Tag Archives: wfh

(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.

An awful lot of time…

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Sitting in the office all day gives you time to think.

It gives you time to think about smelling other people’s meals, and listening to their phone conversations, and their wandering around from cube to cube looking for an ear to bend, and the hour wasted traveling to and then another hour wasted going from that monument to early 20th century management philosophy.

Yes, sir, sitting in the office gives you an awful lot of time to think.

I’m quite sure there are people out there who are dying to get back to the office full time. God knows there will be plenty of senior leaders who can’t wait to get back to preening in front of town hall meetings and capacity crowds conferences – and seeing their toiling minions stacked elbow to asshole across whole floors filled with cubicles.

More than anything, though, sitting in the office is full of time to think about how utterly ridiculous it is to sit in an office when every single touch point of your day involves email, phone calls, and shuffling electronic information from one place to another. If you’re heart doesn’t seeth with just a little bit of rage knowing it could all be accomplished from any place on the globe with a reliable internet connection and a cell phone, well, I’m not entirely sure you’re thinking about work as a product and not as some kind of half-assed social activity.

As long as those running the show put as much or more premium on the quasi-social elements like maintaining a “corporate culture” and the farcical notion that “real” communication can only happen face to face, no amount of real world evidence seems likely to move the needle away from 1950s ideas of what working looks like.

There’s still no formal guidance on what the new and improved “return to work” plan will look like here in the belly of the bureaucracy. I’m told they’re working on an updated plan at echelons higher than reality. If precedent is prologue, I’ll expect this new plan to cleave as close as humanly possible to exactly how things were done in the Before Times and ignore as much as possible the last two years happened at all.