Home Office, Good Sleep, Bad TV
My obsession with the suck-itude of morning news shows continues. All three major networks (and CNN! probably Fox News, too, but my tv won't go there without exploding) have correspondents standing around in cornfields, yes, in Amish country, speculating on how this small community will move on. Maybe by having you leave them alone? You think that is helping? Not everybody needs to whore themselves in front of the cameras in order to deal with tragedy. Really!
Bleah. I had to sleep in the living room last night because of the street work outside my bedroom window. Oddly, even though the sofa bed is not as comfortable as my real bed, I wound up oversleeping. Maybe not so odd - I didn't have the upstairs elephant foot stomping over my head, nor did I hear her alarm go off, two things which serve as the backup to my own natural wake up routine. Today wasn't really oversleeping, just not early enough to make it to the gym, but I went yesterday and will go tomorrow.
I'm working from home today as I have a cable appointment this afternoon. (Wait, did I accidentally turn on Fox and cause my cable box to implode?) So even though I wasn't up early enough to get to the gym and home before my first morning conference call, I have no commute and don't even need to shower or dress, so I have more time than usual to sit here and goof off. Lucky you! (And if I don't shower or dress, lucky cable guy!)
Yesterday at the gym I kept looking at the necks of the other women, wondering if I could tell which was the victim of the knife-wielding crazy last weekend. No, I'm not a vampire, just admiring the smooth, scar-less, bandage-free, never-slashed purity of your neck. Next!
Ah, when shall I begin my work day? I have this theory that I can run the vacuum between conference calls. The sad truth is that I know that I am easily distracted when I work from home and have no misconceptions that I should do this often. (Although I could - several people in my office do it weekly.) But since I'll be on calls from 9-11, it seems silly to have to be in the office to take them. And you know what most of my typical day is? Managing emails. Yes. I start working on something and then an email pops up, with a request for something, and I respond, and that takes either two seconds or fifteen minutes, and then that other thing I was waiting for someone to send me appears, and I take care of whatever that is, and then there are more emails, and etc., etc. My daily goal is to keep my inbox down below 100. (My inbox only contains those emails I haven't completely addressed; I delete or archive all of the others.) When I was traveling a few weeks ago, it got up to about 300. I managed to winnow them down to 70 the other day, but last night was around 130 when I left. You see? It's practically a full time job, and one I can reasonably do at home. Right?
I'm not too old to remember what working in an office was like before email, as many of my co-workers are. In fact, I remember when we first got email, back when it was only an internal communications network (it was a huge deal when we could get email from "the internet," i.e., anyone outside our company.) On one of the first days of internal email, an attorney in our office emailed her admin, who sat just outside her door, and asked her to come into her office. Of course everybody couldn't stop talking about how silly that was. To send an email! When you could just pick up the phone! Or call out your door! Crazy.
And, now, this is the world we live in. And nobody thinks it's odd at all. Seriously, people who sit on the other side of the cubicle wall from me, whose lunch I can identify by the smell and sounds of their chewing/chomping, who can't open a drawer or unzip a briefcase or sneeze without my knowing, will send me instant messages to ask simple questions. I sometimes get up and walk over to their cubicle to answer them. I think it freaks them out.
So, why not be at home if nobody wants to talk face-to-face anymore, anyway?
Bleah. I had to sleep in the living room last night because of the street work outside my bedroom window. Oddly, even though the sofa bed is not as comfortable as my real bed, I wound up oversleeping. Maybe not so odd - I didn't have the upstairs elephant foot stomping over my head, nor did I hear her alarm go off, two things which serve as the backup to my own natural wake up routine. Today wasn't really oversleeping, just not early enough to make it to the gym, but I went yesterday and will go tomorrow.
I'm working from home today as I have a cable appointment this afternoon. (Wait, did I accidentally turn on Fox and cause my cable box to implode?) So even though I wasn't up early enough to get to the gym and home before my first morning conference call, I have no commute and don't even need to shower or dress, so I have more time than usual to sit here and goof off. Lucky you! (And if I don't shower or dress, lucky cable guy!)
Yesterday at the gym I kept looking at the necks of the other women, wondering if I could tell which was the victim of the knife-wielding crazy last weekend. No, I'm not a vampire, just admiring the smooth, scar-less, bandage-free, never-slashed purity of your neck. Next!
Ah, when shall I begin my work day? I have this theory that I can run the vacuum between conference calls. The sad truth is that I know that I am easily distracted when I work from home and have no misconceptions that I should do this often. (Although I could - several people in my office do it weekly.) But since I'll be on calls from 9-11, it seems silly to have to be in the office to take them. And you know what most of my typical day is? Managing emails. Yes. I start working on something and then an email pops up, with a request for something, and I respond, and that takes either two seconds or fifteen minutes, and then that other thing I was waiting for someone to send me appears, and I take care of whatever that is, and then there are more emails, and etc., etc. My daily goal is to keep my inbox down below 100. (My inbox only contains those emails I haven't completely addressed; I delete or archive all of the others.) When I was traveling a few weeks ago, it got up to about 300. I managed to winnow them down to 70 the other day, but last night was around 130 when I left. You see? It's practically a full time job, and one I can reasonably do at home. Right?
I'm not too old to remember what working in an office was like before email, as many of my co-workers are. In fact, I remember when we first got email, back when it was only an internal communications network (it was a huge deal when we could get email from "the internet," i.e., anyone outside our company.) On one of the first days of internal email, an attorney in our office emailed her admin, who sat just outside her door, and asked her to come into her office. Of course everybody couldn't stop talking about how silly that was. To send an email! When you could just pick up the phone! Or call out your door! Crazy.
And, now, this is the world we live in. And nobody thinks it's odd at all. Seriously, people who sit on the other side of the cubicle wall from me, whose lunch I can identify by the smell and sounds of their chewing/chomping, who can't open a drawer or unzip a briefcase or sneeze without my knowing, will send me instant messages to ask simple questions. I sometimes get up and walk over to their cubicle to answer them. I think it freaks them out.
So, why not be at home if nobody wants to talk face-to-face anymore, anyway?
posted by medusa at 7:51 AM
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