Don’t forget we moved!
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Gotta Work For a Living
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I feel really awful missing the first day of school. But I’m also sitting and having to take a break after folding just one basket of laundry.
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The only time my work insists we use cameras is when there’s someone with a disability who needs to be able to see what you’re saying. This has led to a culture in my team of cameras on for greetings and general natter, then cameras off unless you’re speaking (or have something you want to say) for the rest of the meeting.
It’s a good halfway house between the ones who have a need to not be on camera and the ones who have a need to see the people who’re talking, with the added bonus of not taking up as much bandwidth as fifteen cameras all on does, and a great side benefit of people being able to see that you want to specifically add something to the current topic.
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@Arkandel said in Gotta Work For a Living:
We have a guideline by HR to be on camera during meetings.
At university, we have a similar condition. During tutorial (actual teaching) classes, our cameras must be on, but not so during lectures.
The reason for this is an important one, even if it’s a little irritating. The university staff need to know we’ve actually attended, as that’s an essential part of our accreditation - no attendance, no certification, certification which is important for those who want to practice after our degrees.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel I don’t like mandates in general. They are inflexible. I can understand HR wanting to encourage culture-building (at least) by allowing coworkers to ‘see’ each other, take cues from facial expressions and all those everyday subtleties of human interaction. There’s absolutely a time and a place for it.
But for example I once had an accident that gave me a black eye for a week. I wouldn’t want that to be a focus of every call I got on. Other people might be dealing with… anything - a bad hair day, a headache forcing them to keep the light off, it might be hot and they want to be in a tank-top.
There’s no need to have one-size-fits-all policies unless that is actually the case. If it’s 100% needed, 100% of the time, have it. Else leave it as a general guideline and go from there - especially since if you effectively force people to ignore one of your mandates then they will find it easier to ignore other ones, too.
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@Arkandel If they tried to mandate camera use at all times, I’d go for a Reasonable Adjustment to say ‘no’.
I can handle it when the deaf guy needs to be able to see me; that’s fine and fair enough. His need to see who’s talking absolutely outweighs my need to not be visible. I can handle it when I’m talking in general, because that’s what talking in a meeting means now, and that includes the ‘hi how are you’ pre-ambles. Teams will let me fake my background, and I got a nice photo that’s suitably work-themed a few months ago.
In general, though, I find being on camera exhausting, especially when it’s unnecessary. I’m not doing it for hours on end when I’m not the focus, and if you think I’m taking the minutes with a camera on me I have two words and the second one is ‘off’. I have a disability, and I have stated so to work. One of the recognised symptoms is being camera-shy. I will absolutely weaponise employment legislation if I have to.
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Another poorly represented argument here is… there is only so much screen real-estate on a monitor.
Much of IT actual work at least is conducted over screen-sharing sessions. I want to look as much of an IDE, code PR or log someone is sharing with me as I can; I don’t need to see their face at the same time. Hell, it’s distracting from what we’re actually trying to do.
Also also I work in operations. Sometimes shit catches fire at inconvenient hours well into the evening or early morning. No one needs to see a bunch of sleepy-eyed squinting nerds drooling down their chins as they try to make things right again so they can go back to bed.
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I have been in thousands of hours of videoconferences and I don’t think I’ve looked at the face of someone who wasn’t talking once. I cannot fathom a reason that would be necessary aside from middle managers wanting to assure you have a butt in the seat, which is the lowest form of management. I’d go nuclear on a company trying to enforce some “cameras on at all times” shit.
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When we were first debating policies about whether or not to require cameras to be on at all times during meetings, one of the considerations that I had to bring to the attention of my immediate supervisor was the fact that not everyone has a pristine living environment to show on camera. There are plenty of people that are not living to the same means as their peers, and they might find that embarrassing, or heavens forbid they live in a messy environment, or are living out of a hotel room for the moment, or simply just get crushing anxiety from appearing on camera.
This actually seemed to catch my manager - who had been advocating for always on cameras during meetings - off guard, and they had to stop and think about it for a time and politely disagreed, and I politely pushed back. They ultimately did take my advice and run it up the chain, who ultimately agreed with me where he did not.
There are so many more nuanced reasons why people don’t want to turn their webcam on that upper management immediately thinks of.
The cynical part of me can’t help but think that this is because in part, they are all comfortably wealthy.
At the time, I was live reporting from a laundry room.
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I was scheduled to be in trial yesterday and today in another town. I drove to the town, stayed overnight in the hotel there. Woke up the next morning feeling kind of yucky and coughing a lot. Dreading it, I called and left a message with the clerks only to discover that the prosecutor tested positive for covid and was ill & asking for an emergency continuance.
I’ve tested negative on two home tests now but I also slept through a ridiculous amount of today. Ugggggggh I don’t want this stuff agaiiiiiin.
