Working from Home (or, the Coronavirus Diaries)
In my nearly 18 years at my current employer, I had never worked from home for a full day. I have never had a corporate cell phone, barring only two weekends with customer go lives where I took home a loaner. My primary computer wasn't even a laptop until last year. On a handful of occasions our CTO had called me at home, all of them in late December 2006 when we had a crisis in Tokyo that I helped fix. Otherwise, I just came into the office.
For much of my time at the company, working from home wasn't even an option for my department. It was comparatively recently that we started hiring remote employees who worked from home, and only in the last three years that this became relatively normal. When we had an employee work from some island in Caribbean for a few years that, combined with an acquisition we did that brought in a lot of work from home people, is really what set it off.
I never was much interested. I like going into the office, seeing people, having a routine. Bring my laptop home and back every day just in case sounded like a hassle. I probably wouldn't have worked from home except for a in a few edge cases, but then came this coronavirus pandemic.
My employer has been on the ball since the very first days out of China, with regular updates at our all hands meetings, via email and eventually a dedicated site on the company intranet. We'd long since dialed back non-essential travel, and two weeks ago they conducted some tests to make sure that the work from home infrastructure could support the entire company. For that reason, none of us were surprised when late on the day of Friday, March 13th (ooh, spooky), the C-suite closed the daycare and the diner and the gym and made the call for everyone who could effectively work from home to do so would do so for at least four weeks.
For this past week, I've set up on the kitchen table and VPNed into work. It hasn't been too bad. I wish I had my comfortable work chair, but aside from that everything is fine. There are certainly distractions at home, but for the most part I've been able to focus. And hey, when I have five minutes between meetings I can put dishes away or pet Tulip or something instead of walking to the next meeting room or whatever.
On a side note, the longest I've gone without being in the office was five weeks back when I took my sabbatical, so if this work from home period is extended by just one week, which looks very likely, I may set a new record.
For much of my time at the company, working from home wasn't even an option for my department. It was comparatively recently that we started hiring remote employees who worked from home, and only in the last three years that this became relatively normal. When we had an employee work from some island in Caribbean for a few years that, combined with an acquisition we did that brought in a lot of work from home people, is really what set it off.
I never was much interested. I like going into the office, seeing people, having a routine. Bring my laptop home and back every day just in case sounded like a hassle. I probably wouldn't have worked from home except for a in a few edge cases, but then came this coronavirus pandemic.
My employer has been on the ball since the very first days out of China, with regular updates at our all hands meetings, via email and eventually a dedicated site on the company intranet. We'd long since dialed back non-essential travel, and two weeks ago they conducted some tests to make sure that the work from home infrastructure could support the entire company. For that reason, none of us were surprised when late on the day of Friday, March 13th (ooh, spooky), the C-suite closed the daycare and the diner and the gym and made the call for everyone who could effectively work from home to do so would do so for at least four weeks.
For this past week, I've set up on the kitchen table and VPNed into work. It hasn't been too bad. I wish I had my comfortable work chair, but aside from that everything is fine. There are certainly distractions at home, but for the most part I've been able to focus. And hey, when I have five minutes between meetings I can put dishes away or pet Tulip or something instead of walking to the next meeting room or whatever.
On a side note, the longest I've gone without being in the office was five weeks back when I took my sabbatical, so if this work from home period is extended by just one week, which looks very likely, I may set a new record.