Tag: work

Hanging in There

My second day back in the office is about half over. Lunch will be wrapping up shortly. Once again there are not many people around today, but there are more than I feel comfortable with. We are all safely distanced from each other and everyone here is vaccinated. We’re about as safe from the dreaded One Nine as we can be. Still… I’d feel more comfortable working from home. Part of me wants to book a conference room and hide there for the rest of the day. No, I will put my trust in the two vaccine shots and the one booster shot. Hang in there, kiddos!

Speaking of not feeling comfortable, this chair sucks. I have been seriously spoiled. Not only is the chair at my desk at home 1000 times better than the chair at my desk at work, but the chairs at the building we worked out of for the five years or so prior to the pandemic were also 1000 times better. My back is killing me in ways that my back usually doesn’t kill me. Normally my back issues are in my lower back, but today it’s up between my shoulder blades. I blame this sub-par chair and I wanna go home.

I also forgot to open the blinds on the bedroom window that gives Bertha the plant clipping all of her sunlight. I am such a terrible plant dad. Bertha may never forgive me. I’m sorry Bertha.

Here in One Piece

Another day in the office for me. Traffic was okay. It took about an hour to get here. I shouldn’t complain. things tied up pretty bad on route 3, and then again for a little while on route 128. Neither jam was as bad as pre-Covid, but still… It’s just frustrating to go through it after working from home for two years and not worrying about traffic at all.

I took a rapid Covid test before I left. I had thoughts of doing that every time I come into the office and then last week when I came in for the first time I completely forgot to do it. We’re supposed to do a little self assessment before we leave the house. Any symptoms? Nope, come on in. My thought was to add a home test to that process. Not sure if I will keep doing that, but I’m negative today so life is good.

Jen told me that she saw a news report of a shooting in my general neighborhood. That’s a happy story to wake up to. I don’t know the details. I’ll have to see if I can learn anything. Just a little icing on the Thursday cake, right?

Happy work day, everyone.

Office Tomorrow

I’m going into the office tomorrow. My second time since they reopened the building. I need to make a lunch, I need to wear a collared shirt. I need to not forget my freakin wireless headphones again.

I’m nervous about Covid, of course, but I guess I need to just put some faith in the two vaccine shots and the booster shot and just suck it up and deal with it.

Patches agrees.

Friday at Last

I couldn’t figure out why this week seemed to be so long. This week has been endless, why?

Then I realized, it was the first time in something like four weeks that I didn’t have at least a half day off. A 40 hour week? What the hell is that?

I need to put a big push on music this weekend. I need to write a shit load of lyrics, I need to do a shit load of car music, I need to play a shit load of guitar, and I need to start finishing off songs. This is the way. I have spoken.

It’s going to be a busy day at work. The weekend is Eight hours and 39 minutes away. Let’s get to it!

Cheap Soda

My company has soda machines all over the place. The cans of soda are nearly free for staff. We have to pay the $0.05 state deposit and that’s it. Picture it; me, a lifelong dedicated fanatical soda drinker working in a building where cans of soda cost a nickel. Basically heaven.

Except that I can’t drink soda anymore. Shit.

I am in a new building now. Did I mention that? Probably. We were in Waltham, which was closer to home for me than any other company building, but they sold the Waltham building during the pandemic. We were moved to Westwood, which is further away than Waltham but was the next closest building to home. When we had our brief return to office experiment over the summer we had to setup our new desks and get used to the new place. Now it’s just where we go. No big whoop, right?

There was a point in time during our Waltham stay where I was trying to eliminate caffeine in the afternoon. I started bringing a water bottle and filling it up from the water cooler in the kitchenette. It tasted really bad. If I added a ton of ice it would get cold enough that the bad taste was sort of masked, but even if I put my go-to grape flavoring stuff in it, the taste was still crappy.

Now I am under doctor’s orders to no longer drink soda (Robert wipes away a single tear) so I’m back to the water bottle. There’s a little cooler in the kitchenette here too. I just filled up… nervous that this water would be bad too…

It isn’t. It sure ain’t the Poland Springs wonder that is our cooler at home, but it’s okay. I can live with it.

That sound you heard all over the surface of the Earth was my emphatic sigh of relief.

Half Way There

My lunch break is coming to an end. I am halfway through the work day. Halfway through my first day back in the office.

