I’ve been back in the office for about 4 months now, and will literally never work from home voluntarily again. It’s been so much nicer and more productive being back at the desk and keeping ‘home’ and ‘office’ completely separate.
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Interesting. I’m probably never going into an office again, except to get my personal effects, or unless I get a new employer. I worked too hard to build this desk!!
the desk i was forced to set up in my apartment is pretty sweet.
My employer hasn’t been willing to give me a private office in years. I can give me a private office. I like working in an office. It’s quiet, and i don’t feel like people are looking at me. And if i want to take a break to cycle the laundry i can do that.
I liked the social aspect of being on campus. I liked running into people in the hallway, and having lunch with friends. But i find it much more comfortable to actually work at home.
And sharing a screen works so much better than looking over someone’s shoulder. When i worked with the guy who sat next to me, we used to use Skype to share screens, but talk to each other over the cubical wall. But because we were too lazy to walk around the wall, but because it was actually easier to see each other’s screen that way. And hey, it works just as well when we are both working from home! And our conversation doesn’t bother anyone else.
Interesting, I’ve had so much the opposite experience. Sharing a screen has been a disaster — it’s easily made 3 minute conversations into 30 minutes of ‘can you see this? No, the screen is frozen’.
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I really don’t miss noisy inconsiderate people in the office who insist on having loud meetings or talking on speaker phone with their doors wide open.
I upgraded my home internet a few months back and I still get some audio/visual issues.
It’s totally a Teams/Skype thing — I’m in the office on a LAN and screen sharing is still a nightmare if you have audio with it. The only thing I’ve gotten to work consistently is sharing my desktop screen while using the video/audio on my laptop.
Yes ,we forgot how much you enjoy the neighbor kids and can’t wait for them to be roaming the halls all summer. Why go to work at all?
What other audio would you want to use? I’m confused. I share one of my screens, or maybe just one application. And i use the laptop’s audio, sometimes with headphones, or sometimes just using the built in mike and speaker.
I don’t like them either.
I do like that part of working from home.
But I like the office better. My desk at my office was ergonomically adjusted for me so it’s physically more comfortable. And it’s nicer to be able to talk in person.
I mostly go back & forth between two clients now. I weirdly have a private office at one (I don’t understand why they don’t give the office to someone higher on the totem pole than I imagine myself to be) and go in person. The office is fairly small and has no windows, but during Covid it’s been a blessing to not have to share an office with someone else’s germs. And the computer is positioned so that I’m facing the door and can see outside through my door. So the no windows thing isn’t as much of a bummer as I initially thought it would be.
The other is work from home. On balance, I like the on-site situation better, but there are certainly advantages to working from home.
I’ve had MH’s experience of Teams just not working if you attempt to use the audio. It’s very frustrating.
I was using my cell phone to dial into the audio portion of Teams meetings, and only using the video.
Doing both audio & video worked great for a couple of months and then it just stopped working and no one could figure out why. The workaround was my cell phone. But then having my cellphone on speaker for an hour meeting drains a lot of battery. It was just a nuisance.
Yeah, having to also dial in with a separate phone would be a nuisance. I think I’ve had to do that… Once, maybe twice, since we all started working from home. While annoying to ever have issues, the time I’ve wasted doing things like waiting for me or anyone else to connect has been enormously less than the time i used to spend commuting.
My most frequent issue has been difficulty connecting my laptop at all, but that’s a not super common, has never taken more than half an hour to resolve, and i just chalk it up to “commuting time”. Also, i can’t recall having any issue at all in several months.
I still have a landline, so “phone battery drain” has never been a work issue.
I think the last time I received a work phone call was in… 2018ish. My worst WFH complaint is when my cat lays on my keyboard while I’m away from desk, sometimes turning off the wifi.
I don’t get work phone calls either. But when Teams audio isn’t working then I need to use my phone to call into the meeting with sound.
My Teams always works fine.
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Lucky you!
Maybe we should have a “flex your teams experience thread”. 
My teams works, too. Although two people in my department have been having issues, so maybe i don’t want to jinx myself. (One can join meetings fine, but can’t create them. The other has been using the web app, because the other one has been flaky. Neither’s issues have had any effect on me beyond my sometimes initiating a meeting that another person normally would have.)
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Teams works fine for me too. We had some issues early on, but those seem to have been mitigated. That might have been while my children were at home using the WiFi all day for school too.