So the weekend went pretty well. We stayed at home, and conducted the youth D&D session via Discord. The service is a little overloaded, and we wound up cutting off video feeds to keep it more stable, but it worked. But now it's Sunday night, and my thrice-cursed workplace is still expecting us to show up if we're not feeling sick. Which, given the latency period on this, is asinine and infuriating, but here we are: I'm tired, and angry, and depressed, and I'm just sort of dreading the eventual meltdown that I suspect will come to our employees. I don't even know what I have scheduled to work on this week, but I've got a To Do list at my desk and my desk is in the server room; as long as I stay in there, I'm pretty isolated.
I will note for the record that while I don't feel sick, I do have a bit of a cough; but I'm prone to seasonal allergies and having this show up when I'm usually coughing anyway is not doing anything for my peace of mind. (I record this here mainly in case it becomes important later; you never know.)
Our big outings are mainly taking the dog on walks, which he (and we) desperately need.
The boys start school online tomorrow -- not so much e-learning as emergency continuation of services during isolation. Beautiful Wife will be here with them; she is not looking forward to it. And, of course, if I ever do get permission to work from home, I'll be here with everyone else. Which would be both wise and worrisome in approximately equal measures.
I keep thinking about some of our discussions -- that not everyone in our organization has the means to work from home, and we only have so many laptops available for checkout, and like that -- and I keep coming back to the idea that honestly? Most of our PCs at work are about the size of a hardback book. The larger ones are maybe half the size of a toaster oven. Monitors are bigger and harder to move, but we really only "aren't equipped" to move to people working from home if we're not willing to just slap VPNs on those desktops and tell people to move them to their houses if they can. (Admittedly, Internet connection might still be a problem -- the desktops aren't equipped with WiFi -- but if our people are already plugging a home PC into a router somewhere, they could plug in a work PC instead.) Most likely we'd need a combination of measures to really get the city government to move to a telecommuting footing, but even if it turns out that it's only feasible for, say, 80% of our employees... that's still an 80% reduction in potential disease vectors into our workplace.
I don't know. All I know is that I'm not looking forward to this week.
I'm thinking of you this week.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
DeleteHmm... Every wireless router I've ever seen has been capable of accepting ethernet connections; they just don't require them. Heck, my housemate has her computer plugged into the household router because she can't find a good place for it that gets a reliable wireless signal. All the other devices in the house use wifi.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think this should be workable if we really wanted to make it work. I also think we're still worrying more about the optics than about our safety.
DeleteY'know, at some point, the optics change from "Those guys sure are working hard" to "Gods, those guys are suicidally stupid." I still say that if having everyone work from home isn't feasible, sending enough people home that the remainder are working at desks more than six feet apart is a decent compromise.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, you're in the DFW area. I checked an incidence map of Texas, and that area has the highest incidence of Covid-19 in the state. You guys should be setting a good example for everyone else.