The Work Thread 2 - Get back to work!

[Drumstick]

The worst part of going in to the office, by a substantial margin, is the commute. It now feels so painful to spend £8 on a return train ticket, despite the fact I'm still saving a lot more than I used to when I would shell out for an annual pass. Not only that but it also feels like such a waste of time.

It absolutely is a complete waste of time.

I have moved house during the pandemic and my former two minute drive/10 minute walk commute would now be a 30 minute drive during rush hour. At the moment, when it's not my morning to get up and parent the kid, I can roll out of bed at 7:58am ready for my 8am start.

[Qikz]

I woke up at 08:20 today and thought I'll snooze my alarm one more time (it's on a 3 minute timer). Next thing I know it's 08:58 and I run to turn on my PC to clock myself in on time. Very glad I'm working from home

[Zilnad]

Returning to the office is going to be a really strawberry floating rude awakening. There's literally no valid argument to return to that way of working, in my role at least.

[Oblomov Boblomov]

It's all the little things you can do during the day if you're at home that make it so much better.

We'll do the washing, cleaning, cooking prep etc, then bigger things like nip to the shop for essentials, exercise... whereas before it would be such a routine to have to come home and rush through it all. I'm perfectly happy to have longer active working hours (I seem to have settled into roughly 7.30am - 6pm) when I have this flexibility, because I'm still gaining time overall and when I do sign off at 6pm, I can do what I want to do instead of what needs doing.

It's brilliant! Compare that with today where I've had to pay money to spend an hour travelling each way, to log on at 9am and finish at 5pm. Worse for work and worse for me. Fortunately, my wife is WFH both days so she can pick up all the crappy chores in time for me to get back .

[Drumstick]

It's all the little things you can do during the day if you're at home that make it so much better.

We'll do the washing, cleaning, cooking prep etc, then bigger things like nip to the shop for essentials, exercise... whereas before it would be such a routine to have to come home and rush through it all. I'm perfectly happy to have longer active working hours (I seem to have settled into roughly 7.30am - 6pm) when I have this flexibility, because I'm still gaining time overall and when I do sign off at 6pm, I can do what I want to do instead of what needs doing.

It's brilliant! Compare that with today where I've had to pay money to spend an hour travelling each way, to log on at 9am and finish at 5pm. Worse for work and worse for me. Fortunately, my wife is WFH both days so she can pick up all the crappy chores in time for me to get back .

I agree. I have concluded that management who demand people be in the office despite there being no discernible reason to do so have nothing outside of work in their life.

[aayl1]

It's all the little things you can do during the day if you're at home that make it so much better.

We'll do the washing, cleaning, cooking prep etc, then bigger things like nip to the shop for essentials, exercise... whereas before it would be such a routine to have to come home and rush through it all. I'm perfectly happy to have longer active working hours (I seem to have settled into roughly 7.30am - 6pm) when I have this flexibility, because I'm still gaining time overall and when I do sign off at 6pm, I can do what I want to do instead of what needs doing.

It's brilliant! Compare that with today where I've had to pay money to spend an hour travelling each way, to log on at 9am and finish at 5pm. Worse for work and worse for me. Fortunately, my wife is WFH both days so she can pick up all the crappy chores in time for me to get back .

I agree. I have concluded that management who demand people be in the office despite there being no discernible reason to do so have nothing outside of work in their life.

This is 100% a manager at my partner's work. She is such a busybody jobsworth that is (was) staunchly anti-wfh. She has no life outside of work and brings this up as a "joke" often. I also have it on good authority she has made every single member of her team cry at some point.

[Winckle]

It's all the little things you can do during the day if you're at home that make it so much better.

We'll do the washing, cleaning, cooking prep etc, then bigger things like nip to the shop for essentials, exercise... whereas before it would be such a routine to have to come home and rush through it all. I'm perfectly happy to have longer active working hours (I seem to have settled into roughly 7.30am - 6pm) when I have this flexibility, because I'm still gaining time overall and when I do sign off at 6pm, I can do what I want to do instead of what needs doing.

It's brilliant! Compare that with today where I've had to pay money to spend an hour travelling each way, to log on at 9am and finish at 5pm. Worse for work and worse for me. Fortunately, my wife is WFH both days so she can pick up all the crappy chores in time for me to get back .

Yep, I put the washing machine on whilst I'm making breakfast, unload it into the dryer at lunchtime, put the clothes away at finishing time. Little things like that go a long way to giving you a big "block" of time to do whatever you want in the evening or weekends.

[Drumstick]

Today I have put the dishwasher on and emptied it (both x2), loaded the washing machine and put it on for a spin, emptied the washed clothes into the tumble dryer. In my lunch time I was also able to put the vacuum around.

[Drumstick]

This is 100% a manager at my partner's work. She is such a busybody jobsworth that is (was) staunchly anti-wfh. She has no life outside of work and brings this up as a "joke" often. I also have it on good authority she has made every single member of her team cry at some point.

This is awful. Get a strawberry floating life.

[Zilnad]

I'm really worried I'm going to be hit with a crushing bout of depression when we're all eventually forced back into our shitty offices. My life WFH is so much better for all the reasons you've stated. I'm making the most of it while it lasts with the idea that by April it'll all be over. Makes me want to cry, honestly.

[Green Gecko]

The worst part of going in to the office, by a substantial margin, is the commute. It now feels so painful to spend £8 on a return train ticket, despite the fact I'm still saving a lot more than I used to when I would shell out for an annual pass. Not only that but it also feels like such a waste of time.

