1. We give out full size candies 2. Make a listing of all costumes 3. Make a timelapse movie
Michele carved a pumpkin
I let the kids choose their favorite candy themselves. This can sometimes lead to a prolonged choosing process and debate. The moments of “OMG” and “wow” are wonderful as they realize the candies are full size.
Hearing the kids get excited about full size candies makes it all worth it. Airheads were popular last year and we bought 4 boxes this year. Every single one was taken.
When people come to the door, I ask every person what they were dressed as and wrote down their answers. I am careful to ask what they are, accepting their answers rather than interpreting what I see.
The time-lapse takes place over a little more than three hours that is reduced to just under two minutes for your viewing pleasure.
One of the Elsas that visitedThe interesting Forky costumeThe iconic ghost chatted with meBeekeepers showed up! We chatted for a bit and I gave them some of our honey.
You can see the clipboard I use to write down what the kids tell me they are dressed as.
A big bump in visitors this year. Quite a busy night.
No surprises with the top costumes many of the generic favorites toward the top, with stronger showing by the girl costumes for Elsa and Spidergirl. Several complicated Anime costumes were on display, but a bit esoteric for me to recognize easily.
This year’s complete costume list of 182 people:
1 Air Force Pilot 1 Among Us 2 Anime Person 1 Anna 1 Aoi from Demon Slayer 1 Ariel 1 Army Man 1 Astronaut 1 Baby 1 Baby Shark 2 Banana 1 Basketball Player 2 Beekeeper 1 Bendy 2 Black Panther 1 Captain Jack Sparrow 2 Cat 2 Cheerleader 1 Cher from Clueless 1 Cholo 3 Chucky 3 Clown 1 Cookie Monster 1 Corpse Bride 1 Cowgirl 1 Darth Maul 1 Dead Lumberjack 1 Deadly Doll 1 Deer 1 Demigorgon 1 Dino Ranch 1 Dinosaur 1 Doctor 1 Dosamma Dosa 1 Dracula 1 Dragon 2 Edward Scissorhands 1 Elastagirl 2 Eleven from Stranger Things 4 Elsa 1 Famous Skeleton 3 Fireman 1 Forky 1 Fortnite Character 1 Ghost 1 Ghostbuster 1 Ghostface 1 Gir from Invader Zim 1 God of Death 1 Green Guy 3 Grim Reaper 1 Grim Reaper from Fortnite 1 Gudetama 1 Guy who got picked up by an alien 1 Hacker 1 Harry Potter 1 Hermoine 1 Hot Dog 1 Huggy Wuggy 1 Iris Wilson 2 Jack Skellington 1 Jesse Pinkman 1 Jester 1 Justin 1 Kim Possible 1 Ladybug 1 Lava Girl 1 Lebron James 1 Leonardo TMNT 1 Lion 1 Little Red Riding Hood 1 Luigi 1 Lumberjack 1 Mandalorian 1 Marty McFly 1 Mexican 1 Mexican Witch 1 Michael Jackson 1 Michael Meyers 1 Mickey Mouse 1 Monster High Doll 1 Mormon 1 Mummy 1 Murderer 2 Naruto 1 Neighbor from Home Improvement 1 Nerd who works for Meta 2 Ninja 1 Pain 1 Penguin 1 Pennywise 2 Plague Doctor 1 Playboy 1 Policeman 1 Pom Pom Purin 1 Princess 1 Princess Peach 2 Prisoner 1 Quiet Girl 1 Rabbit 1 Radioactive Person 1 Rainbow Fairy 1 Random Costume 1 Rapunzel 1 Robot 1 Robot from Evanglion 1 Sally 1 Sam from Trick or Treat 3 Scarecrow 1 Scary 1 Shark 1 Sith Trooper 4 Skeleton 1 Skunk 1 Slim Shady 3 Snow White 1 Sondra from Demon Slayer 1 Sonic the Hedgehog 1 South Pas High School Cross Country 3 Spidergirl 3 Spiderman 1 Spongebob Squarepants 1 Squid Games 1 Stitch 1 Strawberry Shortcake 1 Superman 2 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle 1 The Joker 3 The Purge 1 The Weeknd 1 Thor 1 Tiger 1 Trea Turner of the Dodgers 1 Turtle 4 Unicorn 1 Wendy from Wendy’s 3 Witch 1 Zombie 1 Zombie Girl
I let the kids choose their favorite candy themselves. This can sometimes lead to a prolonged choosing process and debate. The moments of “OMG” and “wow” are wonderful as they realize the candies are…
It’s been almost two years since my company sent everyone to work from home due to the pandemic, but I’ve been in the office, keeping the lights green and the wheels spinning.
