Dang. Do you feel like that has worked out ok for you personally, Kalshane? Are people following guidelines and whatnot?

A friend of mine was ordered back to the office every third week, for no good reason (she works in higher ed doing financial aid for an online program -- she never sees students in person anyway!), and she got out of it for a medical reason, which was her BMI, which seems crazy to me, but apparently is a high-risk marker.

Just a possible arrow for some to keep in their quiver if you're looking for a reason to stay out of the office.

Also, msbelle, I thought of you as it took me 1000 emails to get paperwork submitted to the City, but half of it was my issue. And they took scanned paperwork!!

On Ask A Manager, there are stories ...

One of the worst was a firm who tried to make their employees forfeit their entire year's vacation time because they'd been working from home. (AAM said that, appalling though this is, over much of the United States it would be legal.)

I've made the decision that the move to remote work for my company is permanent. The work has been getting done as needed, we are set up to communicate through a few avenues, and when needed we can gather at the office. The office space will have a couple of workstation areas set up so that you can connect your laptop and work from there if something requires you to be in. We will do a rotating shift in the office to cover shipments and things like that, which means basically one day every week and a half each person will work from the office space for the day, but they will most likely be solo in the office.

One thing about the fulltime job is two weeks of vacation and THREE sick days, which to me sounds like bullshit. Fortunately I'm confident that the guy in the local office is very flexible in terms of hours and working from home.

In happier news, Ryan has been learning about the Dreaming at school, and has celebrated it by writing a haiku (so, traditional Aboriginal poetry). It's called "Echidna and the Shade Tree Movement".

Echidna and the Shade Tree Movement

Animals hunting
Echidna guarded the young
Echidna angry

It's that last line that makes it poetry.

Dana that sounds like complete bullshit. The full time jobs I've had in retail have had better leave than that.

Right now we get (or pre pandemic got) 114 hours (or something like that) of PTO AND 40 hours of Personal days. At Best Buy I think we had 2 weeks of sick and 2 weeks of vacation although I believe that has changed since I was there.

Work has been tiring, customers are so needy right now. Also some continue to be just..batshit.. annoying. Our store is now open an hour before the mall so now instead of having customers bitching we were closing before the mall does we now have people grumbling because the doors to the mall are closed because the mall is closed.

"When did the mall start opening at 11?"..since May 1.

So they increased our hours of operation but they had cut us to the bone in terms of staffing hours with full time getting 29.5 hours. But now we are behind in fufillment (pulling products for online orders) so we have increased hours. I'm going into tomorrow and working 8 hours just pulling stuff. It's hard for me because I'm not familiar with upstairs areas and then also the store looks a mess in many areas because we are so lightly staffed.

I have nothing but respect for people working in the service industries. That shit is stressful in the best of times when things aren't batshit crazy and you don't have to worry about your customers infecting you with a virus (or trying to beat you up because you asked them to wear a mask).

As for my work, I personally think it's bullshit that we're in the office right now. We proved we could easily work from home while still providing our high standards of support to our users (we had a rotation with one person physically in the building each week to push buttons and swap out hardware as-needed.)

On the plus side, they're doing a lot cleaning, we've got a hospital-grade HVAC system, elevators are restricted use and they've reworked the cafeteria to encourage social distancing and limit physical contact.

On the negative, up until our governor issued a mask mandate last week, maybe 10% of people were wearing them and I was constantly seeing unmasked people standing in each other's cubes talking. They're also continuing to do monthly guest speakers in the auditorium which is flat out stupid, IMO, but their reasoning is attendance is voluntary (except for, you know, the staff that has to support it) so people are choosing to take the risk.

So far we haven't had any evidence of intra-employee transmission but I worry it's only a matter of time.

My big boss' general practice has been to require people to be at the office during normal business hours because it helps collaborative work, ensures that people are available if clients or co-workers need to get in touch with them, etc. But she's been quite reasonable about working from home in this situation, and in fact ordered everyone who could to do so well in advance of the states closing non-essential businesses. I think the work getting done, and safely, is the main priority, not making sure that people don't occasionally wander off to deal with a child or pet during the work day.