It absolutely is a complete waste of time.

I have moved house during the pandemic and my former two minute drive/10 minute walk commute would now be a 30 minute drive during rush hour. At the moment, when it's not my morning to get up and parent the kid, I can roll out of bed at 7:58am ready for my 8am start.

If it makes Oblomov feel any better I used to pay £25 for a retun from Surrey to Sussex via London, and then when I moved back to Sussex I held onto a job for a while where I merely travelled back in the opposite direction for the same amount! This went on for about a year and half as I had two jobs at the same time for a while. One was zero hours and the other was placed on an extended probation of 12 strawberry floating months because my manager wasn't happy with me but the real reason was they didn't want to have any employment protection.

My take home pay before expenses was somewhere in the region of £50-60 per day

And figure this one out: when I reduced my hours for health reasons to 3 days per week with 2 of those remote, I made more money than when I was working full time.

Certainly taught me how strawberry floating ridicolous commuting is and I haven't even mentioned that train took up FIVE AND AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS of my day - only 3.5hrs less than the time I was working. Meaning I was using well over 150% of my time for which I was paid. Complete and utter insanity and I have no idea why I ever even entertained it - that is how bad the graduate job market was in terms of doing anything remotely related to what you are good at.

In other news / bitching about work, I finally heard from this seperate logistics company on behalf of the 4 of 5 different departments I've been dealing with at Ricoh. They called me once on my office phone and won't try again for 24hrs, even though I provided my mobile number, I've phoned them 3 times now all going to different voicemail inboxes. They also sent a notification about calling me from a noreply email address. Why the strawberry float does anybody use noreply email addresses these days? Surely it should be possible for customers to progress with their order via a channel like email?

I didn't even finish speaking on the customer services switchboard before they put me on hold to another department. Second time I called them I leave a voice mail with the customer services switchboard.

So that's two voicemails left with random people I have no relationship with, and another voicemail left with, what, the entire company? All because they called the wrong number and don't accept emails. Why not have a digital tool in place that enables the customer to self-serve their delivery slot via a simple link in the email? ... Looking at their website, how much is this company supposedly worth?

What the strawberry float is it with corporations and 100% reliance on getting through to someone on the phone during one 2 minute interval at some random, unknowable time of the day or week?

Their email slogan is "making business flow". Yeah, sure. Have some strawberry floating agents on hand then to take phone calls, if you are going to do the 100% phone thing.

[OrangeRKN]

I can't put the washing machine on because I have to work in the kitchen and it would make far too much noise

I kind of miss my commute too, it was a good way of forcing exercise

[Jenuall]

As someone who has been in the office throughout all of the pandemic I now find myself in the strange position of being jealous of all you lucky strawberry floaters who have been getting to do exciting things like the washing up and emptying the washing machine on your own schedule!

2020 has been a strange time!

[Green Gecko]

I got through to the logistics company and it won't be arriving until the 26th November. That means from contact to deliver it's taken 6 weeks to buy a very small printer, strawberry float me I think that's my longest ever "acquisition process" that surely would only normally compare to a house or something.

They asked me about security protocol before realising this is a street level address. So that means no parking, and security? What security? Just deliver the printer lol. So I have this hillarious conversation explaining that Ricoh aren't only delivering 6 figure photocopier/printers but they've introduced much smaller machines and so yes those are going to be delivered to shops and small offices and the like, with me based at home in a small town. So the intructions are literally, phone me, the business owner (not an office reception, or some logistics and acquisitions person or some other corporate cog), ring my doorbell, at my address, and, that's all there is to it. You don't have to phone a strawberry floating security guard or pin an access code into an electronic gate before being patted down for weapons or mobile phones.

It's really funny being this tiny business interacting with a multi billion pound Japanese corporation's UK office who has to account for a myriad of complications just to buy and deliver a strawberry floating printer. Really makes me happy realising just how relatively simple my meagre existence is compared to these behemoths, but then I remember what it's like to work in them and how horrible that is.

[Xeno]

As someone who has been in the office throughout all of the pandemic I now find myself in the strange position of being jealous of all you lucky strawberry floaters who have been getting to do exciting things like the washing up and emptying the washing machine on your own schedule!

2020 has been a strange time!

Thast's all trivial. Being home when deliveries arrive and not having to use a drop off or pick up point is the best flex.

[Dual]

What about detailing the exact day to day routines of your neighbours to the point that I know exactly when they will leave the house and for how long?

[Xeno]

Do you plan to rob them or just strawberry float with their heads by leaving "gifts" on their door step?

[Green Gecko]

Man, some of the glaring errors in B2B marketing emails. More blahblah Covid strange times blah:

Those of you who were with us back in March might remember the immediate action we took to protect the professionals on our platform. We never thought we’d be here, eight months later, but one thing hasn’t changed - we’re still committed to making Bark work for you as we go forward into 2021, together.

Wait, you were 100% confident that your business wouldn't exist after all this?

Cool, I'm definitely going to throw money at you to get one or two email addresses / telephone numbers that nobody answers from tire kickers. strawberry floating loathe these business referral platforms that don't need to exist and do pretty much nothing of value but it's funny when they passively acknowledge this.

[Victor Mildew]

Oh my god mute ypur strawberry floating microphones on a call ffs. Just had the usual guy loudly sneezing and coughing while someone else was talking. We have to ask him to mute his mic every single day.

[Cuttooth]

Can't you mute him yourself?