I wrote a short piece on what the first year was like. The tl;dr is the beginning was crazy, inventing a way to do our work from home, the middle was people beginning to get used to the new way of work, and the end was wondering what life would be like in the Aftertimes.
This is your update for those keeping score at home.
The second year began with the rush to get vaccinated, a topic of the watercooler talk that the limited skeleton crew engaged in daily. Before vaccines became politics instead of public health, the desire to get the shot was a big deal. People exchanging tips on how to get a slot and talk about the differences between the types of vaccines.
Our work is a lot of video and graphics post-production that requires specialized hardware and systems. The first methods we put in were good, but not great. We didn’t have a lot of choice in the early days of the pandemic, but now people were complaining. As with many things in technology, amazing innovation gets taken for granted after a short amount of time.
The basics in place for a return to the ‘hybrid’ office
So the team did a lot of work to put in a third generation of work from home tech: Zero Clients, Teradici, Leostream, DMZ servers, etc. Getting this done in the Beforetimes would have been hard, but considering the hurdles in place from cybersecurity, procurement, licensing, and literally just racking hardware on a locked down studio lot, it took calling in every favor we had to get it working.
In the meantime, other execs were getting pretty demanding about getting everything running faster, better, cheaper. They had adapted to WFH and all our miracles from the year before were expected as a bare minimum.
The new solutions required us sending equipment to people and getting them to stop using the old methods to move onto the New & Improved methods. This was slowed by a couple facts.
First, people have moved away from the local area. I can’t say I blame them. But now we were dealing with a workforce spread across the United States. No longer would a simple courier do. We were now in the business of packing up and shipping full kits, including monitors, all over the place. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but on top of all the other tasks the on-site team had to do, making these shipping arrangements and hauling boxes across the lot to the mailroom was a pain. Hearing complaints about slow delivery had me resort to getting up from my desk and walking a lap around the floor to calm my emotions to avoid saying how I felt in the moment.
Second, people hate it when you move their cheese. Even though the old system was not as good as the new, people became accustomed to it. We’d send new kits, and they would stay unopened or unused. Invariably, we’d receive a report about slow remote performance and then find that the person never started using the system we had put effort into building out and sending to them. It’s hard not to feel emotion over this kind thing. Hard to put into words. Maybe a kind of disrespect or dismissiveness about the kind of work we do on a daily basis? We tried to never let it show, as it wouldn’t be helpful, but it leaves a mark after you feel those things.
Outside of our normal role in technology and operations support, our division felt that year two was a good time for a major re-org and moving entire floors of people from building to building. Not a bad thing, but with hardly anyone on the lot, it’s a lot of complicated planning. The enterprise IT team did decide to do a major upgrade to people’s workplaces in terms of monitors and other desktop gear. This was a great idea that will make a difference in the long run to have large new monitors and other new kit to plug laptops into. I am glad this expensive decision was made to help out the average staff member.
That left us to coordinate several complicated things: moving the technical post-production gear, deploying new desktop hardware, reconfiguring conference room systems, new networking requirements, and the decommission some edit rooms and the build out a few new ones. With actual construction required to pull it off, time was of the essence to get plans locked in and get the work done in the elaborate sequencing needed to get it done smoothly.
However, no proposed floor seating plan survives contact with senior executives. It is known.
As a result, the floor plan is delayed later and later causing issues for all the trades, which were under tight deadlines to somehow have everything ready for a Return To Office (RTO) in early Fall 2021. This seemed impossible at the time.
Fate intervened, and the “RTO” date kept getting pushed out further and further, as the virus surges continued. Target dates went from September to October, then to January. When Omicron hit, the company went back to bare minimum status and the early returners were sent home and once again we were down to 5–6 people on a floor meant for 300.
