Some of us are going to be working on it through the weekend. I’m not going into specifics, but there are things that no one has done before that we suddenly have to do. Entire workflows are being built on the fly. In a word: craziness. I think we are going to pull it off though and when we do it’s going to be epic.

I already mentioned 50/90 in the last post. I’ve played guitar two days in a row. Yesterday I played like shite. Today was a smidge better but only a smidge. Tomorrow… I want to do some car singing in the morning but I’ve been so beat each bed time that I’ve actually been sleeping kind of late each morning. We will see about tomorrow.

There isn’t much else going down right now. I visited my folks at their new place on Tuesday. It was all right. Neither of them seem thrilled with the new normal, for different reasons, but they are managing. I really hope they are okay.

The COVID stats aren’t getting any better. We are more or less back to pre-vaccine lock down levels in our house. It’s been 18 months. I’m so sick of this shite. Am I using the word shite correctly? I don’t know. I just like the sound of it… shite.

Probably going to turn in soon. I’m going to get myself a bottle of water and then lay down. I want to be up early tomorrow, but who are we kidding.

G’night, folks.

Oh, the Crazy

For the last few months, going to work has often seemed like a break from all the rest of the stuff going on in the world. That is kind of the opposite of normal, right? Being away from work is supposed to be the more enjoyable part of your day.

Welp, we’re officially back to normal! Oh, the crazy stress right now. My head is spinning! WHEEEEEEEEE!

Jen just made an appointment with a plumber to come and look at the source of lake asshole. They are coming for the first look tomorrow. Oh happiness! I am so looking forward to a day when I can go into the cellar without getting my feet wet. That’s going to be a good day.

So much music work to do. So little time. When am I going to finish all this stuff off? When, oh when?