Cozy Covid - How is your situation?
So far so good here. Both Sara and my company are fully working from home for the next few weeks. The kiddos school is closed for weeks, so they are using google classroom with their existing teacher setup.
Work wise, I'm pulling long ass days shepherding IT resources and services to people who are home bound around the country for the company.
Cleaning up my Plex movie collection. Maybe time to implement my seperate IoT vlan for home.
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Home office FTW!
Business as usual for me... The kids are off for March Break, but the schools are closed for a further two weeks beyond that. The kids are a pain, when they're home, so the next three weeks will be annoying.
The wife is looking into some on-line school things the kids can do while their off, so that might keep them busy.
My kid's school is closed until the first week of April, at the earliest. His day-care is only 5 kids (and two were already pulled out) but we made the call to pull him out after today, because we aren't 100% sure if my wife will continue to get a paycheck.
My wife works at a different school as a "Special education assistant". The school is also closed, and for the short term she is going to be working from home... Probably about 3 or 4 hours a day doing clerical work. Still, until they run out of clerical work or training she'll get paid. But we don't know how long that will last. She wants to try and take care of the rugrats classroom instruction during that time.
I thought I'd be working from home after Wednesday, but the company CEO overruled that over the weekend. He says that although many of us have the capability of working from home, we are "more effective" working from the office. Also, we work in a vital industry right now (lets just say telecommunications) so for this crisis the company is, for once, OK with being considered a utility. So... 95,000 employees being told they have to report to the office when only about 10k are needed to go out and repair/install/update infrastructure.
So why do the IT staff, clerical staff, administrative staff, etc have to work from the office? Well, I have a theory. See about 5 or 6 years ago this guy decided that he didn't like how many people had home offices and began to pull people back in where they could be seen. He can't believe people are working if he can't see them. Plus of course it was the trendy thing to do... Yahoo! did it after years of allowing their employees to work remote, right? Well, he cannot very well go back on 5+ years of throwing a fit any time he found out that departments allowed occasional at-home work by suddenly having to admit it was all bullshit, right?
Either way, half my office is already not showing up... Some members of management basically said "Fuck it, I'll take the loss" and let people work remotely and others had to let employees take care of kids that were out of school.
Now, all that being said, I am ready to work from home. I used to do it about one day a week despite the ban, and have space set up for it. I have projects and to-do lists I'd love to work on without people walking into my cubicle or workroom. I have 15 goddamn laptops set up in the workroom ready for people to grab if they have a problem I can't solve remotely. I've even recently been set up to take help-desk calls. Now when our help-desk office inevitably ends up shut down I can take some of their calls from my basement. Or my desk at work I guess.
But no. It looks like I'm going to the office every goddamn day until the state or county government says "Fucking stop it" or someone in my management chain tells me its OK.
Our local school district is running their local route tomorrow at the normal times, but instead of picking up kids they'll be dropping off food for people in need. Unfortunately for me, my hip surgery has been pushed back 'a few weeks'
I've been home-based for just over 10 years, so nothing has changed for me work-wise. The wife is home-based but usually travels to the Gulf Coast every other week to check in on the nursing homes in her region. She's grounded, and all non-critical initiatives and meetings have been suspended, so she's got it fairly easy for now.
The non-verbal, autistic son, who's out of school, on one of his vomiting kicks and will pound on office doors when you're on a customer calls is a bit of a drag though. Normally my lunch breaks are my own, and I occasionally take a PTO day in the middle of the week - while the wife is traveling and the kid is at school - to work around the house, go for a bike ride, or go shopping. Now we spend all the time we're not working trying to calm Jr. down and cleaning up the messes he makes. It's gonna be a long couple/few months.
my wife is working from home, both of my kids schools have closed. Im still puttering around visiting customers.
School's out until 4/15 at least; realistically it's out for the rest of the year, IMO. We'll know more in 2 weeks, but testing's juuuuust started. They haven't even closed the beaches yet, and we have spring breakers screaming fuck corona like that's going to protect them. Schools shut down on Friday and I called in on Sunday night saying I couldn't get childcare for Monday. Monday by noon we were told "WFH if you can but be available on Teams and phone during business hours". We're good, supply-wise; canned and dry goods are always on hand and reasonably resupplied on the regular due to hurricane preparedness, and we got both toilet paper and fresh foods sorted out. No alcohol or sanitized to be had, no masks to be had. Shit hasn't hit the fan but once the testing ramps up or the illnesses start getting bad, I think the panic will get worse.
