Friday, February 23, 2007

On working from home and rambling stories going nowhere, seemingly pointlessly.


*
Today, since I’m still sick (sorry iamnot, but I am) I worked from home. Yesterday I was IMing with a coworker and mentioned I was working from home although it was pretty much forbidden per company policy to do so. My coworker stated that she worked from home from time to time (she has two young kids) as did her boss but didn’t understand it was against company policy and why were we issued laptops if we couldn’t work remotely, anyway? I stated that was just what I had been told a while back when another coworker told me the story of some guy who had worked in our office but decided to buy a big chunk of land out in some Midwestern state and intended on working remotely until he was told otherwise. Evidently he hadn’t cleared it with his supervisor and had a rude awakening after moving out to the middle of nowhere and being forced to commute 2 hours each way to the nearest Hugs and Kisses office. Fun, imagine buying a plot of land to get away from the rat race and end up having to drag your ass about 120 miles each direction, five days a week, anyway. That would seriously have to suck and I think I would have to have some sort of conniption fit or pass out like those fine southern ladies used to in old movies back when women wore corsets and were the weaker sex.

But I digress (that’s for you Shawna) so let’s just go ahead and travel back in time to my original thought about working from home. So, my coworker was surprised we couldn’t work from home and I told her I didn’t know if it was true or not but I wasn’t going to change my practices either way since I’ve been on many a team conference calls with my boss---who was on speaker phone---and unless she has a grandfather’s clock and a barking dog in her cube I suspected she works from home as well. With that statement my coworker said that I was funny and hoped my cube was going to be close to hers after the huge remodel in our office is complete next month! I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about that subject yet. So the office space my branch now occupies is cavernous, huge, I tell ya. The area my sole cube is situated in is probably 20 x 50 feet (imagine if you will a single cube sitting in that kind of a s p a c e ) and I’m the only one there---mind you, the only cube in that entire space to be exact! I can go a whole day without seeing a soul!-----which is exactly what I told my coworker stating that I see no reason to commute 45 minutes each way (if I’m lucky) to sit by myself and not see a single other employee all day. I can be lonely and unloved without wasting all that gas and getting out of my pj’s, thank you very much. But I digress again (and again, that’s for you Shawna) because I was talking about the remodel. Well, the office park our office is situated in has H&K smack next door to this company that manufactures some sort of miracle bandages that are quite popular with our boys in Iraq, so you can imagine that business is BOOMING!!! (Please note caps and multiple punctuations, that’s how popular those band aids are) and they therefore need more room, more square footage to be exact, to make more lifesaving bandages. And since there’s only 5 bodies in our huge ass warehouse of an office, the band aid company asked if they could blow out a wall and take over some of our acreage. Sidebar: at the risk of being douced, H&K is about the worst run company I have ever come across so any “easy” way to cut costs (ie: layoffs), as opposed to actually changing processes and making the company more efficient and the like, is jumped upon. All this said---and I’m kind of getting lightheaded from all these twists and turns this post is acquiring---come March our office will become a swirling dustbin of smashed walls and torn up carpet, and that’s no place for hard working slaves like us H&K drones. So we will be forced into mandatory WORK FROM HOME mode. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m heartbroken to be deprived my tightly knit office environment and all that other happy horseshit associated therein. When I told the Roomate about having to be forced to work from home he made some offhand comment about sleeping in and extra long lunch hour naps, but I know he understands how this upheaval will affect me. He understands, hell, he works there, too.


Now the interesting part is my boss (said with a straight face) will be coming to town next month and expects to spend a day with me at the office. And by office I do NOT mean my house. So let’s just make sure that’s straight from the start. She’s not taking a 2 hour lunch time nap with me, I don’t care how big my work-from-home-bed is. Period.
*Not my current work cube but you get the drift.

3 comments:

Sounds like BOY-tek said...

you lost me at work.

Gnomeself Be True said...

With a bit of air and enough bandwidth, I could do my job from the moon.
Unfortunately, we have a policy against telecomuting.

Shawna said...

Man, crazy, I thought you jumped ship from blogging, it's only shown the sniff snort post for DAYS, I log on today and see all this. Blogger sucks balls.

Thanks for digressing for me Sue. I KNEW someone would have to do that....