I had planned to bring my AirPods Max with me. I forgot to pack them. I’ve been using air buds like some kind of caveman. I also forgot that they centralized the trash barrels. Instead of having a barrel at every desk they have one in the middle of the room. My lunch trash is just sitting on my desk. I’ll chuck it out the next time I get up, but when will that be?

It’s sunny and 50 degrees out. Practically Spring, right? I made sure to open the blinds in the bedroom so the plant clipping can get good light today. I’m hoping there will be a new leaf opening up when I get home. Fingers crossed.

There are more people here now than there were the last time I posted. Still no one close enough to make me nervous, but still. I’m Covid safe, but not as Covid safe as I’d be if I were working from home. Sigh in frustration.

I got a phone call from the weight loss clinic. They confirmed my appointment for Monday. Yet another teeny tiny hurdle crossed. Monday should be a huge hurdle crossed. I’m nervous, but I am okay with it for now. That’ll probably change once I see a doctor holding a knife above my guts. Crap.

Okay. Back to work.

Back to the Office Again

I’m in the office today. I’m not terribly happy about it but I’ll live. The commute was better than most days pre-Covid, but given that I’ve only made this drive a few times over the last two years it was infuriating. I drove about 200 yards before I hit traffic. It was just a school bus, but it was still traffic. The highways were slow and annoying. Again, not quite pre-pandemic, but definitely bad enough to imply that the pandemic is over… even though it’s not.

There is no one sitting at any desk near me. I think the closest person is probably 30 yards away. Much more than six feet. I am plenty Covid/Omicron safe at my desk, but I will still need to go to the bathroom and the kitchen and such. I feel good about my elevator skills. I expertly avoided having anyone in the car with me as I went up to the third floor. My people avoidance skills are still very sharp in that respect.

My desk is still here. It’s nice and clean and all. My keyboard is shit compared to the one I use at home. My monitor is double shit compared to the one I use at home too. Oh well. It’s just going to average out to one day each week. I can survive that. Sure, I would prefer not to be here, after nearly two years of only working at home.

Funny, remember back in March of 2020 when all of my posts were how working at home was abnormal and how I had to get used to everything being different? Deja-Vu, right?

Wow, is it Early

I mentioned over the weekend that we were planning on trying to do a little electrical work in the dining room but once we opened things up it was more involved than we expected so we punted. There are a handful of other electrical things we want to do around the house as well so we put out a call for quotes from electricians. One is coming today and they said they’d be here between 7:00 and 9:00… 7:00am? Really? Most days I don’t wake up until after 7:00am. Okay, whatever. I got up at 5:30 and was dressed and ready to go by 6:30. The electrician said he’d text when he was on his way. It’s 6:56… no text yet. Oh well.

The sad thing is, I am going to do it again tomorrow. My company is back into in-the-office-once-a-week mode again like we were during the summer. I’ve decided that tomorrow is the day this week. I really don’t want to. I don’t want to run the Covid risk, I don’t want to spend a chunk of the day wearing a mask, I don’t want to find out how my back is going to feel when I walk from the parking lot to my desk, I don’t want to use the shitty little monitor on my desk when I have a massively gigantic monitor on my home desk. Mostly, and this cannot be overstated, I don’t want the friggin’ commute.

We have to do it though, it’s the law now, so tomorrow is going to be my first day back. I will have to get up a ton earlier than the work-from-home normal, though not quite as early as today. I can do it. It’s okay. I just don’t really want to.

It’ll be okay. I can hack it.

Happy Bonus Day

My company gives an annual bonus when they can and today is the day for this year. Happy Happy Bonus Day, co-workers!

That’s one way to make Monday a little more palatable. I had one of those internal calendar confusion moments last night. Jen and I were in the living room watching a Bravo show about ladies screaming a lot. I was doing a little Twitter doom scroll and I saw something about the cold open from Saturday Night Live. Wait, I thought. It’s only like 8:00pm… why is someone sharing the open from SNL if it doesn’t happen for another few hours? Pause while my brain struggles with math. Shit, because today is Sunday, not Saturday. Shit. I have to work tomorrow.

12 hours later, here we are.

I have a lot of meetings today but they should be okay. Hopefully it will be a quiet yet productive day. May your days be productive and quiet as well. It’s Monday, folks. Let’s all duck and cover and get through it together.