Seeing as I'm a lazy bastard who loafs around all day long, I can only update for Mrs WilliamA and my kids. Mrs W retires in January, but being a nurse there isn't any winding down on the agenda and she still plods there and back every working day. My son still works from home for Hastings Direct - the only difference being that as of a couple of weeks ago he's now working from our home thus giving himself a pay rise of around £800 plus/month. HD are still quite happy to have most of their staff working remotely and it's looking as though this may be a permanent option for some. My daughter works from home too, but she lives in London. She's a civil servant and her present role is on policy for adult social care. Her boss has been seconded tp work on Covid 19 policy and she's praying she doesn't have to follow.

Still doing 2 in, 3 out, though I did 3 in last week for a nail-biting server replacement.

The old server was a 20-year old PowerMac with the last version of Ubuntu ported to 32-bit powerpc architecture (14.04), and had some inexplicable lockups over the summer, so it wasn't something that could wait much longer for covid to be over.

It started out as a web dev staging server ~8 years ago because I hated ftping stuff about, then it became a sandbox for my time-wasting experiments in server admin, then in March it suddenly became the defacto gateway between our office file server and everyone working from home.

After provisioning a replacement, I learned our ISP had lost the router's login, probably when they got swallowed by a big-ass USian outfit and outsourced their support to Bangalore. I *guessed* the login (the router manual listed several stock user roles, the support folks at least had a working password for one I tried).

To make things extra fun, after getting to the office I discovered the router login doesn't work from the office lan, for reasons no one can explain, and the ISP support folks couldn't figure out how to make the switch, so I got an IT buddy from outside the office to do it.

 

I'm back in the office most of the time, usually Mon-Thu with Fri at home.  I'm watching bots tick over and sometimes restarting them as a side task to my normal job.  The guy that officially looks after them can't be arsed and I don't care too much about going in vs staying home.

There's 1 other person that is working there Mon-Fri because she finds it a massive stress WFH.  We have a variety of babysitters because we have to have a first aider and a fire warden in, so it's nice when they change and we have a bit of a chat to catch up on Covid life.

Basically no work, so that's fun!

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. Any prospect of that changing?

I've been working in the telecommunications department at our local hospital since My 22, 2017.

I route incoming calls throughout the hospital, call emergency or situational codes that effect the entire hospital, page doctors.

I also relay messages between doctors, staff, outside entities (such as police), and sometimes patients, and in certain situations call security and/or maintenance for the various hospital departments.

Night shift handles the department's shift paperwork for all the shifts. The other shifts can be too busy to do it. So it falls to third to get it done so all the shifts have everything they need to do their work.

Night shift also handles recording of weekly, monthly, and yearly statistics for the department, and if needed, tidying up around the office.

My second job at the hospital is as a patient companion. This is an As-needed position, or as some would call it, an On-call position. PCs help care for patients by handling non-medical direct assistance for patients in need; such as helping them get a drink, keeping a fall risk patient from getting out of bed. We also offer comfort to a patient who may be confused, such as one who suffers from dementia or a similar illness, or someone who may have suffered an injury that has disoriented them. We visually monitor the patient, and call the nurse if and when needed. These are just a few of things I've done for patients as a PC since taking the job in 2017.

that sounds like some valuable work to be doing, hats off to you!

Thanks. I do enjoy it most of the time. Every once in a while I have to deal with some rude idiot, but otherwise I like it very much.

I think your point about familiarity breeding complacency is a biggie. I saw that at my office. Plenty of people who have been in most of the time not really sticking to the guidance. Made me feel uncomfortable, resulting in me having an overall feeling of wanting to WFH.

Still haven't picked up any "proper" work, but I've had a bit of ad-hoc consultancy. So not on the breadline by any stretch and it's always part of the risk of freelance/contract work.

Got a few plates spinning now though, so hopefully one of them will work out!

Just getting a bit bored of not being able to enjoy ourselves really - had to put the little extension on hold etc.

Retired (since Nov 2019).

Enjoyed 12 months of retired life so far?

Phew, long time without looking in here. Not sure what made me click on the link in the favourites bar today but here we are.
Well for my update, I work in the IT department of North West NHS trust as a Senior Network Engineer. Its been pretty full on since February this year for obvious reasons. On the one hand its quite draining, on the other hand though its been very exciting throwing solutions together to get the workforce able to work from home.
We went from an average of 20 people working on VPN at any one time to well over a 1000 in less than a month, Firewalls needed replacing, internet circuits upgrading and new services rolling out.
I'm fortunate that I'm based on a hospital site but in a seperate building, so day to day I'm well away from the patients.
 

Wow. Puts our 6-7 off site folks in perspective.  :-S

Job and trying to build own business

It's fairly common for people to do a job for a living.

Would you like to expand on what that job is, and/or what business you're trying to build?

Ich bin ein Janitor.

3 sites at the moment. One on furlough (kerchiing) as a lot of it was the restaurant.
The truck depot is good pay and uncomplex...they have 29/44 drivers still well enough to work. I cycle commute two marathons worth a week, so kept fit through it all.
3rd site I celebrated 10yrs this week and is just an hour an evening... dredging 3k a year.

Spending most of my time at going-postal.com in their Disqus comments...which is a shite platform, and I have pointed them to Beehive.

Good to see so many still alive around.

Amazing how many old faces this thread picked up, I just went back through it from the start.

How's everybody doing now we are potentially looking at coming out of the pandemic via vaccines saving our bacon?

I'm still at home and sport is still going so it's generally same-old for me. Homeschooling was mostly horrible, a constant hour-to-hour decision needing to be made about whether we compromise our jobs, the boy's education or our happiness and relationship with one another. Hopefully the schools reopening doesn't make for too much of a spike in cases.

Hey Milko, lovely to hear from you!

For you, keeping people at arms' length must have been no hardship.

Feel free not to read beyond here, because I've had a fucking good Covid.

I had my first AstraZenica vaxx a couple of weeks ago with no discomfort - not even what I felt after my October 'flu jab. Charlie, my youngest is not that far off thirty and schooling other people's kids. I have one lovely grandchild who calls me 'Grampus'. I have invested the shitloads I've saved from home-working on Georgian glass, Edo period Netsuke, strong drink and generic viagra.

Give my undying love to Tina.

Still waiting on our shots in Ontario (provincial motto: "Let others lead, we follow").

Striving to keep self-abuse to a dull roar, with limited success. Man, it's just so fuckin' fun.

Killed more peggies [FC5] than you can shake a stick at.