Cube Logic

I've found myself frequently thinking about posting, but obviously I don't do much here these days. My workload is lighter than it was last year, though I am wasting spending too much a significant amount of time commuting again.

So what's different? Since I am back at the same employer as before I was laid off (and back then I was posting something almost every weekday), I've been considering what's different this time. I would say the way this job is structured, I'm doing a little more than when I worked there before, but not a great deal more.

I think I know what it is: I was more physically isolated from my coworkers. For a good part of the time I worked there I was in an area where almost on one came into my cube, or if they did I would have heard them approaching. Even after I moved to another part of the office, there wasn't much foot traffic in my area, and even if someone did pass by, our cubicles had higher walls.

Now I work in an open area in a cube that's completely open on one side and has lower walls on the other three. Someone sits directly ahead of me and someone else sits directly behind me. Until yesterday someone sat directly across the aisle from me, and the person who sits in front of her and the person who sits in front of me both pass my desk numerous times a day. I have a larger monitor, and it's much more exposed to others.

How much a person can see of my screen depends on what angle they are looking from, but I still feel a lot more self-conscious about what I'm doing at any time during the day. People probably look at my screen less frequently than I might think they are; I don't pay much attention to what's on my coworkers' screens when I'm moving around the office. But still, it does feel like we're under greater scrutiny, or at least that it's possible to be, and this affects my online activity.

I could take advantage of my lunch hour to work on posts, and I'm going to see if I can do more of this. But now that summer is fading, I feel more inclined to go outside during lunch, to get some air and move around. I'm more aware of my health than I used to be, and I know that getting in some activity, even just walking, is beneficial, and it's also nice just to get away from the desk for a while.

But that still leaves the dilemma of when to post. I also go to bed earlier these days, and I spend time before bed getting my clothes ready for the next day. This is mainly so I don't have to get up quite as early. I used to prefer ironing my clothes in the morning, because it allows for last-minute changes of mind about outfit choices, but I've found that being able to get dressed quickly is also an advantage. With the unpredictability of the T, almost anything can ruin a commute, and it's better to leave earlier, both for a margin of error and because traffic and crowding aren't quite as bad.

So I get up a little later and I leave the house a little earlier, but it turns out that having a more compressed morning routine helps keep me focused, making it more likely that I'll hit my target time for being ready to leave. My weekdays are more structured in general, but I still don't have as much free time as I used to. I can probably still find time to write, but it means I'll have to exercise greater discipline.

Moved In

The office move went smoothly, and when we arrived at the new office a week ago Monday, everything was waiting for us in our cubicles. I had very little to unpack, just a few reference books and my water bottle and coffee mug. I set up my computer, and there were IT people around to help us figure out which printers we would be using and get connected to them.

The office itself is substantially nicer than our previous space. We're now in another concrete building that was built around the same time as the library where our office was previously, but unlike that building, this one has a more conventional design with decent window area. Our section is on the south side of the floor, so we have natural light coming in pretty much all day. The other side of the floor has a more interesting view, but there are other buildings of similar height pretty close by, so less natural light is available.

Our work spaces are arranged so that our desks face the wall with the windows. To the side is a low storage unit with two horizontal drawers on one side and shelf space on the other. Behind is a taller cabinet with more shelves, more drawers below the shelves, and a locker-like compartment to the side with a hook inside, for storing one's coat and other belongings. The tops of these units provide convenient surface area for displaying personal items, and I've found that the top of the lower unit is an excellent place to stow my bag during the day. There is also an under-desk wheeled file cabinet with a cushion on its top surface, for impromptu desk-side discussions or something. And all the cabinets and shelving units, including the banks of file cabinets along the walls, are white for added visual brightness (most offices choose gray or black for such fixtures).

The walls of the cubicles are not as high as those in some places I have worked, and not as low as those in others. They are topped with frosted glass panels about six inches high that serve two purposes: they visually extend the height of the dividing walls, while allowing a little more outside light to pass through and reach deeper into the space.

The desk surfaces are light-colored material that is made to look like blond wood. I've had cubicles with this type of surface before and I find it pleasant, and it also happens to match my desk at home. The entire desktop raises and lowers electrically, making it easy to find a comfortable and ergonomically preferable position for working. I had to experiment a little to find the right arrangement; I have a long torso, so placing the desk surface at the right height for comfortable typing (forearms should be horizontal) made my monitor too low. A little-used book under the monitor base solved that problem. But if I want to stand for more than a few minutes, an anti-fatigue mat is necessary.

