The Office

I chose to take the train into the office today. That marks the second day I’ve been in since the office re-opened on May 16th. Not exactly spending a lot of time here. I took the train because tonight there’s a club gravel ride, and I didn’t think I’d feel up to it if I rode to the office and home again today. The train ride was disappointing: despite the fact that Calgary Transit mandates people wear masks in the stations and on trains, fewer than half of the riders were masked. I can see that I won’t be going to the office on days that I can’t ride. 😷

I’m getting my office setup together, but it’s still a step down from working from home. The biggest issue is sound isolation. At home, sound is never an issue unless Murphy comes in and starts talking to me. And I’m not bugging anyone. But here it can go both ways. I’ve got some sound isolation in the form of headphones and music and with only one other person here in the consulting area today, it’s more than fine. But what if it’s really busy?

I’ve got everything I need to work, but:

• I’m still waiting for IT to help get my laptop and iPhone onto the corporate WiFi network. Not being in charge of the IT here is a pain.
• My external monitor is bigger than my laptop screen, but it’s low res crap. I just put Outlook and Teams over there and then use the laptop display for work.
• In the interests of not streaming media at work (it’s a bit of a gray area in the personal use exemptions for the company network), I’ve got my iPod! 🤓 Tammy’s anniversary gift to me in 2007 keeps on giving! It’s moved out of being outdated and into retro-cool.
• Speaking of outdated, when I came in on May 16th, I realized that I didn’t have a keyboard at work, because I’d taken the Apple Bluetooth one home at the beginning of the pandemic and now Tammy’s using it. I searched the office and found this classic Microsoft one. It’s the same one that I got when I joined Esri Canada a billion years ago. See it here? It was already old then. It’s mine again.

I still am on the fence about returning to the office. On one hand, it’s better. There’s an intangible effect of being in the office. Maybe it’s just the change, but it gets away from the malaise of working from home. But on the other hand, the commuting time takes away from other things, and my train experience this morning was not encouraging. How Miranda has stayed healthy this long is a mystery to me. I could just cut and run and declare that I will work from home, or I could continue with sporadic office visits. If they become more regular over time, I could see needing to fix things like my monitor quality issue.

Time will tell.