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao said in Gotta Work For a Living:
I’ve tested negative on two home tests now but I also slept through a ridiculous amount of today. Ugggggggh I don’t want this stuff agaiiiiiin.
I hope it’s just a cold and you’re feeling better soon!
Tangential PSA - latest guidance from CDC shows the necessity of testing multiple times, as you did, to avoid false-negative test results (where the test says “no covid” but you actually have covid).
On the first day symptoms appear, a home test is only about 60% effective at detecting covid. If you test again 48 days later, then between the two tests it’s over 90% effective.
Multiple tests spaced 48 hours apart gives you more confidence even if you don’t have any symptoms, though the effectiveness isn’t as high overall. (Generally, symptoms = higher viral load = easier for the test to detect; asymptomatic cases more often result in false negatives). Study source
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@Solstice said in Gotta Work For a Living:
When we were first debating policies about whether or not to require cameras to be on at all times during meetings, one of the considerations that I had to bring to the attention of my immediate supervisor was the fact that not everyone has a pristine living environment to show on camera. There are plenty of people that are not living to the same means as their peers, and they might find that embarrassing, or heavens forbid they live in a messy environment, or are living out of a hotel room for the moment, or simply just get crushing anxiety from appearing on camera.
This actually seemed to catch my manager - who had been advocating for always on cameras during meetings - off guard, and they had to stop and think about it for a time and politely disagreed, and I politely pushed back. They ultimately did take my advice and run it up the chain, who ultimately agreed with me where he did not.
There are so many more nuanced reasons why people don’t want to turn their webcam on that upper management immediately thinks of.
The cynical part of me can’t help but think that this is because in part, they are all comfortably wealthy.
At the time, I was live reporting from a laundry room.
I’m firmly of the opinion that the real reason upper management is so convinced that returning to the office is a great idea, allows better focus, is more productive, builds a better culture, etc. is simply because…
When we’re in the office, they’re top dog. Everything and everyone around them bends to them - their convenience, their needs, and their schedule. Meanwhile when they’re at home working from their kitchen table, their six year old absolutely doesn’t give a shit that daddy is using their snack-making space. It’s snack-making time, so the kid is going to use the table.
Sucks that y’all had to spend two years living like the rest of us plebs, I guess?
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@Aria said in Gotta Work For a Living:
When we’re in the office, they’re top dog.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve been watching management level people in my network and circles lose their minds over how meetings just don’t feel the same anymore. They are suffering extreme withdrawal from the obeisant postures, attention, and micro-inflections of those below them on the org chart. The inability to stop someone at will in the hallway as a power flex. The dropping by someone’s desk just to feed on the momentary dilation of the pupils that is the unconscious response to the appearance of a predator.
Fuck management.
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@shit-piss-love My (former, now) Director is also a friend so we keep in touch since he left the company. He’s a genuine nice dude but damn was he judgmental as fuck - and I told him then, as I do now - about how people dress.
Like, not the ones who dress inappropriately even. But for example he’d always notice and comment on my socks when they were athletic instead of fancy. We didn’t even have clients over at that building, literally ever. Who cares? Well, he did. And the reason he always gave me is that others would care, and it can impede one’s career, which makes some sense at least.
I imagine less nice folks than him are seething a bit now that most Zoom callers are probably wearing shorts and fuzzy pairs of slippers or whatever from the waist down.
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Got headbutted by a kid today, and then was 30 minutes late clocking out because it took 20 minutes for me to console him/help him calm down enough so that he could understand i was accepting his apology. At least admin came running when they hear him screaming. And thank goodness I’ve learned how to move to absorb a hit if I see it coming but can’t avoid.
Thank fucking god it’s the last day tomorrow.
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Our middle schoolers are being sent home early because their 1930’s Era building doesn’t have AC
But yes. Let’s fix the sign outside with two bucket trucks and a crew of 5.
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On the one hand, ugh. I completely understand the frustration. They need to get AC in! On the other hand though, I am super glad to hear admin is willing to not make the kids sit in it. I wish I wasn’t surprised by it, but the lack of empathy for this sort of thing was rampant when mine was in school.
the entity previously known as Sunny
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Our teachers’ union is on strike and of course the district is sending communications internally to non-rep employees such as myself pretty much going “Hey, you got extra work and inconvenience from us? Blame the teachers’ union lololol.”
And of course our district building gets the occasional death threat from a frothy “patriot” every now and then.
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Unfortunately it would cost as much to retrofit this old building to have AC as it would to just build a new building. Neither are in the capital funds budget.
These buildings just weren’t designed for our current climate.
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The middle schoolers ate making tiktoks, and tbh, some of them are AMAZING. Laughter to tears.
Another account ranks the girls and I want to hunt down and suspend whomever is making that one. >:|
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big changes at work
none of them are good
I’m so tired.