Non-stop construction
A word about the trades. Like our team, work from home didn’t apply to the others on-site getting stuff done. Year one was full of overdue maintenance projects and a lot of things that benefitted from no one being in the buildings.
We worked alongside the various carpenters, laborers, sparkys, tin-knockers, tapers, and other trades dealing with the extensive rules of COVID safety. No one complained. But there was a common frustration with “the managers” that expected work to proceed at Beforetimes pace, even if supplies were slow to arrive and just getting on the lot required going through the gauntlet of temperature checks, questionnaires, and other health safety theater.
Our group is lucky to have free drinks and snacks on our floor and shared them openly with everyone. We’re all in this together and have to help each other out, even with the small things. Getting a free bag of Doritos in the middle of a hard day can make a difference to someone. That idea seems to be lost on the national level these days.
The other group to talk about is the Human Resources (HR) teams, who also have been pushed to the limit. The constantly changing rules about safety, who can come into the office, how to handle the constant churn of people moving on to other companies, onboarding folks that have never set foot in our building, and dealing with all the drama about vaccine rules.
They must need hipboots to wade through all the bullshit surrounding them. Getting decisions handed down from the highest part of the corporate structure, and then trying to work with line managers to implement these complicated plans that look nice on presentation decks, but are unworkable in the real world. Couldn’t pay me enough to deal with that kind of stuff.
In my year one piece, I talked a bit about what it was like to walk into other people’s offices and see their personal items. Our second year included a reorg that resulted in layoffs. Adding in the office moves, we were in other people offices a lot.
The Facilities team helped a lot with the packing needed, but we often got asked to retrieve some personal items for co-workers that had been let go. I was happy to help, but it sucked to be the one packing up their old life into cardboard boxes at such an uncertain time.
Desks are full of photos and mementos that are worthless to most, but priceless to the owners. Tossing them into cardboard boxes haphazardly felt kind of disrespectful to be honest.
Meeting people outside as they handed off their badges, phone, and other company stuff since I was the only exec around is in the no fun category of management. I guess tearful goodbye hugs in a once in a century pandemic has become the norm. Doesn’t make it any easier.
After spending most of the fall and winter prepping the building, working with our local IT and facilities teams, we are ready for the long awaited “RTO” when people return to our building. Things are prepared to allow people to work ‘hybrid’, meaning a couple days at home and couple days in the office. Each group and department is going to do things a little differently, but we are as prepared as we can be.
I have to keep in mind that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy and be ready to adapt to new, unplanned needs.
The truth is I’m exhausted. The team is exhausted. The trades are exhausted. While the work from home folks may have found their happy place, it feels like we have carried the org on our backs for two years and many seem to take this for granted.
Seeing other people dialing in while sitting in the sun outside or hearing about trips to Hawaii while we’re sitting here trying to keep the wheels on takes its toll on empathy for others.
And I have it fucking easy. I can’t imagine what nurses, grocery clerks, wait staff, delivery folks, and others have to deal with with an increasingly selfish public. There’s an awful lot of hard working people out there fed up with this bullshit and the baffling expectations that people have these days.
Yes, I know that the people working from home are working hard and have their own struggles with the situation. While the remote work situation does allow business to get done, it really doesn’t let people get in sync emotionally and create the empathy and understanding needed to keep a team together. Humans are are just monkeys with clothes on and emotions drive a huge amount of how we react to each other.
I try to de-stress by eating my lunch out on a dusty balcony away from my computer and just watch TikTok for a bit. I still water the plants and try to keep these mascots from fading away.
I just don’t know when we get to an ‘end’. The need for all this remote tech isn’t going away. Ever. They are hiring people in Massachusetts, Georgia, Florida, and many staff have moved away permanently. This new second job and tech stack is here to stay.
People talk of the ‘new normal’, but I don’t know what that really means.
If I have learned anything over the last two years, it’s that people are more adaptable and inventive than I thought possible. That is a good thing. Too bad it came at such a cost to learn.
