Category Archives: the ongoing saga of my job

the ongoing saga of my job Leave a comment

Work News and a New Toy

Today was the IT Holiday Party at my work. The main venue was a not-quite-IMAX-sized movie theater, in which we got to enjoy some catered appetizers and light fare and desserts while we waited for the bigwigs to thank us for another year of our valuable work in the trenches of Information Technology.

While we were waiting, the Disney+ series The Santa Clauses played on the big, BIG screen. That brand of comedy really isn’t my jam; in fact, I spent a lot of mental energy trying in vain to ignore it. Never have I been so glad to see a bunch of suits take the stage.

It’s been a weird year, with lots of changes in upper management. Some people retired, some people were coerced into retirement, and some people were straight-up let go with zero fanfare or warning — including one of the suits who normally would have lightened up this sort of gathering with his unique brand of wry humor. Add to that the news that the company is selling off a large portion of our internal customers, and it makes for a kind of omnipresent, low-lying anxiety amongst just about everybody.

The latest news we got today was that most of the IT department will be permanently remote beginning January 1, 2023. The rumor mill is all abuzz about various reasons why, but none of us are particularly surprised, given that we were asked to fill out a survey not too long ago about our preference for hybrid vs. remote work.

Even though I find my in-office days more taxing than my work-from-home days, I still like having some face-to-face time with my co-workers. Things are said in person that would never be typed out over Teams chat, and interactions happen that would be very different if both parties were remote. Even so, if there’s no one else in the office to interact with, then there’s no point in me being in the office, either. It’s bittersweet. It’s one more example of how the paradigm has shifted since the pandemic.

While my co-workers and I sat in the theater and tried to converse over Tim Allen, I had something else to keep my attention: a Rocketbook that I won in a raffle last week. They retail for $35, and I bought five raffle entries for $5 each, so I essentially got a VMWare-branded Rocketbook Core at a discount. (If I’d won the Grand Prize, though, I would have gotten a Very Large monitor for that $25 donation.)

The Rocketbook is basically a notebook with wet-erase reusable pages and an accompanying app that streamlines the process of scanning and uploading your notes and sketches to the cloud service of your choice. I can sketch something, make a mark on a specific icon at the bottom of the page, and when I use the app to scan the page, it will get beamed to my Google Drive. Or my personal email, or my work email, or my personal OneDrive, or any number of other services. I only wish I could take the Smart List feature and beam those items into my Outlook for work or my iOS Reminders.

There have been a non-zero number of times when I’ve wanted to sketch out a diagram or a dashboard layout and get that sketch into my OneNote, and it’s been a timesink of image adjustments to output a decent image. The Rocketbook will definitely make that sort of thing a lot more efficient… even if I don’t need to do it very often.

I have a two-week vacation scheduled for the weeks of Christmas and New Years. I’ve been looking forward to it — I should have taken a breather several weeks ago, honestly — and I’m still looking forward to it, even if it means that I might not be returning to the office after the break is over.

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Work Memories

In two days, I return to working in the downtown office a few days a week.

The last time I was in the office* was July, when I spent a week working from a vacant cube while my son was attending a science day camp downtown. Before that was March, when my coworker and my boss and I spent two days cleaning out our cubicles in preparation for a full renovation of multiple floors of our building.

Somehow, I failed to document the move-out either on my blog or on Facebook, so I had to dig into the Exist archives to find the last time I didn’t tag “work from home.”

18 March 2021: Mammogram this morning, then downtown to clean out cubes with N. Spent literally all day on my feet, cleaning and packing. Brought home a load of stuff today; going to get the rest Monday. Tweaked my back pulling the wagon with all my crap in it, so skipped Krav this evening.

23 March 2021: Final office clean-out day with N and CW (and O joined us for lunch). Diverted more stuff from the landfill to Goodwill. 

Over the course of those two days, I packed up and hauled multiple wagonloads of stuff to my car. At least one wagonload was destined for Goodwill, since I just couldn’t let so much perfectly usable stuff go to the landfill.

Now, some seven months later, my ADHD brain has finally decided that now is the time to go through the half-dozen tote bags and boxes that have been sitting in full view at the bottom of the basement stairs this whole time.

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pandemic, the ongoing saga of my job, toledo 1 Comment

Back Downtown

Since Connor is attending a science camp downtown this week, I decided to request a temporary cube and work from the actual office instead of driving to and from downtown twice every day. Most of my team is now permanently remote, and the few of us who will be going back in-person a few days a week need to wait until our floor is fully renovated in September.

Facilities sent me a layout diagram and marked the cubes I could choose from, so I picked the cube closest to my boss’s boss. That totally paid off, as I got a tour of one of the renovated floors that’s identical to what ours will look like when it’s done. It actually looks… workable. But we’ll see.

Over my lunch break, I enjoyed an iced coffee outside (and finally used some of the birthday coffee funds from N)!

After work, I walked across the street to pick up Connor from camp, then we slogged through the heat and humidity to get back to the parking garage. On the way, we saw this great view of the High-Level Bridge, framed by the Junction building, and Connor convinced me to take a picture.

So… the last time I actually worked a full day downtown was October 2020. It surprises me to say, but it was satisfying to be back in a more formal work environment after working from home for so long.