Working from home

Health officials in King County (Seattle area) are recommending, among other things:

Workplaces should enact measures that allow people who can work from home to do so.

About 5:00 PM on Wednesday a blog reader told me::

Microsoft just told all employees who can WFH to do so until March 25

My employer said something similar yesterday. My team started WFH the day before that.

I can work from home for almost everything except meetings where someone is likely to be using a real whiteboard (we have virtual whiteboards in some conference rooms).

My first thought was, “Will the VPNs fall over?” So far both my MS contact and I have had not had any problems with our Internet connections to work. I suspect they have self-scaling VPNs.

Barb has been working from home exclusively for years now. It’s a little odd for both of us to be working from home every day. It’s nice but it just feels a little odd to only see each other for such extended periods. I wonder how it will feel after three weeks.

Yesterday I asked Barb if we are going to get “cabin fever” and get irritable or something. She thinks she will be okay as long as she doesn’t feel physically trapped as in being snowed in or something.

We’ll probably will go for walks occasionally. That should help and it should be safe as long as we don’t have contact with other people.

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3 thoughts on “Working from home

  1. I’ve been working almost exclusively from home since 2010. I only leave the house to fly somewhere to meet a client, physically work on a construction project, or attend a conference. In fact, my company just closed the office that I would occasionally visit, removing any opportunity I may have had for the two-hour commute to get there!

    Since my wife retired a couple of years ago, we are in constant contact. There have been some accomodations to that. She like to eat dinner early – often as early as 3:30 or 4:00. So sometimes I just do that with here as a late lunch, then eat again later in the afternoon. She’s pretty good about not bugging me during the day – and if the weather is nice, I’ll often have a bit of lunch at my desk and then go for a half hour walk with her through our gardens or forest.

    I cannot imagine getting up at 0 Dark Thirty to sit in a car for an hour or so every morning to drive to work. And now, being completely removed from any need for an office setting, we could sell our home and move to a free state without any employment issues, if Washington continues its slide into socialism. As long as there is Internet, I can get to work.

    • My situation is somewhat similar. One difference we have noticed is not having much to talk about at meal time because we no longer have a day’s worth of stuff stored up that all waits until dinner. But the lack of commute is nice, and the daily walks with the dog have me in better shape and 10 pounds lighter.

  2. Cabin fever is absolutely real. I don’t know if working from home will aid in it or distract it, but it’ll help to keep busy for a bit. But yeah, you’ll probably start feeling it 2-3 weeks in.
    I was unemployed for about 2 months a while back. It was a transitional period- got out of a job that paid well enough to sustain myself for a bit (without going crazy w/ the wallet), and I had a 2 month wait to round out a refractory period for the next job. So 2 months of zero commitments. My sleep schedule fell badly out of whack, going to bed at 5 am and getting up at 3-4 pm with a whole lot of sitting around in between. Kept up w/ yard work mostly, but you can only mow a lawn so many times a week.
    Yeah… cabin fever is real and you will feel it. Just… take breaks and keep busy. Productivity works.

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