It looks like we’re heading back to work

"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck) 04/30/2020 at 23:26 • Filed to: None

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I never really stopped working, but they are talking about a phased reopening of the office. In support of their plan, they sent out this today:

To my surprise, m y wife voted for the first option. I’m wondering if they will let me work from home long-term or at least split my time between home and the office. It’s not like they’ve seen a whole lot of me over the last two years. 

PyramidHat > TheRealBicycleBuck 04/30/2020 at 23:38

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Without doxxing  yourself, what is it that you do? I’d think most j9bs would be choice if you could work from home. No bothers from random so bys, no commute...

Chariotoflove > PyramidHat 04/30/2020 at 23:40

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I bet you end up using choice 4. Having the flexibility allows you to keep yourself fresh and sane. Plus, it’s never a bad thing to show your face in person once in a while. It solidifies business relationships.

ETA:  meant to post this to the top of the tree, but it works here too.

Just Jeepin' > TheRealBicycleBuck 04/30/2020 at 23:41

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I wouldn’t go back unless  there was a strict mask policy. I still see too many people either not using one, or using it incorrectly.

PyramidHat > Chariotoflove 04/30/2020 at 23:42

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That’s what we’re doing now...come in for specific reasons, but meetings and email can be done at home

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > TheRealBicycleBuck 04/30/2020 at 23:43

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At leas they give you an option. My boss is chomping at the bit to reopen and force everyone back in. b efore the stay at home order, he was flipping a shit, because people just doing CAD stuff were asking to work from home. There was no reason to have them in other than my boss being a dick. Funny it was no risk for us to be there, but for 2 weeks, two of his family members on payroll (whole other story) were nowhere to be seen. 

Chariotoflove > PyramidHat 04/30/2020 at 23:45

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Now that I’ve been doing this at home for three weeks, I’m getting the groove of it. Still, running my lab is going to require some face time at some point, especially if I hire a new person. What I’m hoping for, now that I have an alternate work location arrangement on file,  is to settle into a hybrid work flow where my arrival time is flexible, so I can can come and go as I need.  It’s not like anyone was keeping tabs on me before, but it’s good to be above board about it.

ranwhenparked > gmporschenut also a fan of hondas 04/30/2020 at 23:46

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I worked at a job like that right after college, if you weren’t in the office all day, the boss assumed you weren’t working. The thing is, it was a community organizing-type role with a nonprofit - raising money, media outreach, meeting with other nonprofits, recruiting and training volunteers, etc, 90+% of the job HAD to be done outside the office. But, he wanted to see bodies at desks, so I’d go in and mess around on the Internet for 8 hours and try to do little pieces of my actual job in the evenings and over the weekend, when he wasn’t around. 

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 04/30/2020 at 23:51

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Watching my wife work from home, it seems like many of her Zoom meetings are likely more efficient that ones held in person. She also manages to get to work on time more often. 

PyramidHat > Chariotoflove 04/30/2020 at 23:54

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Yeah, lab work is a gotta be there sort of thing

DipodomysDeserti > Just Jeepin' 04/30/2020 at 23:56

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A basic mask policy can’t even be followed by Covid units in low hit cities. My sister has to reuse her mask in between shifts. No way a strict mask policy will never happen. If it did, it would create an incredible amount of landfill waste.

Telling people to wear whatever mask they have is not a strict mask policy and is probably 50% performative.

Just Jeepin' > DipodomysDeserti 05/01/2020 at 00:01

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Masks are a good reminder that things aren’t normal. They don’t have to be 100% effective, and you should be able to go through a rotation without filling up landfills.

I’m not talking about N95. Just get people to reduce the viral load they’re spreading.

(Update:  and I’m definitely not talking about health care professionals. Our inability to protect them is criminal.)

jminer > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/01/2020 at 00:10

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We’re officially WFH through atleast June 1, likely to extend with the most likely increase in cases with everyone wanting to stop quarantine a few weeks too early.

I'll personally be WFH for a good long while until the risk is long passed as I can do my job easily remotely.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/01/2020 at 00:11

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never closed here...just sacked all the temps...still churning out coffee machines (yay backlog)

i think we’re only getting about 20% of what we should be getting in new orders tho... for us the real hurt is still aproaching

also...most of the shit we’re churning out is getting stuck in the wareheap atmo as borders are shut.....

facw > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/01/2020 at 00:51

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I was full time remote before any of this happened anyways, but my company has said they planned to keep our HQ closed at least until June, with a phased return whenever we do open up again.