Oh, and the chairs! The chairs in our old office were horrible. They were upholstered units with rubberized armrests, but they were really conference-room chairs and not intended to be used for desk work. I used to have to get up every 45 minutes or so because their inferior padding caused my tail bone to ache. (It's a good idea to get up and move around during the work day, anyway.) Now we all have Herman Miller Aeron chairs, considered one of the best task chairs available. Coincidentally, I bought a used one of these for myself a few months ago, when I was still working at my other job. So I now have Aeron comfort day and evening.

We also now have an attractive and much more functional kitchen with plenty of seating. There are two large refrigerators and a separate, smaller freezer. There's a Keurig coffee machine (relocated from our previous office), and now a Nespresso machine to go along with it. Neither of those are my thing, but they seem to make other people happy. Unlike many employers, mine does not stock the kitchen with snacks. Just outside the kitchen are small rooms for having private phone conversations.

While all of this is great, not everything is wonderful. My biggest gripe, and one I have had at various workplaces for decades, is that the overhead lighting is too bright. With the abundant natural light and desktop task lighting, overhead lighting is hardly even necessary, and yet we still got stuck with it. I think all of us were under the impression that the overhead lighting would be LED, but it's terrible old fluorescent lighting. The fixtures are long and narrow, suspended from the ceiling perpendicular to the window walls; at least they didn't use the typical ceiling-mount fixtures with reflectors that make the light even more harsh.

On the plus side, we have discovered that the lighting is dimmable; on the minus side, one switch controls the lighting on the entire side of the floor, so dimming the lights affects the other department occupying the space adjacent to us. I think we will be able to work something out with them, as they seem to share our feelings about the brightness.

Overall, the new office space is a definite improvement. I'm still getting used to sitting in an open area with several other people working around me, and to filtering out random noises from various sources. But I have my trusty, American-made Grado headphones, Spotify on my iPhone, and my iTunes library on an old-school iPod Classic that was retrofitted with a solid-state hard drive, giving it four times the capacity of my original unit. Now all I need is to have a dimmer switch for the lights installed at my desk...

Movin' Out

My department at work is moving to new office space in a different building. We've been preparing for the move for the past couple of weeks, packing up belongings in plastic bins, discarding unwanted files and other stuff, and labeling our computers and other equipment.

We also moved a decade ago, but that was within the same building, just from one floor to another. It was still a fairly complex procedure, but this will involve trucks and dollies and bringing everything outside during whatever precipitation happens to be falling later this afternoon. We don't have to do any of that; it's all being handled for us. We only have to disconnect our computers later this afternoon, pack the peripherals into special plastic bags, and leave everything. So work will be wrapping up a little early today.

For the whole time I've worked here including my earlier period, and for some years before that, the department has been located in a building that is also a library. I enjoyed the notion of coming to work each day in a library, but in fact there are several downsides that will be eliminated when we are settled in our new space. We've had to make do with kitchen facilities that were never supposed to be built where they are, and so have inadequate plumbing and no real space to sit and eat. We've had to share the restrooms on our floor with everyone else who passed through the library. And the building itself, built in the 1960s, has little natural light due to its structure and the unusual placement of the windows.

In the newly renovated space we will be sharing a floor with a couple of other departments, but we will have our own distinct area. We're going to be in cubicles, but the way the floor is arranged, the rows are only three cubes deep and perpendicular to the exterior wall with the windows, so everyone will get a reasonable amount of natural light. The desk part of the cubes will be situated so we are facing that direction, and the desktop surfaces are adjustable, so we can work sitting or standing. And there will be a spacious kitchen area with storage, appliances, and ample seating.

It feels good to be having a fresh start a mere few weeks after returning. Now I just have to see about getting my work computer swapped out for a Mac...

Back to the Office

I've been in my new/old job for a couple of weeks now, and getting used to again having a morning routine that includes getting out of the house in time to catch a bus. I've needed to make a few adjustments, and I admit that I'm trying to keep the routine a little tighter so I don't have to get up quite as early as I used to when I did this before.