My mantra for the pandemic has been ‘Maintain your chill’, written on the wall behind my desk. I’ve done my best. Hopefully the Aftertimes will allow a little recharge of our collective chill.
It’s been almost two years since my company sent everyone to work from home due to the pandemic, but I’ve been in the office, keeping the lights green and the wheels spinning. I wrote a short piece…
1. We give out full size candies 2. Make a listing of all costumes 3. Make a timelapse movie
~200 Full Size Candies
I let the kids choose their favorite candy themselves. This can sometimes lead to a prolonged choosing process and debate. The moments of “OMG” and “wow” are wonderful as they realize the candies are full size.
Hearing the kids get excited about full size candies makes it all worth it. The Airheads were the first pick of most, so we’ll get a lot more next year.
When people come to the door, I ask every person what they were dressed as and wrote down their answers. I am careful to ask what they are, accepting their answers rather than interpreting what I see.
The time-lapse takes place over a little more than three hours that is reduced to just over two minutes for your viewing pleasure.
Michele carved us nice pumpkins!
This Halloween makes it 16 years of data to compare, though 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. We did not give out candy in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Here are the top ten costumes for the last sixteen years compared.
No big surprises this year. Squid Game related costumes were new. ‘Frat Boy’ is what a group of teenagers called themselves since they were wearing no costume. No politics related costumes at all.
Our total number of visitors was down a bit to 131, no doubt due to coronavirus concerns. Also, several homes on our street had their lights off and probably lead to lower traffic to our house.
This year’s complete costume list of 131 people:
1 “I forget” 1 50s Girl 1 Ariel 1 Arrow 1 Astronaut 1 Baseball Player 2 Bat 1 Batgirl 1 Batman 1 Beach Boy 1 Black Witch 1 Bunny 1 Captain America 1 Cat 1 Chocolate Cat 1 Cinderella 1 Clown 1 Cow 1 Cowboy 1 Cowgirl 1 Da Babby 1 Dead Skateboarder 1 Death Mask 2 Dinosaur 1 Dog 2 Dogwalker 1 Elmo 2 Elsa 1 Evie 1 Face Makeup 1 Farmer 1 Firday Night Funkin 1 Firefighter 4 Frat Boy 1 Freddy Krueger 1 Frog 1 Gask Mask Person 1 Ghostface 1 Good Ship Everstuck 1 Grim Reaper 1 Guy being kidnapped by an alien 1 Harley Quinn 3 Harry Potter 1 Hermoine Granger 1 Homeless Person 1 Hush 2 Jabberwocky Dancer 3 Jack Skellington 1 Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body 1 Joel from Love & Monsters 1 Katniss Everdeen 1 Killer Clown 1 Lava Reaper 1 Little Boy 1 Malificent 1 Man in Black 1 Mandalorian 1 Mermaid 1 Military 1 Minecraft Hammer 1 Naruto 5 Ninja 1 Phantom 1 Pikachu 2 Pirate 1 Plague Doctor 1 Poison Ivy 1 Police Officer 1 Predator 1 Princess 1 Princess 1 Queen Bee from Lady Bug 1 Sally 1 Scarecrow 1 Scream without mask 4 Serial Killer 1 Siracha Bottle 5 Skeleton 1 Skeleton carrying man 1 Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 Spidergirl 3 Spiderman 3 Squid Game 1 Squid Game Boss 1 Stormtrooper 1 Strawberry Cow 1 Sumo 1 Susie from Deltarune 1 Tech Worker from BTS 1 The Hulk 1 Triangle from Squid Game 1 Undertaker 3 Unicorn 1 Venom 3 Witch 1 Witch w/ broom 1 Wonder Woman 1 Zenitsu Agatsuma 1 Zombie Ballerina
I let the kids choose their favorite candy themselves. This can sometimes lead to a prolonged choosing process and debate. The moments of “OMG” and “wow” are wonderful as they realize the candies are…
Silicon Valley denizens are making the rounds bloviating on their ideas about the ‘metaverse’ which basically are nonsense vehicles for selling more eyeballs.
No actual human wants to do this
Life is suffering and people want an escape from reality, somewhere to find solace and happiness.
No one finds solace in a business meeting.