So far it seems the company hasn’t fallen apart, despite furloughs, so maybe they will allow more people to work remote at least part time in the future. My bosses in IT have never cared that much (except when one guy who was local was never in the office), but there were a lot of people at corporate who hated the idea of remote work and definitely did not trust employees to actually work if there wasn’t a manager standing around (I think this is fallout from being a retail company and having a lot of management who came up through the ranks and are used to dealing with cheap, high- turnover retail employees, rather than white- collar professionals)

DipodomysDeserti > Just Jeepin' 05/01/2020 at 01:03

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Except viruses are an every day  part of the human existence, and you should always be covering your mouth and washing your hands. Sure we have vaccines for some, but the vast majority still make people sick and kill some of them, and only one has been eradicated. Thankully, the Earth has a tendency to mutate the real deadly ones, and our bodies have evolved to fight off most of them ourselves.

We continue to take the wrong lessons from this. Instead of educating the masses, we continue to scare them. This is apolitical in nature.

I’ll be watching my nieces tomorrow while my sister takes a final for her DNP program. Life goes on, viruses and all, as it always has. We continue to keep la mia nonna quarantined, because we know she  has a good twenty years left in her, but aren’t panicking and continue to educate ourselves (outside of commercial media).

Just Jeepin' > DipodomysDeserti 05/01/2020 at 01:16

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Yet with the country in major lockdown mode we’ re still dying at record rates.

I’m not saying everyone should panic, but the other extreme isn’t helpful either.

Chariotoflove > PyramidHat 05/01/2020 at 01:17

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Thing is, most of my work isn’t in the lab anymore. But  you still have to be there to keep your operation cohesive. The boss showing up physically matters. I’ve actually been pretty remiss about that lately.

DipodomysDeserti > Just Jeepin' 05/01/2020 at 01:44

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For one, we aren’t on a major lockdown. We’ve mostly just shut down businesses with workers who don’t have enough power to raise a real fuss. My friends all out of work are servers, barbers and tattoo artists.

What record? H1N1 is still the title holder, and it defended it’s title less than a decade ago, and it mostly killed people under the age of 65.

Made it’s first round with the Spanish Flu then a second round with Swine Flu in 2009. The main difference being deaths were being under reported back then. H1N1 probably killed over 200k people in 2009 and a whole hell of a lot more in 1918.

This isn’t a biological phenomenon, it’s a societal one.

Against my better judgement, I’ll use a news source for reference.

https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/americas-especially-hard-hit-2009-swine-flu-study-finds-2D11657478

New York was also reporting a much worse flu season this year, so who knows how many deaths were really caused from flu viruses on accounted of our testing deficiencies. My sister’s hospital has been overcapacity since October. Now they’re cutting hours and sending people packing. Our flu season is shorter than New York’s, which extends until May.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/12/26/flu-nyc-department-of-health-flu-symptoms-flu-shot/amp/

I’m no Trump fan by any means, but there has been some fuckery going on.

Just Jeepin' > DipodomysDeserti 05/01/2020 at 01:59

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estimated 151,700 to 575,400 deaths total [3] [4] in about 20 months 

Last H1N1 outbreak courtesy Wikipedia . Let’s double that to give it the benefit of the doubt, so 1 million deaths over 20 months, or 50,000 deaths/month.

So far with COVID-19 we’re at 234,000 deaths, probably underestimated but to be conservative let’s say 200,000 since December, or 5 months.

So, if you round down for the current virus and round up for H1N1 the death rates are about the same. Very iffy, but let’s go with that.

You say we’re not in lockdown, but we’re at somewhere around 15% unemployment due to the economy coming to a crashing halt, which tells me there’s a whole lot of nothing going on right now. Government-enforced or not, we’re mostly staying home.

So H1N1, which did not result in 15% unemployment in the U.S. thanks to people staying home, probably wasn’t as deadly as the current one, even with significant social distancing.

DipodomysDeserti > Just Jeepin' 05/01/2020 at 02:20

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We introduced a vaccine for H1N1 during the 2009 flu season and already had antivirals which could fight it. We also had 90 years of experience fighting it...

We’ve been dealing with stuff like this for a long time, it’s apart of our world.

Like I said, education is key. Unfortunatly we’ll now be be cutting education budgets and firing teachers because we’re panicking (because we’re a nation of dumbasses). A nation of rational, educated people don’t come close to electing someone like Trump.

Both sides of the aisle are in need of a real education.

I have to get some rest, as I’ll be teaching a middle schoolers how to set up a rain harvesting system tomorrow. I wish you nothing but happiness and good health.