Commuting via public transit is still a mixed bag. Some mornings everything goes smoothly; I get a seat, I read the paper, stations whisk by until I look up and realize it's time for me to get off the train. Other days the train is packed way beyond what is comfortable or safe, and doesn't thin out until Back Bay. I sympathize with my fellow commuters, because we're all in it together. We're all on that train because we have to get somewhere and don't have any better option for how to accomplish that.

At the moment, though, I'm only going to the office three days a week. There are space issues, which is part of the reason the department is moving to newly renovated office space some time in April. After my coworkers and I were laid off five years ago the department no longer needed all that space, so it was divided and another organization took over the other part. But as time went by the headcount started to increase again, and eventually they had to start doubling up in offices.

I am currently sharing an office, meaning my desk is a rectangular folding table wedged into a corner. It's not terrible, but I feel to some extent like I'm intruding on the original occupant's space, so I work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This also helps create a transition period for the dog, who was used to me being here every day for the previous eight months. We were concerned about how she would react to this change; we have a dog walker coming on the other days, and Charlie seems to be okay with things. It certainly helps that she's getting treats stuffed into a Kong toy when we leave, and another one when the dog walker leaves.

One disappointment: when we move to the new office, we're going to be in cubicles. They are inescapable, I guess. Given what the renovations must be costing, the institution needs to maximize the number of people who can use the space, so we will be sharing the floor with two or three other departments and the floor will be filled with cubes. We have been told that they will be equipped with adjustable-height desk surfaces to accommodate those who choose to work while standing. I'm interested in trying this, even if only for part of the workday.

But cubicles are still better than the completely open office layout that many companies have adopted (allegedly because it "fosters collaboration"). I shudder a little every time I see one of these photos, and I'm thankful I don't have to work in an environment like that. I don't know how anyone could get anything done with so much going on around them; work requires focus.

Changes

Life is funny. Things happen when you are not expecting them. Generally, the older you get, the less surprised you are when something unexpected happens, but occasionally a genuinely surprising event occurs.

For the past year or so I have been working two jobs. For the second half of 2016, I was regularly working more than 50 hours each week. Plenty of people do this, but it was new territory for me. When my W-2s came I saw that I had done all right for the year, but the effort required to get there was significant. But certainly, let me be clear, it was better than not working and not being able to get a job.

I think I have mentioned before that my second job was for one of my former supervisors. What I don't think I spelled out explicitly is that this was at the employer I was laid off from five years ago, the one I had thought I'd be able to stay with until I was ready to retire (remember, I'm closer to the end of my working life than the beginning).

For a while after I started working for her again, I used to think about the possibility of being rehired full-time, but it seemed a lot more likely that the most I could expect from them is that someday they might offer me 20 hours a week. Even if that happened, I couldn't see how I'd make it work; my main job was not the sort of thing that could be done part-time, and 20 hours a week wouldn't pay me enough to live on. I stopped thinking about it.

Then, unexpectedly, before Christmas my former/current boss asked me in an email: "If we had a full-time position, would you be interested?" Just like that, with the "if" italicized. I knew there had been some staff changes and that resources were being allocated differently in their budget, but I was not expecting that sort of proposal.

I told the Mrs., who was suitably pleased. I decided not to say anything to anyone else until I had some certainty about what was happening. I made one deviation from that: I told my family, but only after a couple of weeks. I had to get through a medium-sized obstacle course of bureaucracy that took a few more weeks. I needed some idea of when they wanted me to start, so I could figure out when I needed to give notice to my other job. (I've only had that experience a couple of other times in my working life.)

The structure of the job is a little different from what I used to do, and a little better overall. Some of it is the editing work I've been doing for the past seven or eight months, which I really enjoy. Other parts of it are just what I used to do before, and while that's not necessarily as exciting or interesting, it's worth it. Some of the processes have changed, and not necessarily in ways that can be considered improvements, but I don't care; it's worth it.

Even though I was working full-time and then some for a successful and growing company, I was technically an employee of the agency that placed me in the job; the work was stressful but also tedious, I was not being paid what the work was worth, and the benefits available to me were not especially competitive. Making this change means that once again I'm part of an organization with thousands of employees, and able to benefit from that in all the ways you would expect.

