OTR: Working from Home -- 18 Months Later

Fourteen years ago -- yes, I have been sporadically blogging for that long -- I wrote a post called, "The Two Minute Commute". I had forgotten about that post until I re-read it this evening -- after I finally finished this post. It took a while, but I've been living that life now for most of 18 months. What's interesting is how I imagined it would be and how it turned out. Oh, and that long ago work style never happened. Massive downsizing tends to make space available in a company.

For most of the past 25 years, working from home has been an option for me. At first, it involved tying up the household phone line with a noisy modem connection. But I had a laptop and the ability to produce work away from the office. During that time, my home workspace evolved from a cluttered table in the kitchen or basement to a dedicated office space with a door after we did some remodeling.

Early on, working from home was a rarity -- a critical need or weather would force the issue. By 9/11/2001, working from home was more common. I recall being at home on that fateful day and being able to turn the TV on and see what was happening. I was home that day because my wife was ill and we had a pre-school child who needed to be looked after.

Through the next 20 years, I improved my workspace. I bought better monitors; added KVM switches to enable me to easily switch between my work computer and my home computer using the same keyboard, video monitor and mouse; I bought better seating and work surfaces; and I added a TV in my office. Working from home was now a treat -- but mostly a way to avoid bad weather or work while recuperating from some back surgeries where I was able to work, but not drive for a month. So at the point that Covid showed up, I had worked at home for some extended periods and had a comfortable workspace with most of what I needed at hand.

On Monday, March 16, 2020 --  my last day in the office -- I locked up my cabinets, turned off my monitors, and grabbed a few things that I thought would be useful at home. My Dilbert calendar remained on my desk because we expected to be home "for a couple weeks".

I got home, popped my laptop in the docking station I had purchased previously for my home office and took stock. The prior Christmas, my daughters had gifted me with a Samsung 43-inch curved, flat screen monitor (now apparently no longer available). I had been looking for a second monitor for my home setup and stumbled on this monitor instead. It had a built-in KVM switch and after a bit of fiddling, I had gotten it to work seamlessly with my home setup. I knew that I'd like that monitor, but I had no idea how much.

I dug out an old webcam that I hadn't used since my prior job and dusted off a couple sets of USB headphones that I had squirreled away. Up to that point, I had been using headphones with my landline phone for conference calls, but we were shifting to video conferencing with our relocation to home.

That first week was a major learning curve for everyone. With huge numbers of people working remotely, plus schools shifting to remote learning, a lot of technology crashed and burned. Our technology folks moved quickly to deploy new tools and enable capabilities that had only be discussed previously. Co-workers were often scrambling to find places at home to work. But work continued. After all, it would just be for a few weeks...

At the end of May, my employer merged with another company. The merger happened while most of the people who would be involved in making companies come together were working from home. It has been a remarkable process.

As Spring turned to Summer, we began to realize that this would go on for a while. We started scheduling "water cooler meetings" to check in on our teammates and share our latest Amazon purchases or recipes. We had some late afternoon cocktail meetings just to be casual and maintain connections. I hired two employees -- who I never saw except through my monitor. I decided to buy a new office chair -- one that matched my in office ergonomic chair. I found that I could customize it and decided to get a longer piston so I would sit a little higher. Unfortunately, I didn't check dimensions with a tape measure and discovered that the lowest setting on the tall piston put my knees at desktop height. A phone call and FedEx resolved that problem.

Along the way, I did manage to get out a little. A few visits to a friend gave me some change of scenery and company. The Internet kept me working like I had been, minus my big screen and nice chair.

Summer started to turn to Fall, and it looked like we might head back to the office. Some people did, but the check in protocols and in office safety protocols didn't make it very conducive. Covid ramped back up and we all stayed home. I started experimenting with different desk lamps to deal with early darkness and late night meetings.

Fall became Winter and the vaccines started to arrive. Some people went back in again, but we mostly stayed home. Winter turned to Spring. The company started to offer vaccine appointments, with factory workers and scientists who had to be in the building getting first dibs. Eventually, my turn came in April and May and it looked like we might finally be returning to the office. At the end of May, the safety protocols were lifted and I decided to venture back in mid-June.

On June 9, I opened my office door for the first time since I had closed it 450 days previously. There was my Dilbert calendar. There was a 20th anniversary Lucite plaque for someone on my team who had the anniversary while we were gone, and had taken another job in the company during the interim.

There was amazingly little dust and a sign on my desk proclaimed that my office had been sanitized at some point. For the next couple weeks, I went into the office a few times to reacquaint myself with the commute and start to see people I had missed. Traffic wasn't bad and parking was great. The vending machine company, however, had given up on stocking our machines.

Within a couple weeks, we were invited back to the office. We found some treats on our desks to welcome us back.

Most of my team was able to come in, but there were still some challenges. Parents didn't have day care or summer camps for their kids. Office moves weren't happening, so transferred employees couldn't come in to their new location. Then we started to use our "work from home" conferencing technology and had a whole new learning curve. Our conference rooms were mostly set up for audio conferencing and trying to make video conferencing work was... difficult. We had a cookout in the parking lot during week two and ice cream during week three. We started having in-person meetings again. We rediscovered hallway conversations that enabled us to avoid meetings. But the population was definitely not at pre-Covid levels. Parking was quite good, however.