RiceRocketeer Extraordinaire > ranwhenparked 05/01/2020 at 03:05

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Did that, it sucked because you waste those hours at the office , and your personal hours get eaten up doing work.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/01/2020 at 03:22

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The government’s loosening the lockdown here, but our company’s already decided o ur policy for the foreseeable future is going to be “come in to the office if you have something that needs doing from there, but otherwise do what you like”.  WFH is working pretty well overall and since we’re asking everyone to take a salary haircut the least we can do is help them cut their commuting costs

Sovande > gmporschenut also a fan of hondas 05/01/2020 at 06:37

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I am looking for a new job now and one of the top questions I have for potential employers concerns working from home. I just don't see the value in me driving to an office to complete a task that I can complete at home. Everything I do I computer based so it's not as though I need to be in an office to do it. 

TheRealBicycleBuck > Just Jeepin' 05/01/2020 at 07:00

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The bulbs in our kitchen light fixture died a few days ago. I ordered new ones from the box store and tried curbside pickup. I had to wait half an hour for them to bring out two bulbs, so I sat and watched the menagerie wander in and out of the store. Perhaps half were wearing masks. Half of those were wearing it incorrectly.

TheRealBicycleBuck > PyramidHat 05/01/2020 at 07:09

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I wear a lot of hats (none shaped like pyramids). Much of my work is around managing projects related to disaster recovery. I do everything from geospatial analysis (what buildings flooded where and when) to FEMA recovery (coordinating building inspections, processing FEMA paperwork) to financial forecasting (given the roster of projects, how much cash will be needed to cover invoicing by month for the next five years) to environmental analysis, and field data collection, and disaster modeling. If I’m not on the computer, I’m on the phone or communicating by e-mail. It’s only when we have to physically capture field data or visit a project site that I have to leave my desk.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Chariotoflove 05/01/2020 at 07:10

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I’m hoping it’s choice one for a while and choice four from there on out.

TheRealBicycleBuck > facw 05/01/2020 at 07:13

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I was in the same boat. I checked in with my direct supervisor every other week, although the project manager in Houston was always giving me a hard time if I wasn’t in the office when he was. Even so, he knew he could trust me to get work done even if I had to work from the hotel.

TheRealBicycleBuck > farscythe - makin da cawfee! 05/01/2020 at 07:18

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Your previous posts had me reminiscing about working in the plant. While working there, we went through production shutdowns and periods when we worked through the weekends to meet demand. I saw the warehouse practically empty and also with material double-stacked in the aisle from one end of the warehouse to the other. It was an interesting lesson in market fluctuations for a much younger me.

TheRealBicycleBuck > jminer 05/01/2020 at 07:19

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I’m betting that there will be a significant increase in cases in the coming weeks. That’s why I’m hoping for option 1. 

shop-teacher > facw 05/01/2020 at 07:24

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I think a lot of companies were like that. Ridership on our area commuter train system is down 97%. I’m curious to see how it bounces back. I think a lot of companies will see that their business has  not fallen apart during quarantine, and take this as an opportunity to shrink their office footprint quite a bit, this saving huge monthly expenses on rent/etc.

Just Jeepin' > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/01/2020 at 07:39

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What we have here is a failure to communicate. 

TheRealBicycleBuck > Just Jeepin' 05/01/2020 at 07:51

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As I posted previously , even the media are really bad about wearing PPE correctly. In all the media blitz, I still haven’t seen anyone give instructions on how to properly wear a mask. I know what to do because I was trained on what to do. Worn incorrectly , a respirator will get you killed because it can’t do its job. This is especially true when working in a chemical plant.

We really need the news stations to start broadcasting videos on how to wear a mask. A mask not worn properly is worse than not wearing a mask at all.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > ranwhenparked 05/01/2020 at 13:18

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My first job was the attitude “get your stuff done and we don’t care what hours etc” 2 years later I was transferred to another department. Everyone had laptops to take home and travel. During shitty winter weather he would march around the cubes multiple times every hour., taking attendence. Hes a director earning 250k.   pettty asshole.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Sovande 05/01/2020 at 13:35

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The owner of the company is about to learn what happens when you’re shitty to people. the amount of open contempt, people aren’t simply grumbling,

ranwhenparked > gmporschenut also a fan of hondas 05/01/2020 at 13:49

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This guy was just in over his head and had no idea how to manage people or an organization. The board waived educational, experience, and certification requirements to save money and hire a CEO on the cheap, and promoted someone about 3 levels beyond his qualifications.