So, while I am still disheartened and disappointed by what's happening in our government and in our country, on a more personal level this is a distinct turn for the better for me. And the office will be moving in a couple of months, which will provide a figurative fresh start to accompany this more experiential one. And I expect I will be able to find more time to blog...

End of Year Reflections 2016

When I wrote a similar post last year, I said I'd check back in to see where things were; here we are on December 31st, and I don't want to make a liar of myself.

Unlike the past several years, I had plenty of work to occupy me this year. My day job demanded my full focus and attention for pretty much every minute of every workday, a marked departure from most of my prior work. I find the work quite stressful, and initially I considered not committing to the assignment, but a combination of inertia and guilt kept me in place. I made a verbal commitment to remain in the position through the end of June, and since nothing better had presented itself by that point, I kept going. By the end of July, the volume of work had increased to the point that I started working overtime hours, and regularly logged an average of 45 hours per week for the rest of the year.

I also took on additional part-time work for one of my former bosses. Initially that involved migrating several years of content from one platform to another, somewhat rote but not entirely uninteresting. I finished that project near the end of July, and within a few weeks I was being asked to copy-edit and proofread material, a task I find much more engaging. For most of the year I put in five of six hours a week on these projects, which was good for my bank balance and my resume.

Elsewhere, we said goodbye to our dog in early February, and got another dog near the end of June. I quickly fell back into the routine of walks and feedings, all of which is much easier with a younger, healthy dog. This dog's personality and quirks are still revealing themselves to us, which is a big part of the appeal of having a dog.

Otherwise, things around here were pretty normal. Like a lot of people, we are kind of ready to be done with 2016, though along with that goes apprehension about what's to come. At the same time, we are grateful that this year has brought some measure of stability back to our lives. The other day I had the thought that 2016 should be sent off by symbolically burning something, perhaps the calendar that hangs on the inside of our back door, but as renters we don't quite feel comfortable lighting something on fire, even outdoors.

So tonight we'll sit down with friends for a home-cooked dinner, and toast to our collective good fortune. Here's hoping that everyone has a fun and safe night and weekend, and that 2017 brings good things to all of us.

Hey, There

A few times over the past couple of weeks, I've wanted to post but felt like I didn't have enough to say to justify it. At the moment I'm almost ready to head off to bed, but a few thoughts are swimming around and I can probably turn them into small bits.

My work continues more or less the same, though my employer has allowed me to shift my hours so that my work day now finishes at 6 pm instead of 7. While I did like having time in the morning to accomplish certain things like paying bills, drinking coffee and eating breakfast, and catching up with my online reading, I much prefer being done earlier and having that time free in the evening. So that's something.

Outlet shopping ain't what it used to be. On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend we visited Freeport, Maine, the home of L.L. Bean. We hadn't been there for a number of years and I kind of bugged the Mrs. into going. Even though we have Bean stores around here now, it's always fun to visit the original, but aside from that it wasn't a very exciting day. I didn't see anything in the stores that interested me much; part of that is just what's available at a given time, part is that outlets serve a different function than they used to; and part is that my tastes and preferences have shifted somewhat, and I also try to think more carefully before making purchases. Truthfully, my shopping urges could have been satisfied at the Kittery outlets, which are an hour closer than Freeport.

The weather cooperated; the day before it was 96 here, but the day we went it barely managed to hit 60. We did stop for dinner at the Portsmouth Brewery, which is always a good idea; they take the food as seriously as they do their beer. And following dinner we made our way over to Annabelle's Ice Cream, which I first visited over 30 years ago. It's still in the same place, and as far as I can tell it hasn't changed at all.

Long Hours and '80s TV Homages

Still very busy over here, working the regular job plus trying to find at least a few hours each week for the additional work (which pays much better hourly, but is a project that will only last a couple more months at most). My main job is quite mentally exhausting, so it's been difficult to give up my free time to do the other stuff, but having the first couple of checks come in from that has been nice.

I've been trying to come up with post ideas, but at 11:30 pm my brain is generally not offering much in the way of creativity these days. However, a trailer for the upcoming seventh season of Archer surfaced this week, and it's so brilliant that I decided I needed to share it.