The truth is the metaverse already exists in various places and people are living virtual lives there, without the help of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.
How do I know? Because I’ve been in a sliver of it for over 10 years, part of a huge virtual community.
In meatspace, I’m a bog standard corporate tech exec. I get my fill of meetings.
Why the fuck would I want to go into VR meeting room in an avatar that looks like me and talk about bullshit when I can be an immortal pilot flying a world killing spaceship, part of a group of like minded individuals settling a grudge against another group who wronged us in the past.
In the metaverse, I lead a global group of thousands of individuals that can be spurred into action by a single Slack or Discord message.
Space war is much more fun than a virtual shopping mall
Our IT stack is larger and more resilient than most companies on earth. We have divisions for HR, military, finance, infrastructure, technology and more that coordinate 24/7/365 on short and long term objectives.
We have logos, mascots, slogans, salutes, and even a mission statement.
Living in the world of EVE Online, a simulation video game about spaceships and solar systems, we are only one of many other groups that have similar capabilities.
We have diplomatic deals more complex than pre-WW I Europe, hurl thousands of players at each other in wars that go on for years, and run an entire free market economy based on virtual construction of in-game resources.
We get to be a whole other person, as disconnected as we want from the banality of our meatspace reality as we want. To think that people want their virtual life to replicate what is ‘real’ is to miss the entire appeal of the metaverse.
It’s not all fantasy though. The interpersonal relationships we have are strong and enduring. We hold vigils when people die in real life, larger than most funerals. We have organized support groups for mental health and other issues.
People want the un-reality of the metaverse
Let’s be honest, despite all their well-rehearsed and focus group tested talking points, the Silicon Valley/VC world is solely about making money.
They can only envision a metaverse that they can relentlessly monetize and control to maintain optimal growth KPIs to appease the board of directors and Wall Street.
They give no fucks about the long haul truck driver logging in after a long day to become a military commander. They give no fucks about the queer young person stuck in a rural area that can live their truth online much more than they can in their hometown. They give no fucks about the person with untreatable terminal cancer that becomes the respected fleet commander with hundreds acting on their words, in complete control of this part of their life.
These metaverse communities exist all over the universe, many in video gaming, but popping up elsewhere. They aren’t easy for tech giants to make money on because the allure of the metaverse is the freedom and opportunity that technology platforms are designed to control.
There are global communities everywhere that are creating their own version of the metaverse based on a variety of technologies. Discord was intended to be a chat tool for video gamers but has been pressed into service as the defacto standard community for artists using NFTs with their creations.
These key aspects of people wanting to associate in common interests and enjoy a metaverse not bound by real world constraints are antithetical to the Silicon Valley goals of monetization, DAUs, and algorithms driving engagement.
The proponents of this ‘corpoverse’ can’t imagine a world not driven purely by the tools they already have. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All they have are algorithms to try to force new interactions on people. Unfortunately, that’s not what builds communities and communities are the core of the metaverse that already exists.
Despite all the slick marketing, there is no heart & soul in the kind of metaverse Silicon Valley is advocating. It’s a cold and calculated effort to create and control the communities of the future. It has nothing to do with people and giving them a way to find some joy in life.
People want escape from the constraints of the real world and all the ‘corpoverse’ offers is rules and control.
In the words of Chuck D, “Don’t believe the hype.”
Silicon Valley denizens are making the rounds bloviating on their ideas about the ‘metaverse’ which basically are nonsense vehicles for selling more eyeballs. The truth is the metaverse already…
It’s been a year since my company sent everyone to work from home due to the pandemic, but I’ve been in the office, keeping the lights green and the wheels spinning.
I manage technology for part of a large American media company. In my division, I’m responsible for “everything that uses electricity.” That covers everything from laptops to servers to petabytes of storage to an entire application suite of tools that allow the creation of high-end graphics, audio, and video all connected with a fast ethernet network. Oh, and I worry about powering all these things 24/7 as well.
While many businesses can operate within a web/cloud environment, professional video post-production still requires powerful workstations, significant amounts of server-class hardware to render/convert video, and enormous amounts of high-speed storage.
