Tag Archives: desk

(Home) Office space…

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With the new and improved telework agreement now in place, I’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that my home office needs to be upgraded in several ways.

My set up isn’t particularly unusual. On the personal side, I’ve got a soon to be six year old 27-inch iMac that’s still an absolute workhorse and probably 5x more powerful than anything I actually need. It’s a great machine, even if it does occupy a significant amount of desktop real estate. For work, I’m toting around a Dell Latitude with a 16-inch screen. From it, hang an absurd number of wires and dongles – USB hub, mouse, Wi-Fi antenna, headset, and camera (rarely).

Most of the time, the laptop is perfectly serviceable for anything I need to do day-to-day. There are times, though, particularly when working in Excel or PowerPoint or dealing with multiple documents at the same time, where having a larger screen would be helpful. 

I’m sure there are ways to rig my laptop to use my iMac as a monitor, but that violates my first rule of working from home – my personal computer and my work computer must never, ever meet. They can sit on the same desk, but I want them to share absolutely nothing from one system to the other. Those are two streams I never want to cross.

That’s going to mean there’s a lot of “unnecessary” duplication with two full set ups occupying my desk. I can live with that, but want it to be done in an elegant a way as possible. Figuring out what that looks like is where I am now.

It certainly means buying a more robust hub/docking station and probably a new monitor – ideally one that with a build in camera and mic that will let me dispense with headset and camera. On those days when I can’t avoid the schlep over to the office, I’d like to unplug the laptop from one cable and walk away. Currently, I have cables running everywhere and it’s just unsightly and an uninspiring way to work. It was less of a problem in the height of COVID, when the laptop mostly stayed put and in the immediate post-COVID environment when I was in the office more than home. Now, it needs to be functional and look reasonably attractive.

After the technical hurdles are surmounted, I know I’ll need new lighting. The current lamp is fine, but adding a second monitor means I’ll need the space it’s occupying. In a perfect world, I’d like to find a slightly larger desk to hold it all. Being that my current “desk” is a kitchen table I liberated long ago from a dusty shed and pressed into service, I like my chances of being able to find a suitable upgrade. In fact, I’d be absolutely willing to just buy another table, but slightly longer, as this one has worked surprisingly well for the last 8 or 9 years.

When all this might happen, remains firmly in the “to be determined” column on the calendar, but I expect to see some of it sooner rather than later.

Moving day…

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I’ve been back in Maryland for just shy of eight years now. I find that incredibly hard to believe, but it’s beside the point as far as this little tale goes. The only reason I mention it is that as of today, just shy of eight years on, I’m now occupying the 9th separate cubicle I’ve been assigned to since arriving back.

When I think of the manpower that’s gone into not just physically rearranging the deck chairs but also time allocated to “strategizing” the move and selling each one of them as a value added proposition, all I can do is shake my head and wonder at how we’ve managed to win America’s independence, put down a rebellion, conquer a continent, deliver victory in two world wars, and stay in “business” over the last 200+ years. Surely this isn’t the way we actually do things. I know better, though. Of course it is. This is exactly how we do things. It’s situation normal.

Sigh. Yeah. It’s good to be back in the saddle.

Only Wednesday…

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Standing in the pre-dawn darkness, the first words I muttered after rolling out of bed this morning were, “Oh Christ on a crutch… it’s only Wednesday.”

That should have given me every indication of the kind of day it was going to be. But no, I opted not to listen to that small nagging voice that had already tried to warn me off. I press on with the morning routine – shower, coffee, feeding the menagerie, and trundling off to the office. I even had the audacity to enjoy the drive in, the humid air feeling brisk and refreshing once you got above a certain speed.

The wheels didn’t really come fully off the day until I’d already been at my desk for 45 minutes. I won’t get into specifics, but be assured it was all sideways and down hill from there. It was a day wholly given over to the anti-Midas touch – a skill that appears unbidden in my quiver from time to time and enables everything I touch to turn directly to shit.

Tomorrow has got to be better if just because there are only a few ways in which it could be worse. Steer into the slide. Regain control. Navigate away from danger. That’s the plan. Either that or sitting at my desk sobbing quietly. Really, either one feels like a possibility.

Back in my swivel chair…

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Today was not an unmitigated success. There were no meetings and, if I’m honest, that goes a long way towards making a day more tolerable if nothing else. Then there was the great cleaning of the inbox. Clearing out near 300 backlogged messages that had no hope of being answered felt like a win… until I then was left to ponder the hundred or so that remained and actually needed some kind of answer. I spent way more of the day plowing through those than I want to think about. The amount of time wasted on email would be spectacular if anyone ever bothered to add it all up. They won’t, of course, because no one really wants to know the answer for fear they may have to do something to make that number more reasonable.

So now I’m back to the office. They say great art comes from great pain. That could very well be true. I don’t know if “pain” is the right word here and I’m in no way vain enough to call what I’m doing art, but my best and most consistent writing almost always finds its source at the office. Sure, that could be because for five days out of every seven that’s where I spend more waking hours than anywhere else. I like to think, though, that it’s because the bureaucracy is a vast treasure trove of stories begging to be told. If I weren’t part of it, I’d have a hard time believing that anything so convoluted could even give the impression of functioning.

I’m not thrilled beyond all reasonableness to be back in my swivel chair, but for the sake of the blog it’s a good thing… and that’s as close to glass full as I’m going to be able to manage.

The game of telephone…

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“You’re going to be able to keep you current phone number,” might just prove to be as much of a joke as “You’re going to be able to keep your doctor.” After seven days of not having a phone at work, I now possess the capability to have voice conversations with people who are too far away for a good strong yell to be effective. That’s a plus. I didn’t realize how many times a day I used the damned thing until I suddenly didn’t have it. That’s the good news.

The bad news, because there’s always bad news, is that the number people have to dial to reach me is not the old number that “I get to keep.” That, it seems, is a “phase two” of this particular project. Given the sloth-like speed at which phase one has been carried out, I expect to still be waiting for my actual phone line to be assigned sometime when I get back from my Christmas vacation.

In the meantime, the telecommunications gurus have come up with a work around by which apparently every telephone in the universe is forwarded to a different number, somehow magic happens, and calls to our original number end up ringing through at our new location. It’s safe to say that I lack faith in this particular arrangement to be anything more than one of Uncle’s standard cluster fucks. Clausewitz tells us that in war even the simplest things are hard to do. It’s no less true in peacetime as it turns out.

I should have long ago given up on the idea that anything might just work as advertised, but God it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised just this once.