Tag: work

Working from home

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

So for the first time in my life I’ve spent a full week working from home. I did the odd day or two semi-frequently in my previous job, but to be honest I only really did it towards the end of my time there and it was because I wanted any excuse to not go there.

It’s been weird and also not weird. My manager and I have had daily video calls. We seem to have adapted. The work itself hasn’t changed at all. It’s been nice to potter around the garden before starting work.

I don’t think my new employer’s business will be affected much if at all by the country shutting down. Most of our clients are public sector (councils and hospitals) and should continue to function, and some of our funding is from government R&D grants. Probably the biggest risk is that the Managing Director is about 70.

I wonder how things would be different had I still been at my old job.

I don’t think the same is true of my previous employer at all. Their customers are mostly small businesses or individual entrepreneurs who’ve secured a chunk of money. I can see investment for those types of projects drying up pretty quickly. My ex-employer also has the disadvantage that they won’t be able to use the government’s scheme for helping with 80% of their salary bill should they have to suspend or cut back on operations, because a large percentage of their workers aren’t salaried due to being contractors in Russia. I might be experiencing a certain amount of schadenfreude with that. I always got the impression that their profit margins were quite small as well.

Overall I’m glad to not be there anymore.

Day 9!

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Not much to say really, I feel a lot better. But I’ve been here before, so let’s hope I also feel a lot better tomorrow!

Work has formally announced working from home now, so I feel more relaxed about that.

Oh yeah, and we’re in a lockdown. Just my luck that as soon as I start feeling better Boris starts putting restrictions on movement.

Day 8

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With day 7 going quite well, I thought today would be the day I’d wake up and feel like I’d finally shaken the virus off, but actually it was the opposite.

I woke up feeling pretty horrible – sore throat, headache, general flu symptoms really, and then I spent all afternoon asleep. I really can’t remember the last time I had a virus that affected me this much for so long. When I had flu last year I couldn’t get out of bed for a few days, but after that it was a definite upward trend and I was back at work 5 days after it started. With this one it’s cyclical. I feel better, then I feel worse, then I feel better, then I feel worse…

Garmin told me my resting heart rate this morning was 60, which is crazy for me (it was 43-45 just over a week ago), though since sleeping this afternoon it’s been adjusted down to 55.

So I’m definitely not better and I’ll work from home tomorrow and the next few days probably.

The work thing is causing me a bit of stress. The reduced train service currently is going to be adding about an hour onto my working day, and that’s assuming there will be enough space to actually get on the train.

I’m not dealing with this while I’m still unwell. First, it’s a bad use of energy which my body needs to use to heal itself, and second, I don’t want to expose myself to more viruses while i’m still fighting this one (for all I know this isn’t coronavirus, and it would hit me harder because my immune system is weaker right now. Not worth the risk).

I will need to address the train situation with work soon, but, as with a lot of things in life, there’s an argument for ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away: 1. The train timetable may be revised if NHS workers (for example) start complaining they can’t get to their shifts on time. 2. Hopefully my work will officially make working from home a policy.

I think it’s pretty bad that work haven’t made any official announcements on the matter yet. Not only does it reflect badly on their care towards their own workers, it also means they’re putting unnecessary strain on transport infrastructure, which is being stripped down to its bare minimum to just support “key workers”, of which I am certainly not one.

I have decided to stick to my principals on this and put my welfare before my employer’s, and if it means job-seeking after the country starts running again then that’s what it means.

Day 3

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Day 3 of suspected coronavirus has been a lot like day 2. I worked from home today, which was uneventful. With this being a new job and with working from home not really being in the company culture, I think I feel a bit anxious about suddenly forcing them to let me work from home for a week (actually only 3 days), but I have decided to reframe my view of it as it being a test of my employer to see how much they care about my welfare.

