dbd33

Today the city where the office is made parking free for April. Plainly they don't expect anyone to be driving there for another month. I'm not expecting to go back into the office until the end of this contract, June 30th, and probably not before the end of the project, January 31st. At some point I suppose a new sofa will have to be ordered from the internet.

The one thing I hope will change is that everyone now works many more hours; partly for infrastructure reasons, the cell phone network is often too busy to use, the VPN creaks. Big layoffs should help with that. Partly because, if you don't live in the country, there's nothing else to do. It's a bother to go out to deal with the trees broken over the winter only to be called back to help with installing some weird software thingy; that happened less frequently when people took evenings and weekends off.

BristolUK

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...hell-out-of-me

DandNHill

I work from home unless I have to go out for showings. Not many of those right now obviously... But my laptop is used for it's true purpose...lap top...I dit on my couch and work. My husband doesn't understand how I do it but I get whatever I need done. Occasionally I sit at the table but 99% of my work is sitting on the couch!!

scrubbedexpat091

Kind a wish I had a job that could be done from home, if anything would at least help pass time.

dbd33

Indeed. Last night nothing much was happening so I wrote a Cobol program. I got paid and I was able to hone my skills at the forefront of technology. All without leaving the sofa.

scrubbedexpat091

I didn't leave the couch either, but I also didn't get paid, but I did finish Tiger King, now need to find something else, finished Ozark as well this week oh and reddit, it passes time as well.

Partially discharged

So do you think Carol Baskin buried her husband under the septic tank ? What a crazy world of critters inhabits the big cat world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comme...drinking_game/

I'll be watching Ozark soon I think along with Sunderland till I die.

scrubbedexpat091

Well I wouldnt be surprised if she was somehow incolved in his disappearance. Seems to be a lot of shady folk involved in general.

Hopefully Ozark will be renewed but bet its 2 years at least at this point. Took like 1.5 years for most recent. The kids will be adults lol

Gozit

JSmth...food for thought - have you ever considered getting into IT? You seem to be decent at using computers, (most people I work with wouldn't even be able to navigate around BE, so i'd say pretty much all regular posters on here are a step above the average person for using a computer.) Barrier to entry is low, college not absolutely required although it does help a tonne. But if you use your time at home to hone some skills, get a couple industry certifications, (the most common entry level one is CompTIA A+ for basic hardware and software troubleshooting) and you could have a tier 1 helpdesk job making considerably more then minimum wage.

You seem to have worked in customer service in the past, so you'd have that as an asset as well.

Pulaski

I could never do that - I am too used to using a multiscreen set up and having several applications running simultaneously - typically a couple of spreadsheets, Word, Outlook (plus a couple of emails), Skype IM, and an IE browser window with 8-10 tabs open - I couldn't imagine shuffling all those windows on a single lap top screen.

dbd33

Then how do you travel?

Pulaski

I walk, between my bedroom and kitchen which are downstairs, and my office, which is upstairs.

The nearest thing to business travel I have had in four years was going to my old office half a dozen times in the past year, but they were for meetings, and during the day I pretty much only used my computer for checking email.

dbd33

If you go on holiday do you take all that stuff with you or, when work arises, can you cope with just the laptop? I deliberately don't use any awkward peripherals so as to be able to anywhere there's internet.

Oakvillian

This is pretty much me as well. Apart from shuffling applications, I also find my laptop screen very small for working for anything over about half an hour or so if I'm on the road and between meetings, but I'm mostly deskbound. At home, as in the office, I have two additional screens to supplement the laptop, and several applications running. Currently the count is something like Outlook (three windows - inbox/calendar/currently open email), Excel (two windows), Chrome (8 tabs on one session and an incognito session with two more), Edge (two tabs and one in-private window), Teams, OneNote, VoIP phone app, Word, and a screen-capture video app (Camtasia). Oh, and a Safari browser running on an iPad too. That's about usual for me; there's sometimes a couple of Adobe Creative Suite apps open as well, but not today.

Mind you, we're pretty busy. The company I work for makes software that manages workflow for team email inboxes (stuff like sales@, customerservice@, etc) - a lot of organizations who can typically manage that process manually because they're all in the same room are now struggling to organize everything remotely; our software helps that process. Our CEO took the decision a couple of weeks ago that we would offer our software free for all users until the end of June - we had already seen a pickup in business but really didn't want to give the impression we were in any way profiting from others' misfortunes.

CanadaJimmy

Apparently NJ is desperately looking for COBOL programmers!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-...nt-system.html