Someday, we’ll get to doing this all in the cloud, but today, it’s just not practical. Pushing petabytes into AWS is a non-trivial task.
As the COVID situation worsened in February 2020, we started discussing how we might work from home in earnest, but the challenges were daunting. Many staff with workstations didn’t have laptops. Our capacity for remote editing was at a proof of concept stage and didn’t scale to hundreds of users. Getting our staff to understand the basics of how to use basics like VPNs and video meetings was trying, especially with them frustrated in having to learn a new way to work.
I was lucky that we had started a few “business continuity” proof of concept projects in the year before COVID hit. We built out a cluster of virtual workstations (usually called ‘VMs’) that directly connected to our post-production systems. By using high speed remote control software, this gave us the performance we needed from outside the company to operate. We also had worked with a third-party vendor to basically create and use the same technical set-up, but externally hosted.
The first week of March, I was away from the office, in Iceland, remotely trying to work with my team on planning what we’d need if a shutdown occurred. Personally, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to get home, or whether I’d be quarantined somewhere. I had about two weeks worth of medicine with me, just in case. It was a tumultuous and uncertain time.
Reykjavik — calm before the storm
We developed a plan that might work, but it really hadn’t been done before at the scale we were discussing. The stark realization of what we needed was gut wrenching. Things grind slowly in big companies and we had to move fast.
I got back to Los Angeles on March 6th. No quarantine. Back in the office, the team worked to nail down the exact details of a plan we could execute. Six days later, on March 12th, the company told everyone that could, go work from home. The game was afoot.
That afternoon, I found myself in the office of the President, with the CFO, explaining the plan and the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost to build out what was needed and get laptops in the hands of everyone. Best case, we were months away from bringing more remote editing capacity online. Worst case, it simply wouldn’t work.
There was a strongly-worded argument that occured in that room as to whether the shutdown was going to be over in few weeks or not. The kind of intense scene you see in movies. I was mainly quiet, just giving numbers and yes or no answers while the debate raged loudly. In the end they told me to do “whatever is needed” and I placed the orders that night. This was the answer I wanted, but the responsibility was now placed firmly on my team and me.
Looking back, that conversation looks crazy, but at the time the uncertainty was off the charts, and no one really knew how hard COVID would hit the entire world and change almost everything about how people work.
In the office, most of the staff disappeared, but the core post-production team stayed to keep the “factory” working. We pushed the two remote projects into service, each limited to about 20 people working at a time.
I sent most of the engineering team to work from home. My rationale was that the two of us on site would probably get COVID at some point and be out for the count. Plans were made on who would be the next to come into the office if we fell sick. My family was super stressed at this point, as the virus seemed out of control and I was still going into work. I remember verifying if my life insurance was still in good standing, as I felt as if catching the virus was a matter of “when” not “if”.
The pressure in this moment was almost overwhelming. People were now at home, most with no way to work. Everyone feared widespread layoffs. My small team was tasked with finding a way to put all of these people back to work, and quickly. New hardware was months away and we had few tools to help.
After another week, the shutdown hammer came down in Los Angeles County and almost everyone was sent home leaving a small crew of about a half-dozen in a building that normally holds 500+.
Empty Parking Garage
That was a stressful time, trying to get laptops delivered and explaining how to use them. Keeping the backend running with my engineering team mainly at home and inventing remote practices on the fly. Planning the expansion of our VM systems. Racking, cabling, and powering hardware under pandemic conditions. Explaining to frustrated execs that it was not business as usual with the usual flow of video out the door. Trying to calmly explain to non-technical people about wifi, VPNs, and authentication over the phone. Trying to explain CDNs, network topology, latency, jitter, wifi channel collisions to non-technical staff that insist that “Netflix works fine, so why can’t I edit” tested our patience. Repeatedly telling people to mute their mics on video calls became a meme.
Soon, we had to start rotating time shifts to use the remote systems so more people could work. From 6AM to Midnight, we had three different shifts of people swapping in and out of the machines. Poor internet at home meant poor performance of remote editing. Frustration was high.