I have tomorrow as holiday because I had a gastroenterology booked at the hospital and I didn’t really want my employer to know about it, so I thought I’d just take the day off. Unfortunately I can’t go to a hospital appointment with this cough, so I had decided I would phone up and cancel it today. Fortunately, the hospital beat me to it and phoned me yesterday to say they were going to change it to a phone appointment. So that’s good.

My heart rate today is still quite a bit higher than it should be for my suddenly sedentary lifestyle, so even though I’m not feeling too bad, tomorrow is going to be a restful day of lying in bed most of the day. To be honest I think I should probably have taken today off sick entirely.

Hmmm… 🤔😷

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I started to feel much better this afternoon, which was promising, and my heart rate dropped back to normal. I was expecting to go into work tomorrow…

Unfortunately this evening it’s shot back up again, and I now have a fever too. So with the fever I now fit the NHS guidance to self isolate for seven days. I’m not sure what my employer will think to that…

Personally, I think I’ve got it (Corona) and they’ve massively underestimated the number of active cases.

I don’t feel too bad though really. I just feel like I have mild flu. Unpleasant but not debilitating. I had a much worse dose of it last January.

Happy?

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It’s taken a while but over the last week or so it’s occurred to me that I am actually feeling happy.

I’m enjoying my new job. Today I was invited to a meeting by the managing director on the next phase of the project. We’re looking at NLP (natural language processing) but we’re not really sure what it can do for us, or even how to use it. It’s a research thing. But being invited to that meeting is an important milestone.

On Wednesday I have a GP appointment to get more anti-depressants. I feel like I’m going to discuss the apparently contradictory concerns of 1. Please can I have these on repeat now, and 2. Do I actually need to be on them? I think it’s time to start solidifying a medium term idea of how to come off them even if I don’t want to change anything just yet.

So anyway, I’ve had a nice evening lying in bed listening to Lady Gaga.

Interesting times

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Today a colleague resigned. Or that’s the official story anyway. We’ll call him L. Whether he resigned or was pushed I don’t know. He was a senior developer who started in August (I started in November), but it was obvious to me that he was struggling with the work and the job in general. Last Friday my manager had a one to one meeting with him because he’d caught him sleeping at his desk twice. He was an odd person. L told me that he left his previous job without giving any notice because it was a bad environment, and also mentioned that they used to “watch them like hawks” in case anyone fell asleep. That seemed like a strange comment at the time, which gained a lot of context in the last few days.

I had a look at his LinkedIn profile, which is detailed to the point that he documents his activities from years ago during periods of unemployment. He’s in his 60s but hasn’t held a job for longer than two years in the past ten. It’s an odd CV and actually I’m a bit surprised he was hired.

Today L finished some work (a report/document), and my manager asked to go through it with him in a meeting room. After a little while, another manager turned up and removed his coat and bag from the room.

Eventually my manager came back and announced he’d resigned. I’m not sure I believe it, but equally, if he was given a warning on Friday it would be odd if the company terminated him only two days later. It’s probably more likely that he did quit, but it doesn’t entirely add up, because it looked like he was making an extra effort yesterday and this morning. On the other hand, he was an odd guy.

I felt a bit unsettled about it anyway. I don’t know if or how it may affect me. I think I’m doing OK. I think I’m doing a lot better than he was, and he was nominally of a much more senior level than me.

I’m still on my probation period and it’s a bit unsettling for someone to suddenly disappear, but on the other hand, I’m also contractually promised a salary review after six months of employment, and their budget just got looser.

I live in interesting times.

Today

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I got two responses back from physios today. Both of them are near work. They are both possibilities but I think I need to actually phone them up to figure out if I can actually get an appointment at a time that works around work. Which I don’t want to do just yet. The two near home are yet to respond, which is a bit disappointing. One of them works Saturday mornings though, so that seems like a good fallback.

I am not really sure if I need physio at the moment. I decided to give myself a rest day today and I’m instead aiming to do a normal gentle run tomorrow, then Parkrun on Saturday and a long run Sunday. So by the start of next week I’ll be in a much better position to decide if I really need it.

