Well, as someone who hates catching colds, I would prefer you WFH and not share that with me. It’s especially helpful if you can WFH when your team is there. Sheesh.
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Yeah. I’m just sitting at my desk not talking to anyone so it’s sort of pointless. My desk neighbor is WFH. My boss stopped by and I put on my mask.
But my issue is that I have an allergy cough that affects me almost every morning. This is the cough that nearly always goes away by the time I get to the office. It had stopped for over a month until this cold combined with cleaning out a dusty closet woke it up. But it still wasn’t that bad. Even now it’s probably not that bad. I’m just extra sensitive about coughing at work or anywhere that someone might hear.
Reminds me of…
At the beginning of the pandemic I went to see my doctor for a regular physical, etc. My blood pressure has always been borderline-high and that day was no exception. He & I discussed going on a med for it, but he warned me that one of the side effects of the med is coughing, which might get you some dirty looks these days.
Yep and it’s not the bp med—unless (now that I think of it) the new one is contributing.
It’s not the bp medicine—I checked. Got a negative Covid test & antibiotics for sinus infection. Decided to WFH and stopped coughing by 8 am today.
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“Allergic to work”! At the office!
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I don’t know why it has taken me 21 months to realize this but…
I complain all the time about the many hours that kids spend looking at screens. I am a proponent of textbooks, though textbooks are not even available for some HS classes. But my point is, I have just realized that spending x hours per day behind a screen is messing with my eyes and my mind. I need to get back to the office so that I can
- have in-person meetings as a break from computer screens
- have infinite access to print out reports to review instead of scrolling on a monitor.
- have impromptu ad hoc meetings or conversations instead of email. The phone from home just isn’t the same to me as the office although theoretically it should be
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And, going out to lunch!
That is what I miss the most.
Oh, and the giant-ass printer that can print 100 pages, “for business reasons,” whatever I need. My tiny-ass home printer would require four refills and 30 minutes. Oh, and I’d need more toner.
This lack of printing is going to result in a transitory opex drop
Cross thread - i HATE home printers as much as I hate buying new phones.
like printing articles to read at work.
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Ever since I got an Epson eco printer, my hate has dropped considerably. It’s super slow & isn’t going to print DTNF’s giant ass-print jobs, but it’s really good for what I do & I absolutely love not having to pay through the teeth for toner.
Not really a screen issue, but that was a big loss for me. Going back to the office won’t fix this right away, as Covid will still play a role due to individual comfort levels with car rides and restaurants.
Here is an interesting COVID non-effect:
This is never going to be a thing for me again. Teams with a significant portion of virtual members (mine) will continue to have screen-based meetings even when covid is a distant memory. So either we all sit at our desks on our laptops and dial in, or we all bring our laptops into a conference room so we can dial in.
I don’t love it. But I don’t see a way around it. Our conference rooms do have projectors and are set up for conference calls, but feedback from virtual team members is that it’s hard to know who is talking, so laptops are preferred.
I was hoping for some kind of revolutionizing camera that shows the speaker in the room for those who are remote. Maybe your telling me it’s just OK.
Some meetings for me may be as you described. Others will be fully in-person…certainly many spontaneous one will be. I don’t know, we used to have conference “calls” where people were on the phone. Didn’t seem to be a big problem to not have visual contact.
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?
There are conferencing systems that will pick up on the person talking and point the camera in their direction
I have heard about this and I hope it works as described.
The wonderful thing about voices is that each person sounds different so you don’t need to see who’s talking to know who’s talking.
Everyone logged into the same meeting in the same room sounds like a recipe for a horrible feedback loop noise sound all meeting.
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Reminds me of the pre-COVID days. It was not difficult to dial in to a meeting through the conference room system for audio and everyone who was logged in through their laptop to simply mute their own speaker and mic. The exception was if you had someone from IT (a programmer/systems person) that would waste the first 5 minutes of the meeting trying to figure it out for the nth time.
If you go back 10 years, this stuff was maybe all relatively new, but it sounds like some of you are a good 5 years behind on having some pretty standard technology.
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