And if you need any further convincing (unlikely if you spent any time watching Magnum, P.I.) as to just how precise this is, the internet has graciously cooperated with a side-by-side comparison:

End of Year Reflections

[Apologies for the silence around here lately. In addition to work and holiday stuff, I got an early Christmas present last week: a cold. It's mostly gone now, but it definitely kept me from tending to some of the things I wanted to be doing.]

Christmas is over and we're counting down the last few days of the year. At this time we naturally become reflective on the months that have passed. While this has not been what I would call a banner year (that fourth Super Bowl championship banner aside), there has definitely been progress.

I started 2015, as I did '14 and '13, without a job. I was well beyond disappointment and frustration with my situation, and was starting to think it would be necessary to return to dreaded retail in order to sustain myself. A former supervisor offered me a bit of freelance work, and then in April I was hired by a grocery-shopping service, but I got only three shifts during my first several weeks, so it became clear that option was not viable.

In May and early June, a couple of work-at-home temp assignments came my way. Both were relatively short in duration but put my skills to use. While I was working on the second of those, the agency offered me a three-month onsite assignment. I was hoping it might turn into a permanent job; it did not, but I was asked to stay for an additional month. Another assignment offer came soon after, which catches us up to today.

Working at home full-time is an odd experience. Depending on where one lives, it may or may not be possible to go out for lunch. In my case I've had to make the effort on weekends to plan ahead and have food on hand for daily lunches. The hours are a little awkward, and I'm busy pretty much all day, so I don't really have time to deal with little personal stuff like most office workers are able to.

Being home means I am also responsible for the dog's needs, which at this point are many and frequent. Before starting that temp gig in June, I was also home and taking care of her, but over the past six months or so, with age and increasing frailty, she's come to need us more than ever. When she appears, roughly every couple of hours, I have to stop whatever I'm doing and take her out, or feed her, or both. Handling it all has been challenging, but at the same time I'm glad that I am able to be here for her.

So my life is feeling somewhat circumscribed at the moment. I have episodes of several TV shows on the DVR that I have not found time to watch. And that isn't going to get any easier, as I have agreed to take another freelance assignment in order to make up for what my main job is (not) paying me. Everything is very stressful, and that's not something I'm used to dealing with.

But as I have said to a couple of people, I have to look at this year as a net positive. These are steps that I need to take as I work to restore my circumstances to what they were before I was laid off. I enjoyed my work and was able to live satisfactorily and comfortably from it. There seem to be more jobs now, and anecdotally I think that people my age and older are doing a little bit better than they were a couple of years ago. Obviously I will continue to blog, but let's check back in at the end of next December and see where things are...

Status: Busy

Hi. Yeah, I know. Work is keeping me very busy. Like, really, really busy. I honestly can't say when I will get time to make a meaningful contribution here. But I'm not going to put the blog on hiatus; I'm just saying, it may be quiet around here for a bit.

Duty Calls

Things have been bubbling lately. Temp jobs have come and gone, for reasons not worth going into here, and now I'm about to start my first sustained experience as a remote worker. I've accepted a long-term assignment with a company where everyone works remotely.

That doesn't mean I'm going to be one of those coffee-shop people; for one thing, I don't care for laptops. No, it means I'm going to be working from home, staying in touch with my coworkers via daily online "meetings" and chat software. My training begins tomorrow, so by the end of the week I should have a clearer picture of how it's going to work.

As for how it will affect blogging, that remains to be seen. I don't yet have any sense of how busy I'm going to be during the day. I'll also be dealing with the dog, who has become quite demanding in her advanced age: when we are home, she needs to go out every two to three hours, on average, and wants food almost as frequently.

Temporarily Un-Temped

I wrapped up my temporary work assignment today. I was there for four months, which was about a month longer than I originally expected. I'll be on a temporary break while I work on lining up another assignment. I have a few random thoughts on the non-work aspects of my experience...

—The office had a business-casual dress code. This wasn't a big deal, I just was not used to it, having spent more than a decade in jobs where I could wear whatever I felt like. I quickly figured out that a very large percentage of my nicer, office-appropriate clothing was for the cooler months, and I had to scramble to ensure I had enough warm-weather stuff. Also, lighter-weight pants tend to stretch out in the waist after I've had them on for a couple of hours, making adjustments necessary, so I had to wear my belts cinched tighter than usual.

