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Working From Home

grendel

By grendel
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grendel

grendel

Posted
Posted

Lets hear your good and bad sides of working from home.

bad sides for me -

only a single screen, I normally have 3 at work, now I am down to a single one, with CAD drawings this means flicking between my sketch I am working from, memorising the measurements, then flicking back to CAD to draw the bit I just memorised.

companionship, I am used to working in a busy office full of people and the interactions between people, somehow at home - even with my daughter working in the adjacent room, its just not the same.

Good things

reduced travel costs, saving a fortune not driving over 600 miles a week

boat coffee in the morning ( a shot of rum in the coffee really helps the day along)

comfortable clothing, I can slob around in comfy clothing rather than 'smart casual'

All targets are out of the window, work are just happy for any output they can get from you as it is keeping the business running (as we are a utility supplier, we still have work coming in as construction sites are at present still open, plus we have networks to keep working, we anticipate a reduction in workloads as the lockdown carries on, but most of us have back burner work we can fall back on, at least 90% of the company are currently working from home, with just our construction teams and engineers going out to site.

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BroadAmbition

BroadAmbition

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Upside - Getting all those 'Back Burner' / 'Round Tuit' jobs around the house done at last / not adding mileage on Trevor / Still alive with no virus as of yet / Can keep up to date with threads on the NBN

Downside in no particular order:-

Slowly going bankrupt / No shooting of any kind / No pub once a week / No chip oil on a Friday / No visits to 'B.A' of any description - There's maintenance & upgrade items outstanding let along cruising the rivers / no visits to see kids and Grandkids / no visits to see family / No visits to see friends / No Tiger riding / Social events cancelled / Not knowing when this partial lockdown will end / Not knowing if this partial lockdown will increase to a full lockdown / Local council waste disposal sites closed / Green bins not being collected / Not being able to organise a Golden Retriever puppy gundog or being able to pay for it / No football / No visits to the lap-dancing club - Hang on, I wasn't allowed to do that anyway / Not being allowed to work and earn a living / Can't support me and mine let alone help out family / Having to spend every waking moment with MrsG at close quarters, She is understandably well chuffed!

That enough to be going on with?

Griff

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SPEEDTRIPLE

SPEEDTRIPLE

Posted
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Seeing as I'm in the aircraft manufacturing industry, I actually build things with my hands, so the question is a bit irrelavent.. 

Karen however, the downsides for her working from home are increased energy costs, gas central heating, and electricity, using our box room as free office space, using our laptop for work, and my time required to set it all up, which being one evening should be payed for at overtime rates. Then there's tea / coffee, which we get free vend at work, the use of our broad band, the list goes on. 

The only up side for Karen is she DOES'NT need to use her car. 

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Jbx5

Jbx5

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Regarding the dog Griff Mrs B was reading on Champ dog that there are quite a few breeders stuck with there puppies at the moment as people cant travel to view or collect them fun fun ! We were going to breed our youngest Lab this year but will leave it until early next year now.

John

 

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OldBerkshireBoy

OldBerkshireBoy

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Right now I`m stuffed all ways up my with work and social life however for my nephew who sells software and all that jazz for employee`s to work from home life in the main couldn`t be better.

Doesn`t have to wear suit and tie (well only the top half when doing conference calls via laptop), no travelling costs, no large bar bills from being out with his drinking buddies and smashing his sales target by 200%. Downside includes cost of tea/coffee at home and having a mother who took to bed self isolating last week having a little bell she rings demanding a cuppa!

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webntweb

webntweb

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, grendel said:

 

Only a single screen, I normally have 3 at work, now I am down to a single one, with CAD drawings this means flicking between my sketch I am working from, memorising the measurements, then flicking back to CAD to draw the bit I just memorised.

This takes me back to when I started my company in 1990 after being made redundant.

I had been a compositor working with hot metal, so I had to teach myself about computer typesetting/artwork (which was in its early days) from scratch.

Because at the time the main software for this type of work was American it was based on Apple Macs.

I started with a couple of Mac IIx's and two monitors, one B&W the other a 20" colour Sony which alone cost £2,000 (work that out at today's prices).

Anyway back to the point. When using the different softwares: Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, when you wanted to switch between any of them you had to save, quit out, open the other software, do the work, save, quit out, open etc, and this was when computers and software were really slow, not only to work on but to open the software.

I had two computers but even that wasn't an advantage as they used a SCSI interface (no usb back then) which at that time wasn't hot swappable. So to transfer something on a scsi external drive meant saving everything, quitting all software, shutting both computers down to move the drive from one machine to the other then booting everything up again- it's a wonder we ever got any work done.