—

Last night was awful. I woke up at 4 o clock and didn’t go back to sleep. When it became clear I wasn’t going back to sleep any time soon I started fiddling with my phone, and for some reason went on LinkedIn. This was a mistake – my previous employer had posted an update saying something like “what makes us different from all the the other software companies?” and had a lot of blurb about how amazing they are and a lot of professionally shot photos which have been done since I left. The photos are… well, I don’t know what the word is. Some of the people in the photos don’t even work there – they work for other companies on the same floor and must have been roped into modelling for photos, and half the photos were shot in a room they hired which they’re pretending is the office, presumably because the office isn’t actually a very attractive place.

In the blurb they mentioned how proud they were of employing lots of developers, but what they didn’t mention is that none of them were in the photos because they’re all in Russia. What makes you different to all the other software companies? Well, the fact that your developers (and your customers’ data) are in Russia would be an obvious point.

It just seemed so absurd and pathetic, and I suppose it upset me because it seemed symbolic of the dishonesty I experienced there. I’m glad I don’t still work there, but I didn’t need to see that in the early hours this morning.

I’ve since unfollowed the company. I don’t know why I go on LinkedIn anyway; it’s not useful unless you’re job-seeking. I should uninstall it from my phone.

I still have problems with that company. I still feel my stress levels rising every morning on the train when I go past the building. With starting to run at lunch times again I’ve been considering routes, and I’d quite like to go the other way along the canal, but I’ll end up going past the building. Part of me thinks I should face it and conquer my irrational fear, and another part of me thinks I should be avoiding triggering myself.

When will I stop having dreams about working there?

LIFE

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The abs are feeling better. I don’t think I’ve had any discomfort from them since Saturday, so that’s pretty good. I’m going to do a test run at the weekend, and then I’m HOPING within a couple of weeks to be in full swing of half marathon training, but we shall see.

I am still quite interested in swimming. I think it would be a good counter to running and is probably very good for core strength. I have not signed up to the gym yet because I realised I did not have any swimwear, but I ordered some at the weekend and it came today, so now I have no excuse.

The train this evening was dreadful because of a tree on the line, thanks to Storm Brendan. I need to claim my 10p compensation for this but I can’t be bothered tonight. A girl I was at school with was sat next to me but I don’t think she recognised me. I googled her and apparently she’s a solicitor now. She smelled a bit though. I probably can’t claim compensation for that. It’s a bit weird to think she’s a solicitor when the main thing I remember about her is that when we were in infant school she did an Irish Jig in assembly one morning in front of the whole school. We stayed in the same class through infant, junior and secondary school, but that’s what I remember. That was… 26 years ago?

Work: Last week we had some training from the Knowledge Transfer PhD student we have, which consisted of essentially a computer science lecture. It felt like being back at university again, but it was a lot more effective than reading articles online, and as I was sat in the room I couldn’t help but think how amazing it is that I’ve worked here less than two months and they’re giving me training on new technology, whereas not once in the seven years I was at my old place did the company ever arrange for anyone to teach me anything.

Part of her presentation involved examples with data sets, and I was quite surprised when one of her slides used my full name as an example. I’m not quite sure how to take that…

Speaking of other things at work I don’t know how to interpret, as I walked past HR lady’s office today, HR lady and researcher lady were having a conversation and HR lady said “EV is one of those people”. Researcher lady: (mildly surprised) “EV here?” “yes”. What was that about? One of what people?! 🧐

Back to work

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Going back to work has proved OK. I’ve really enjoyed the trains being quiet AND ON TIME this week. I suspect this won’t last, but it was nice while it lasted.

I decided to bite the bullet regarding ibuprofen. I made the mistake of googling my injury and then made the second mistake of reading the massive threads of people complaining about sports hernias and saying that they need surgery. Hmmm. So, mixed with my general impatience and the fact I had a few pains at work today, I decided to do what the doctor advised after all. She recommended a week of ibuprofen and then re-assess, so that’s the plan.