Why I don't like telework

With the arrival in my patch of this year’s scary new disease,¹ my manager has both drawn a line in the sand for when we go on mandatory telework and given us broad approval to make that call on our own.

Our mandatory conditions have not quite been met, but my household includes a person who easily qualifies for a compromised immune system and two more who are more vulnerable than average, so we’ve declared it time to button up.

Whee!

I’m a programmer these days and a team leader at that, so I’m a ideal candidate for telework, but I spent the early part of the afternoon getting a useful workspace set up² because I haven’t asked my employer for any work-from-home time until now. I’ve done it before and I don’t actually care for it much.

Boundaries

There aren’t any natural boundaries when you work from home, which leads to two kinds of trouble.

• To make it work you need the cooperation of anyone else present, they have to treat you as “at work” when you are working or your productivity will be nibbled to death by ducks.
  
• The flip side is, of course, that you have to be off work the rest of the time, and that’s not necessarily easy either. Especially when you get one of the flashes of insight that will take “just a few minutes” to get into code and test. Write a note, drop it on the keyboard and come away.
  

I need a dedicated space with a door I can close. When I’m in there with the door closed I’m at work. When I’m not at work I don’t go in there. This worked pretty well the last time I did it, but that was when it was just me and my better half in the place. The toddler does not care for the idea that Daddy can be home and not available to her.

On the up side—maybe…

I’m planning on using my commute time to get a little less out-of-shape. At least as long as they don’t order a full time curfew.
And I’m going to grumble quite a lot if they do because my trotting down the sidewalks (which are habitually empty in this little piece of suburban wasteland) is a decidedly not an issue.

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¹ And it is more than a little scary and even more disruptive, but to my mind the run-in-circles-scream-and-shout responses on display tell you more about the level of either ignorance or willful denial that most people live with than it does about covid19. We’ve been lucky the last few times out the gate, but you should have felt put on notice, people. It’s not like you weren’t given any hints.


But then maybe we should excuse the person on the street. After all, we’ve seen more than a little of both in high places, too. Haven’t we?

² And once I got that done I order a couple of upgraded bits and pieces. My work computer is an unreasonably beefy (six fast i7 cores and 32 GB of ram) and trim (less than 2 kg) laptop. Alas, while its keyboard and trackpad are functional, I don’t want to be stuck with them for long.

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