Six months at home

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020 at 08:18pm

Today is the sixteenth of September, not a particularly significant day, except that six months ago the sixteenth was a Monday, the first day of working from home.

Sure there are some benefits like not having to commute, but I miss the commute as it gave a clear separation between work and non-work time. I also miss the lunchtime conversations with people on other teams or even seeing changes around the CBD due to construction or other works.

Is it ironic that we had only moved into our shiny new office only a few weeks before it all changed?

At the start of 2019 we had to move out of our previous office, and became mostly remote workers. We got a couple of rooms at a managed office space and each team was assigned a day to come in, the other days they would work from home. However there were a few of us (myself included) that opted to come into the temporary office every day.

In my case I knew that I would find it difficult to focus on work when I was at home, unless I was able to create a separate office for work, but I don’t have the space, furniture or equipment for that. It was better for me to tolerate the cramped shared office, with the benefit of still being in contact with people not on my team.

In February our new space was complete enough for us to move in and despite areas like the kitchen and meeting rooms still being set up, we started to make it our own, and then the world changed.

While I would love to have a work office that is distinct from my home office I have gone for a compromise of being able to switch over to a work environment. I’m still sitting on the same chair at the same desk in front of the same monitors, keyboard and mouse, but when I am working that is all driven from my work laptop. Come 4pm I switch the monitor inputs (KVM built into one of them and audio over HDMI is handy) back to my own computer, put the work laptop away and I am no longer in work mode.

So far this has been good enough™ but I am yearning for the day when we can be in an office again, but who knows when that will be…

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