I'm in Michigan. The children of my nieces are all off school. The niece who is a math teacher is also off work, so she is taking care of them and teaching them at home.
I'm most worried about my sister's husband. He's about 77 and suffering from several pre-existing health problems that aren't well controlled. My sister is 67 with pre-existing health problems, most of which are well controlled. I'm 55 with pre-existing health problems decently controlled.
I told my sister that she and her husband probably should stay away from her grand children, young children being little bags of disease.
The last time I stuck my head up, on 3/12/2020, I didn't see any panic other than people buying a lot of bottled water (why?). I'm going to have to go out again today (3/19/2020) to pick up some medication at the very least. I'll probably pick up some groceries while I'm at it.
I'm still pulling 12-14 hour days at the computer working and putting out fires. I'm guessing though something will hit a bit of a slow down as every process is sort of rejiggered.
So question is what do I want to learn/do/accomplish if this lasts months..
Woodworking?
A hydroponic greenhouse would be a cool thing to build.
Anyway, I went out to pick up my medication and did some grocery shopping. I found it interesting what people were buying up. All of the canned pasta and toilet paper were gone. Much of the dry pasta was gone. The fish sticks were gone. The ground beef was mostly gone except for the ground sirloin, which was on sale. There was generally a bit less of everything with more empty space on the shelves than normal.
A few people were wearing face masks, but no one seemed overly panicky. The road traffic was extraordinarily light.
I had to think a while to come up with a hypothesis about why certain things were totally bought up. My guess is that the canned pasta, fish sticks, and the like were lunch food for kids who were home from school. I still have no guess about the toilet paper.
I've been slowly building up a Chef Boyardi horde over the past month or so, since it is 80% of what my kid will eat.
We are holding up, we have a small bit of dry goods stored away as earthquake preparedness. Life of here hasn't changed much; the government isn't really pushing social distancing as much as it could. But the fact that everyone over here pretty much wore masks even before there was a virus is probably helping our curve flatten a little.
So after some negative publicity they've started sending people in my offices home. Including desktop computer users. Which I understand is proving interesting.
"Why can't I connect to my wifi"
"um... we went over this three times in the office"
My company provides communication services, so someone will always be working even when everything nonessential gets shut down. Apparently I'm also 'essential' and have to continue coming into the office. I even got some printout that is supposed to give me permissions to be on the road if they do an enforced lock-down or curfew.
At first the fact they want to force me to come in made me mad. But then I thought... well, if everyone else will be at home after a few more days, then I'm actually OK with this. It would be different if my wife wasn't able to watch our kid. I love working at home, but when everyone else is home I don't actually get much done.
Plus I do actually want to handle the odd hardware issue that actually requires hands-on. I was just originally thinking that I could deal with them on an as-needed basis.
In short: Its very nice that everyone else in my office is social distancing for me.
kuksa
spoons
I mean sure why not? I've already painted two rooms, rebuilt this one retaining wall outside that has seen better days.
re-doing the walls in a room. all wall paper has been stripped, damaged plaster removed (500lbs? probably 70% of the wall surface was ruined) and trashed. next steps, clean wallpaper glue off of remaining plaster, plaster and sand and plaster and sand, remove all dust, paint.
Arguably the most famous comedian in Japan just died of covid. Hopefully it makes folks take it a little more seriously...
John Prine in critical condition with COVID-19 symptoms
Edit: RIP
two weeks of furlough next month, alternating. i plan to use the time to complete some home renovation work.
Howdy all! Glad to see you're all still alive. Things are as good as they can be here, wife and I are WFH, kids are climbing the walls, toilet paper supplies are holding. It's been nice to see the kids more than usual, at least.
OMG, it's weis…
{wave}
I've been limiting my excursions out to once every two weeks. On my last one, I noticed that the seagulls that normally infest the grocery store parking lot weren't there. Also, an unusually high number of dead deer lay along the roadside.