—Conversely, I had plenty of shoes that I was able to rotate through during the summer, but I'm lacking in dress-casual shoes for fall. I have boots, and I did wear those some when it got cool enough, like today. But I'm going to have to add a pair or two of shoes.

—The commuting was far more burdensome than having to wear pants and long-sleeve shirts in summer. Working at home is starting to look more appealing...

—But if I work at home, I won't get to go out and get a tasty lunch every day; I'd end up eating peanut butter and Fluff all the time.

—I used to eat salad for lunch almost every day at my previous job, but I had access to a salad bar with excellent variety. There's only one in Harvard Square that I'm aware of, in the market on the corner of Brattle and Church, and it's kind of overpriced. So I fell back into my sandwich-eating ways (Pronto in the Charles Hotel courtyard, or Al's Cafe in Holyoke Smith Center), punctuated with falafel from Sabra Grill or the tortilla salad from Felipe's. I also went to Chipotle because it was easy and fast, but not more than once every other week.

—I never made it to the food trucks over by the Science Center, because it was kind of too far: by the time I walked over there and waited for my food, I'd barely have enough time to get back to my office, never mind eat. And I didn't want to be out walking that much during the height of summer anyway.

Vertical Ride

I'm working on the top floor of a building with six floors. For whatever reason, there is no exit access from the stairways to any floor except the ground floor and the garage sublevel. You can enter a stairway from any floor, but you can't go between floors, nor can you walk up if you happen to work on the second floor. So the elevators get a healthy workout each day.

As a result, a lot of people have to ride up to the second and third floors, and I think some of them feel at least a little guilty that they are slowing down the rides of those who work on higher floors. People are very eager to push my floor button for me when I'm boarding an elevator, and when they get off on a lower floor, they say, "Have a good day" as they are leaving. I've never seen anything like it.

There are three elevators, and one of them is frequently in use by maintenance and HVAC people. It's draped with heavy blankets to protect the walls inside. Unfortunately, the blankets are quite smelly. I don't like riding in this elevator, which I have dubbed the Smellevator. But when I push the call button, I don't know which elevator is coming (only the lobby shows the floor locations of the elevator cars), and it seems silly to wait for a different one.

Adjustments

I've been back in a full-time work situation for two weeks (not counting the day off for the holiday), and I am still getting used to many things.

First I had to figure out my commute. Getting almost anywhere from where we live requires taking a bus into Wellington on the Orange Line. That bus is pretty predictable most of the time, and the Orange Line runs pretty frequently in the morning. In this instance I'm going to Harvard Square, so I decided my best option was taking the subway two stops to Sullivan and catching the 86 bus. That has worked fairly well, though the 86 is a crawl in the mornings due to the volume of ridership, traffic congestion, the large number of traffic lights, narrow streets, road construction, etc. On average it took 35 to 40 minutes to go the 2.5 miles from Sullivan to Harvard Square.

By accident I left the house a bit later one day last week, and I found that the trip was somewhat less painful overall; the 86 was slightly less crowded, there was a little less traffic, and the trip took about 25 minutes. I did my trips that way this past week and it was basically the same each morning, so I will probably keep doing it that way regularly. Evening trips on the 86 from Harvard to Sullivan are also somewhat easier.

Getting up early enough to make it out of the house on time has been probably the biggest challenge. I've never had a problem getting up when I need to, but I have a hard time adjusting at the other end of the day, to get to bed early enough to get a decent amount of sleep. I'm used to staying up until 1 am or so, so trying to warp up and get into bed by 11:30 or thereabouts, and to fall asleep, is not easy. Eventually I will get tired enough that the routine will take.

My work environment is perfectly pleasant, with a lot of natural light and infrequent need for the dreaded overhead fluorescent lights. My one real issue is that the kitchen/lounge area does not have comfortable seating for eating. There is a counter, but it's on the low side, and there are no stools or chairs to use with it. There are couches and chairs, and a couple of coffee tables, but these are too low to eat on comfortably.

At my old job I was used to eating at my desk so that I could blog, read websites, and do whatever other personal pursuits I wanted during that hour. The people in my little area do not seem to eat at their desks, and as a newcomer and a temp I feel it might be overstepping for me to do so; also I try to be sensitive to the fact that food smells sometimes bother others. I would like to think that someday I might have an office of my own, but who knows if that will ever happen.