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grendel

grendel

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been there - done that, in the early days of CAD we had Unix CAD machines, and one pc, every file had to be ftp'd across from the main unix servers to work on them, and then ftp'd back when you had finished, and the PC was about half as fast as the (slow) CAD unix machines.

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YnysMon

YnysMon

Posted
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Last week I was just glad that I made the effort to get into the office and bring home my laptop docking station, two screens, keyboard and mouse. Last week was a bit frantic, several long working days trying to consolidate information, so that made things a lot easier. Today has been a slow day, despite me emailing colleagues to say I can take on anything urgent. I’ve had three short spells on the allotment, between rain showers and email checking. 

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Jonathan

Jonathan

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 hours ago, grendel said:

only a single screen, I normally have 3 at work, now I am down to a single one, with CAD drawings this means flicking between my sketch I am working from, memorising the measurements, then flicking back to CAD to draw the bit I just memorised.

Being a "tech" I'm sure you have thought of this, but most televisions have wireless networking now.  I have a relatively small (these days!) HD resolution screen TV.  In Windows 10, all that you need to do is settings/system/display/connect to a wireless display (shortcut Win+K), then choose the TV from the list. and set it up as an extended display in the usual way.  You might be able to find a TV that you could use as a monitor at the supermarket whilst on the food run.

Edited by Jonathan
typo
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SwanR

SwanR

Posted
Posted

I don't think that I'm as productive with this home working lark!! I've settled into a later lazier start without having to get out to beat the traffic into town. I live so close to the office that my savings on commuting are negligible. And my husband had to reorganise the house to give me an office space.

Still ... it is what it is ... and there is no choice. I work with schools and the staff are still working either from home or on site. So we have work still coming in.

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Jonathan

Jonathan

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47 minutes ago, grendel said:

I am already running a 32" monitor via hdmi from the laptop. its just CAD uses the full screen and if I had a sketch up alongside CAD would be too small to be useful.

Assuming that the graphics card can cope with it then "project" (or Win+P) allows the TV to be an extended display; so that both documents (applications) can have "their own screen".  I use this when displaying powerpoint presentations, where the TV shows the presentation, and the PC has the presenter's notes and "next" etc.. 

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HEM

HEM

Posted
Posted
23 hours ago, grendel said:

Lets hear your good and bad sides of working from home.

My last employment (for just short of 20 years) was with Sun Microsystems / Oracle where I ended up in Global Hardware Support (mostly involved with the introduction of new hardware products).  Reached retirement age just over 2 years ago.

I'm not sure when I started working from Home Office but it was for probably about 15 of those years.  I have to say that none of my immediate colleagues were in the local office - I had one team guy (also a Brit) in Dusseldorf, two in Denver & managers either in Belgium or in the US.  My children were already of school age & I had a separate room for work.

The advantages:

- Avoided the 30-45 minute drive each way through Hamburg traffic & could put that time to better purpose.
- Able to concentrate much better on my work without being disturbed.
- Flexible time-wise: could take a few hours in the morning for the fitness center & then be available in my evening for conference calls.  My last manager was in San Francisco area with 9 hours time difference - we had a one-hour "meeting" every 2 weeks!

The disadvantages:

- One missed snippets of useful information that come from chance overhearing of conversations in the office.
- Tendency to become a hermit & still be in pajamas at 11am.
- When you do go into local office for quarterly work's council briefing or similar you get met with "oh - you are still here!"

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ChrisB

ChrisB

Posted
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I have always suffered with "Empty In-Tray syndrome". I like to get stuck-in, get finished and start the next job. 

Even after nearly 15 years of retirement it was not a problem, as when the gardening and house were done there was the boat, walks on the saltmarsh, picnics and visiting places far and wide.

But now I am having to pace my jobs, in case I run out of things to keep me occupied. Jobs outside on nice days, inside on bad and longer and longer walks to pass the time.

Luckily my track turns into this:-

Taken today.

20200331_112533.thumb.jpg.7fdc3c731ee619aab96a410748d1e302.jpg

20200331_104129.thumb.jpg.d9c51edc9f82e6bff51b39e310f042cc.jpg

I walked for 2 hours on a circular route and saw a lady on a bicycle as I crossed a lane and a chap with a black lab about 200yds away. 

For some time before Coronavirus I had been thinking it would be nice to try a more urban environment, with coffee shops and restaurants that I could walk to. Now I am glad that I was too lazy to do anything about it.

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Cockatoo

Cockatoo

Posted
Posted

Debs is working from home and the upside for her is being able to work in her pj's. When they have their twice daily conference call it's amazing the number that don't turn their cameras on lol.

18 hours ago, OldBerkshireBoy said:

Please spare a thought for all those unable to work from home and those that will "Fall through the cracks" of the goverment scheme because they recently changed jobs therefore are unable to receive any help.

I think there will be quite a few of those :(

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