I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.
I hate working from home.
Once in a while is fine. Working from home when I know I’m getting a cold, or I just feel like crap…that’s fine and I know I can still be productive when I am at home with a cough but that going into the office shares what no one wants to share.
But working from home intentionally and/or for an extended period of time?
I’ve never been a fan.
Been there, done that.
I prefer the ability to have organic conversations that can happen on the spur of the moment. I like the interaction with the people in the office, the random conversations that I get pulled into, an unexpected invitation for a coffee and the discussions that grow out of those impromptu and informal meetings. The ability to lean on a doorway and touch base on…whatever. So many collaborative things happen when colleagues are in proximity.
I need to see body language and faces, but I hate video calls. They feel forced and they are exhausting. And I say that having only had a couple in my life. I’m not much of a phone person, so even audio meetings over internet are awful. Two people accidentally speak at the same time, then no one speaks, then you both speak again. I don’t speak much on such calls. I just find it too frustrating and exhausting.
I feel like this girl….trying to stick handle a half dozen dogs that are all trying to go different directions at the same time….none of them really paying attention to her.
We went out for a walk after work was done for the day. I’ve been dealing with some chronic pain lately, and I’m reasonably sure that a component of it is a lack of movement because when I do go for a walk …it recedes.
So we are going to try harder.
But two things stuck out to me as we circled back around towards home…..
…. the words “Do Not Enter” at the exit to a school close by….
….and the sign for the Capilano Salmon Hatchery…. mere steps away from my home. And this one brings me back to the fact that I hate working from home.
Just a short walk from my front door is the road down into the Capilano Canyon. At the end of that road is a salmon hatchery. And upstairs in that hatchery are three offices. The little one in the middle contains half of my personal reference books…it’s my secondary office, a sanctuary from a busy office downtown and a space that I was generously offered when our office decided to cram almost twice the number of people into the same space and we were all crammed into smaller space, with less privacy, and virtually no storage space.
I had become accustomed to working from this space once a week or so – less in field season, more outside of field season. It was a quiet space, sometimes deathly quiet….and, to be fair, also came the occasional nerve jarring alarm when there was a power bump or a water temperature or flow event that triggered the system. But, aside from those occasional alarms, it is a place that I can truly focus without distraction when I need to. It is a great place to go when I need to do some reading and/or writing.
Enter COVID.
I lost access to both offices….and this one is …. So. Damned. Close.
The last time my manager and I laid eyes on each other was March 13th when I ran into the office to grab some things before going on a two and a half week vacation, and knowing I was going into a two week self isolation as Kirk was returning from Chicago that evening. When I was leaving, we crossed paths at the elevator and he said “See you in two weeks”.
I responded with a foreshadowing “We will see….”….
Turns out I had a pretty solid hunch about where we were headed. We have a standing half-hour meeting every Monday morning that has (obviously) shifted to phone/MS Teams. But today, since he lives just up the road from where I live, I threw out an offer inviting him to make himself a coffee at home, and bring it down the road to my back deck in the afternoon instead of an 8:30am phone call. It was a welcome change to have a face to face meeting, for an hour and a half, almost three months later.
One of the topics we covered was the fact that the government is now talking about a phased approach to a return to workplaces for those of us that were told to go work from home. But, as I mentioned another day…we work on a floor with around 80 other people, where the windows don’t open, the air is recycled, and it is one floor of 18 similarly occupied floors. I can’t see a really safe return to that scenario if COVID as still a part of daily life. It’s just a transmission waiting to happen.
He also (normally) works out of an office there one day a week, or as possible. I would be so happy to be able to return to my other little office at the hatchery though….even just that one day a week would be awesome. Turns out that he has also been thinking about how much he’d like to get out of his home and work somewhere else one day a week.
So close…. but still so many things to consider. The hatcheries have few staff and they are running on shifts. There are a few higher risk staff who have been isolating at home. Anything that affects their risk negatively also creates a risk to the hatchery operations.
And so I stare longingly down the hill, missing my colleagues down there, and everywhere else, and turn and walk home.
<sigh>
(153/365)
5 comments