The next couple months were difficult, developing new workflows to utilize post-production staff at home, getting into the rhythm of video meetings, getting the needed laptops and home setups out to people, dealing with software licensing issues, and all the while trying to build out our hardware systems to handle the needed load. Pandemic safe processes were being developed on the fly by the supply chain of vendors, shippers, mail rooms, and on-site teams just trying to keep the wheels turning.
We tried to make the workplace as safe as we could, scrounging for cleaning supplies, masks, gloves, sanitizer, and other supplies while the store shelves of America were empty. We opened every cabinet in the building looking for hidden resources we needed. it felt like a zombie disaster film, as we celebrated finding a set of Clorox wipes under a desk.
Soon the Corporate groups started taking the on-site conditions seriously and mysteriously a plethora of stickers started appearing all over the building floors. Stickers to tell us which way to walk in the hallways, which sinks to use, and other “helpful” instructions that seemed quite out of sync with the reality of life in an empty building.
The pandemic workplace
To destress, at times we would walk the halls, looking for office plants to water. Trying to find some normalcy in a time of chaos. A respite from the anxiety flooding into our inboxes and swamping us in Slack. I wish we had focused on this earlier as the dead plants still remain in offices, reminding us of our failure to save them.
The realization that this work at home situation would not be going away in weeks or months started to take hold with the staff. This is when I started getting asked to retrieve personal items.
Everyone was a little different on what they wanted sent to them. For some it was notebooks and printed material. Many wanted some of the family photos from their desk. We sent out yoga mats, pencil sets, personal computer mice, vintage computers, throw pillows, etc. We viewed it as doing what we could to make them feel better about the situation.
Outside my office, I keep a small basket of candy for the few people in the office. We started adding a small bag of candy to deliveries when we could to provide a little extra to those stuck at home.
Team morale is everything
By mid-summer we had upgraded enough software and installed better remote software that everyone could work simultaneously. Performance was good, not great, with some people having frustrating problems we simply couldn’t fix for them. The internet service providers are under tremendous load and some areas simply have bad service, that my team can’t fix for them.
We started to get into a rhythm, as the ‘crisis’ needs became fewer and we dealt with more mundane issues, mainly replacing laptops due to various predictable fates, being dropped and having coffee spilled into them.
Often, we have to enter offices to reboot or update computers, as many things still cannot be managed remotely. These moments sit with me. At someone’s desk, we still see the notes from the week before shutdown. It’s as if they just took the day off, nothing changed.
Looking around the room, you see the space they created, filled with personality and things special only to them. I have no context for most things at people’s desks. While waiting for the computer to reboot, I look at the objects and imagine why they are important. A concert ticket stub from the 90s. A plastic party mug from a bar in Florida. A set of Hot Wheels cars. A light saber. A lego box set. Offices of people that have left the company, still filled with personal items that have never been retrieved. Booze. Just so much booze in people’s offices, waiting for a Friday afternoon get-togethers that aren’t going to happen anytime soon.
The holidays were strange. Zoom meetings just don’t compare to cookie exchanges and white elephant gift exchanges. Traditions matter to people, and without them, marking time is hard.
As we approach a year in the empty offices, most of our day to day operations have transitioned and we are well out of crisis mode. Still not operating at Beforetimes capabilities or ease, but we get the job done.
Most days, there are only five or six people in the entire building, each in our own space, adhered to the safety rules. Masks at all times when we have to talk in person. There are “COVID” patrols in the halls that occasionally look for us breaking the rules.
These days, I bring my lunch to work and eat outside, alone, on a balcony meant for dozens, away from the ding of email and the braap of Slack. At some point, people will be back and I’ll have to share the space.
My balcony garden
I’m eager for a vacation, but there’s nowhere to go. I’m anxious to get the vaccine. I fear getting COVID after a year of avoiding it, when the end is in sight. The weight of holding so much together for so many people presses on me. I just need to bear it for a little while more, trying to avoid falling to pieces when the next crisis appears on my plate.
But, as my father would say, “pressure makes diamonds”.
After this, I’ll be able to cut glass with my fingertips.
It’s been a year since my company sent everyone to work from home due to the pandemic, but I’ve been in the office, keeping the lights green and the wheels spinning. I manage technology for part of a…
Michele carved a pumpkin