Then Covid got another vote. The in-office safety protocols ramped up again and it seemed pointless to drive for an hour each way so I could lock myself in my office all day. On August 2nd, I locked up my cabinets, turned off the monitors and power strips and went home. The Dilbert calendar came with me this time.

So I'm home again, although if I need to be in the office, it is open. People who have gone in say it is back to being a ghost town.

While I was back in the office, I managed to get my laptop replaced -- it was getting very long in the tooth and showing its four and a half years of use. That led to a new set up at home that wasn't working as well as the old setup for some reason. The new computer didn't like the way it was switched over to the monitor and was fussing about USB connections. I decided to turn to Amazon for a new KVM setup and after a couple days, that seems to have solved the problem. That gave me a good excuse to reorganize the wiring spaghetti and do some dusting. 

It's hard to say how long this work at home period will last. I suspect that we may not return to "normal" for a while. One thing is for certain, our expectations about where we work won't be the same.

ATR: Technology Marches On

I actually started this musing a couple years ago, but  never quite finished it. Publishing it today, ahead of a completely new post.

*****

I was talking with someone, and it occurred to me that if you are roughly 45 years old or younger, you have likely never worked in an office setting that didn't have email.

My daughter, who teaches high school, reminds me that every kid in high school has been born in this century. The Kindergarten class of 2001 are starting to pick up their Doctorates.

Tempus fugit.

I often shake my head at the apparent pace of change in the workplace. Twenty years ago, it was a rare hotel that offered Internet access. Today, we complain if a hotel doesn't have a reliable connection, no matter where the hotel is.

Let me step through the changes over the past thirty years or so...

In 1985, when I first started working in an office setting, a desktop computer was a novelty. You'd see some computer terminals that were used to access mainframe applications, but the average worker was using paper and pen. You may have had a typewriter at your desk, or shared one with a few others. If you were a boss, you had someone to type your memos and letters. Everything was likely paper-based. Memos were copied and circulated by Inter-office mail. Letters went out through the postal service or, for something urgent, a facsimile machine was available. A reply to a letter might come in a week or so.

In 1988, I started my second job. I walked in to the office and saw a brand new desktop computer at my workspace. I had little idea of what to do with it. I had a learning curve. At first, it was a glorified typewriter. But I learned that we could design forms and start to create databases and spreadsheets. Then we networked the computers in the office together. We could share files and more effectively share the printers. But it was still paper-oriented. We were still an organization of memos and letters, but we could create more of them, faster.

By 1992, when I started my next job, I expected to find a computer at my desk. These were networked for printer and file sharing and we had something called PROFS installed on the computer. PROFS enabled us to email other people in the company. It even had a point to point single line texting capability.

At home, I bought a computer in 1993 and started using America On-Line. It was an isolated world, but I could get email from far-flung places using something called the Internet.

In 1996, the consulting firm I joined handed me a laptop computer. I was amazed when I walked into an office in another city, plugged in my computer, and it worked just like it did in my normal office.

In 1998, my next employer also gave me a laptop -- from here on out, I never used a desktop computer. Shortly after I joined the company, I traveled to another city and found myself in a hotel with Internet access. The firm was trying out a new way to get email over the Internet and I was once again amazed at a new breakthrough.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, I stopped using dial up and started using DSL and had full time Internet availability at home.

Email was rapidly becoming a problem. For a company with over 10,000 employees, email had piled up to over 3 Terabytes of data and was expensive to maintain. We put a project together to reduce the storage by one-third and save $3,000,000 a year.

When I started a new job in 2007, I attended a meeting early on about the storage problem we were having with our document management system. It had passed 50 Terabytes and people were becoming concerned. We quickly determined, however, that the cost of storage was actually a minor point and the cost of holding meetings to discuss storage costs was probably more expensive than the storage we would eliminate.

By 2017, when I started my current job, a terabyte hard drive on a laptop or desktop computer was a common thing. You expected to walk in to your workspace and find two wide screen computer screens set up. And now the cloud is coming on strong. Access to work email and stored files is as close as your mobile device. Not having that access is seen as "behind the times".

I sometimes think about my work journey. When I started working, I carried a huge briefcase because I was going out in the field and filling out paper forms that needed to be brought back to the office and sent to someone to type up. Today, I carry a smaller computer bag, with very little paper in it, but a whole lot of access to data. Heck, the mobile phone on my belt can enable me to work anywhere on the planet at any time, as long as I have a data or wi-fi connection. We produce data at prodigious rates. Email is our primary means of communication. We easily communicate globally. Libraries of information are at our fingertips. The people coming to the workplace take all this for granted. They expect things to happen quickly.

My former career was based upon managing records. In 1985, those records were mostly paper. Today, they are seldom paper -- or only exist in paper form for a brief period of time. I passed someone in the hall one day carrying three big accordion files of paper records. He had found them and was on his way to the shredder.