I'm scheduled to be on this assignment until some time in September. I was supposed to be starting on a work-at-home assignment, but I have essentially been "borrowed" from that until this one ends. This meant we also had to arrange for a dog walker on short notice. Our dog-caring neighbor now runs a day-care business in Somerville, so she is not available during the day, but fortunately she was able to recommend another walker who was able to step in. The dog has not been so thrilled at this change in routine, and has been somewhat less than cooperative when taken out. Due to the Mrs.' schedule, we only need a walker three weekdays, so we are all adjusting.

Where Have I Been?

Oh, hi there. It's been a while. Like I said, I wasn't sure what things would be like. Almost every evening this week I have come home from work with the intention of posting something, but every night I got sidetracked, and before I knew it, it was time for bed (and that's earlier, since I need to get up earlier to get ready).

In the "old days" I was salaried, and no one really monitored my daily work activities. As long as I met my deadlines I could afford to take 20 minutes out of my workday to write a post. As a temp I'm paid by the hour, and my work area is part of an open space that I share with three other people. Whether they care what I'm doing or not, it wouldn't look good for me to be meandering from my main task, which has intermediate deadlines.

With a holiday weekend upon us, I'm not working tomorrow (Friday), and while I have some other things I'm going to try to get done, I should also be able to do a couple of make-up posts.

Change in Status

So about a month ago I got attached to a long-term temp project. The catch was there was no definite start date. It's a very large corporation, and corporations move slowly. It still hasn't started yet, and it's looking like it won't get going until after the holiday weekend, at the earliest.

Meanwhile, in addition to the short-term projects I have worked on, just last week I unexpectedly got offered a three-month onsite assignment, starting today. The other one was going to be working at home, which was feeling more my speed these days. The agency arranged so that I could do this assignment, then rejoin the other one when this one ends.

We had to scramble to find someone who could come and walk the dog, but fortunately that worked out. Then I had to deal with the abrupt adjustment of going back to work on five days' notice, and figuring out my daily commute, and figuring out what to wear, and everything else that goes along with working a regular job. That is a work in progress.

Posting may be... I don't know. Erratic? Nonexistent? We'll see.

Direct Effect?

So now that the president has been reelected, I automatically get a new job, right? Isn't that how it works? Related: we were also promised jetpacks, and flying cars...

End of an Era

Today is my last day at my job. A combination of circumstances made necessary some changes to the organizational structure that resulted in 14 of us, about 60% of the staff, having our positions eliminated. We found out more than two months ago, but publishing monthly products means you can't just announce cuts and send people home at the end of that day or week; due to advance production schedules, a handoff date has to be planned, and today is it.

(I apologize if I'm being somewhat vague about things, but I think it's safer not to discuss too much of the situation publicly.)

I've been here six years, and some of my coworkers who are leaving have been here for as long as 15 years. A couple are within sight of retirement, while others are under 30. People have kids, one is pregnant, one is getting married in a couple of weeks, and several have spouses that also are out of work. Some of us belong to a union, which means we have a sort of safety net for a couple of months while human resources helps us look for other job possibilities within the organization.

I have really enjoyed working here, and that's because of my coworkers. I've been very fortunate, and this is the most harmonious workplace I've ever been a part of. When you spend every day with a group of people, that makes a huge difference.

I hate looking for jobs, but it's just how things are these days. What's next for me? I don't know, but I guess I'll find out. In the meantime, I am looking forward to at least a few days of doing very little.

Found!

Well, that was strange: someone walking by my cube just noticed that my coffee mug was sitting on top of a bookcase that is positioned against the outer wall of the cube. But I don't actually pass by that spot to get into my cube, so it may have been there for a couple of days without me or anyone else noticing it.

Missing

My travel coffee mug is missing from the office. I didn't end up using it on Friday, and when I went to get it yesterday it was not in the kitchen. An email to my coworkers yielded nothing. This is quite strange; everyone in the office has seen me with it at our weekly group breakfast, and so knows it's mine.

I liked using the mug because it kept coffee hot much longer than in a paper cup, and because the cafeteria gives a discount on their coffee when you use your own mug instead of a disposable cup and lid each day.