Weekend Plans Post: The Return to the Office

Back to the office.

I was *VERY* lucky to have a job that required minimal time back in the office during the worst of Covid and, in 2023, I got moved from that team to a team that was pretty much 50/50 work from home/back in office work. Some weeks had me go in every day… and some weeks had me stay home all week. Some weeks had days where I worked the first half of the day at home and then went in at noon.

My favorite part about working from home is the whole “2 minute commute” thing. Sometimes I go to bed a little early at 10PM and find myself awake and staring at the ceiling at 5AM. Get up, pee, grab a Diet Pepsi, start working at 5:05. Before you know it, it’s 9AM and the kitties want some breakfast and, looky there, the day is almost halfway done. Make a bagel or a warm up some pizza or something and get back downstairs and it’s 4PM before you know it. After a week of this, hey, I have all my hours by Thursday afternoon! Friday is for errands!

The downside of this is the whole 5:05 to 9 thing involves not getting up. You’re working on your system, you’re having your team meetings, you’re downloading your rpms, you’re updating your definitions, you’re pulling this, you’re pushing that and you’ve moved your hands and that’s it.

So, this week, we’re full-time back at the office. And I looked down at 9AM at my Pikmin walking app and I had 3000 steps. I had walked more by 9AM than I had the entire previous Monday (we had a back-to-work meeting with the team that involved meeting The New Guy on the team and then walking around the building twice). By the end of the workday? 6000 steps.

The official reasons given by management are all couched in positive language about stuff like the importance of workplace culture and knowledge transfer and whatnot and the real reason that people gossip about involve this guy who ain’t there anymore and that other guy who ain’t there anymore. I suppose that the positive reasons are good reasons… when we went into lockdown, the teams were all cohesive and everybody worked well together but we’ve lost 10% of our workforce to various attritions (one of my bosses retired, a co-worker found another job that paid more, yet another co-worker got married and traipsed off to some other state entirely) and now The New Guy doesn’t really interact with the older guys much and thus doesn’t learn the stuff that you only get by working with someone (and that never makes it into an email).

So… even though I miss Maribou and even though I miss the kitties, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that it’s probably good to get back to the office.

But I’m not going to like it.

This weekend will be spent, among other things, making breakfasts for the coming week. Oh, yeah. I had hard-boiled eggs and was experimenting with medium-boiled eggs. Oh, yeah. I have to divvy up crock pot meals into different tupperwares and stack them in the fridge. Oh, yeah. I have to make crock pot meals.

Which means that I have to go to the grocery store.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is “Bliss”. Photo taken by Maribou.)