We were out of the office about a week or so ahead of the official word, so that was nice. I had approx two thirds of a day working with the house to myself, blissful concentration at the desk I recently built, it was lovely. Then the school sent my boy home with a fever, which we suffered for a few days before the doc diagnosed an ear infection by phone and prescribed antibiotics, that took about a day or so to see it off. So yeah, a week ahead of the school lockdown I was already doing the childcare plus work thing, fun times. Then they shut the school and at least Tina also got sent home so we can do split shifts. And now I reckon I’m on approx day 5 of having COVID-19, although I can’t really fathom how, maybe I incubated for a full 2 weeks? I’ve barely left the house or anything otherwise. Bah.
Oh yeah I probably will be furloughed this coming week too. Just hoping the business survives really, we rely on professional sport and things like flagship retail stores that are very much not key infrastructure so it kinda sucks for us right now. Not the most important thing by a million miles, but still a thing.
Sorry to hear of your woes Milko. Hope your symptoms clear up soon. As far as your work goes, any luck in getting your animated boards mounted on large autonomous airships which broadcast slogans like "STAY THE FUCK HOME", "REALLY STAY THE FUCK HOME" and "A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU IN THE OFF-WORLD COLONIES"?
I've been working from home for two weeks now. Should have been on holiday, but it was cancelled just in time to prevent me going to a locked-down resort, and I got my money back, so can't complain too much.
My company has been reasonably ahead of the game -the plan had been to split into two broadly similar teams and alternate working from home with working from the office. That all changed, and we're now all working from home, with the offices all closed. It's not too much of a hassle - we're pretty much all capable of working remotely. The marketing and sales teams have had their activities curtailed somewhat, however. We've been doing weekly Zoom-based social activities on a Friday afternoon, and the boss has let us claim for beers and takeaway, which is nice of him.
Been WFH for 2 weeks as of today.
I bailed before our work was allowing it. I've got a blood condition that means I'm higher risk. I was on holiday for a week then got back two weeks yesterday, went in on the Monday and thought "fuck this, I need to WFH". Rang my doctor for a bit of advice, he said if I could WFH I should.
We have a lot of people at head office who often WFH so there's infrastructure and systems in place, but it would be fair to say they're not 100%. Best option IMHO would be work computers (or laptops) at home then connect over a VPN.
Instead we have a virtual remote desktop which just isn't the same and resources are limited - open a hefty spreadsheet and it grinds my session to a halt. It also has limited licences it seems considering the recent All Staff emails asking people to logout. I've been nagging the IT Manager a bit too much, but he has setup an RDP connection to my work desktop PC. This is definitely better, but because I think it is going
My Site --- Head Office (or other data center) --- Home
there's laggggggg.
And because it's being presented over VMWare Horizon rather than a direct RDP there's some keyboard issues.
There's definitely been resistance to people WFH from the senior management (who are all at home). We're a food manufacturer and it is pretty much business as usual. This means we're entering one of our busiest new launch periods and nothing has changed, very little delayed or put on hold. It feels a bit ridiculous and I'm definitely struggling a bit when the work feels somewhat futile.
A virtual remote desktop is what I said goodbye to when I retired. As a DBA team we also had actual terminal access to our mainframe and SSH, remote desktop etc. to live servers, but most of the developers and testers had to make do with a virtual remote desktop. On the other hand, all our admin systems were accessible through VPNs. The other issue was that our client was HMRC and the live systems were all air-gapped so no homeworking on them.
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There's definitely been resistance to people WFH from the senior management.
That was always the way. There are classes of manager who strongly believe that they should have you where they want you to be, quite literally, because somehow that's how they get their money's worth. There are cost etc. arguments but the driving force is bums-on-seats.
I'd cope with the virtual remote desktop if the server had the resources to do the job. Not perfect, but "good enough" if it did. Sitting watching Excel calculate and eventually crash isn't productive.
And yeah, I think they struggle with the idea of people managing themselves. My manager is great though, he's encouraged it but those above him struggled with one making the comment along the lines of "they won't be working 100% at home". We've had team Facetime calls daily which has helped keep morale up. The business as a whole has been using Zoom quite a bit.
It has though made me realise more than ever that I rely on human interaction to enjoy my job.
Thanks for asking. Day 8 by my estimation.
this morning my chest finally feels a bit better, the tightness/heaviness is almost gone. I’ve got a return of the headache though. I’m starting to get aches that I know are just from being stuck in bed so long, so I’m going to try and move about some more today, see how that goes. The worry with that is if I’m still emitting a viral load or whatever they call it, I don’t want to increase the chances of the household getting it.
I’ve been thinking back to possible ways I caught this (boredom) and I remembered my son having that ear infection a couple of weeks ago. Is it possible I caught whatever gave him that and it manifested in me with these Covid-like symptoms? It’s so frustrating that I can’t find out what I’ve got for sure.