Working from home diary, day two
Posted on
Thursday, 19th March 2020
The CD player has seen its first use in months. I imagine it digitally—if somewhat outdatedly—flipping the bird at the Amazon Echo that sits on the sideboard next to it; the latter normally the go-to source of music in recent years, and one of several dotted around the house. The soundtrack for the day is anything from the small pile of CDs I've bought over the last six months but haven't listened to. I know it's not great for the industry, but I mostly stopped buying CDs a while ago due in part to the amount of space my already ample collection takes up, and the fact that I've had a Spotify subscription for a long time now and—despite hating myself for admitting it—it's so much more convenient. The few albums I buy are out of a sense of loyalty to the bands themselves and my love of completionism. Those bands I've had a special connection with for years will always have space on a shelf, irrespective of the device I end up listening to them on. It's those bands that keep me company today.
For the first part of my day, the cats are frequent visitors. Used to having the house to themselves, they take turns at entering the room to see if I'm still there. Satisfied that I am, and unsatisfied that there is no food, by mid-morning, they've disappeared upstairs to sleep off whatever it is cats feel the need to. The older of the two would sleep all day given the chance. His only interests in the waking world are either edible or potentially warm enough to sleep on later. Today, the clunk of the CD auto-changer also draws his attention, but even that rare delight isn't enough to keep his eyes open long. Soon, he disappears upstairs, and I only know that he wakes because of the wail he emits when the younger of the two—who is less inclined towards sleep and more inclined towards mischief—decides to jump on his head. After the proceeding altercation, they settle down and I don't see them again until they're hungry.
I'm left alone to stare at a laptop screen. The laptop itself is a reasonable spec, and the battery life alone puts both cats to shame. If anything lets it down, it's the keyboard. It's one of those with far too many keys for a laptop, forcing it to be slightly more off-centre than is practical. As someone who touch-types out of habit, it's taking a while to get used to the new hand position, and I regularly find myself trying to remember what the words on-screen should have been had my fingers been about half a centimetre to the left. The function key is also in entirely the wrong place. It sits where one of the control keys should be, in the bottom left. Several laptops do this, though few so obtrusively. This one regularly replaces any large blocks of text I'm trying to copy with the letter C and has inserted the letter S after far too many important code changes that I would have preferred saved to the hard drive instead. Both are often followed by number of Zs before I realise my mistake. My biggest gripe with it, however, is what I have taken to calling the 'sometimes space bar'. Many a sentence has come out looking like I dictated it after drinking eight gallons of coffee.
The work itself is slow at first. I thrive in an environment with a team around me. Working alone is much more sedentary. It doesn't help, that my current workload is minimal. Despite being involved in several large projects, almost all of them are waiting for input from others. When they eventually come my way, I half expect to be buried by them all at once in an avalanche of code, documentation and emails. Until then, I'm finding work to do from long-cold email threads and making up the rest as I go.
It's not until mid-morning that things pick up. Thanks to a brief flurry of emails, I end up with some research to do. It's not taxing, but it beats the make-work that failed to keep me entertained yesterday. A typical day in the office is broken up by meetings, phone calls, emails and desk visits from people that need something from me. The rest of the time is spent writing Word documents, updating spreadsheets and—once in a blue moon—trying to remember how to do some of that 'development' stuff my job title suggests I'm supposed to do. I end up passing a lot of the real work on to other people, which is apparently the thing you do as you get more senior. I'm convinced that, if I ever become a high-level manager, I'll have had so little experience of doing any actual work in the years prior that I won't really understand what the people I manage do. It's a troubling thought, but one that answers a great many questions about some of my previous employers.
Being at home is very different to being at work. My only distractions tend to have fur or deliver post. While I'm busy, this is fine, though I worry about the intermittent periods of downtime when that flurry of emails doesn't arrive. Distractions can be beneficial. On those quiet occasions, they break up the day into manageable chunks that keep us sane. On the busier ones, they stop you losing yourself in the work and getting bogged down in it. I'd be lying if I said the risk of there being fewer of them didn't concern me. We're on day two and until this new task came in, the only thing that's stopped me knowing exactly how many bricks are in the garage wall I can see through the window is the fact that, just occasionally, someone in my team sends me a message to say hi.
For now, I'll let the music keep me company. Through speakers long-neglected, those bands I love will visit me with songs, new and old, that keep my foot tapping away the seconds until I can log off and just be at home without the W word.