Oof, askye, sounds like there are no good options there. I hope your Mom can help out.

Awesome, my company is implementing a vaccine mandate as of December 8. There's still a lot of corporate bullshit that goes on, but they do a lot of things right.

My office doesn't have a vaccine requirement (yet?), but we do have required masking and social distancing. For so long, I was the only one in the (huge) office, so it's disconcerting to have OTHER PEOPLE around. They make noise. They ask me questions. They don't take the used coffee packs out of the coffee maker. They should be working remotely, right?

OK, this is a stupid thing to complain about but I really want to. The way we do vacation requests and documentation at my company is with a shared Google calendar that people put their vacation time on, so everyone can see who is out and when they are coming back (months ago we were told it was not actually great for this and we would be doing something else but there has been no word of any change since then). Some people also put things like when they will be in a meeting or such for, I guess, the visibility although we can all see each others individual calendars which I personally feel is more appropriate for that. So, we have the Outlet Sale coming up and we are all supposed to be working 2 days of it, so I signed up for my shifts and put the times I will be at the Sale and therefore not at my desk (or wherever, not available for regular work stuff) on my calendar and just got an email instructing everyone to put their Outlet Sale shifts on the vacation calendar and I am angry out of proportion because it is just going to be a mess of a billion Outlet Sale shifts every day and it will be impossible to see ANYTHING at a glance but this is what we are doing. Argh.

That sounds really annoying. And inefficient at best.

They should be working remotely, right?

Yes

Ugh, it seems like it should be easy enough to have a separate calendar for the Sale shifts, or some other solution.

There's a master schedule with every Sale shift and who is signed up for it, and we each have our own calendar, that anyone in the company can see and that really seems like enough to me. It's really the annoyance of saying to myself for a couple of weeks "I wish people wouldn't do that" and then having everyone be told to do that as official policy.

My office has an Outlook calendar ... which is an issue itself. We don't seem to be able to get everyone looking at - or even having access to - the same calendar. So you put something on the calendar, but there are always people who don't see it. And we have SO MANY calendars, some started years ago for specific purposes that are now moot. And on the main calendar that I use, we have repeating events that were added years ago by people who are no longer with us for events that are not going to take place (like a team - spelled "teem" - meeting on alternate Mondays, all-staff meetings once a month and so on). And since they were added by people who aren't around any more, no one seems able to get them off the calendar. Let's hear it for the labor-saving advantages of technology!

Yikes and I thought trying to get people who send vacation as meeting requests to send them as free instead of busy was annoying! I generally just mark my own calendar out of office (which anyone in the company can see, though not how I label it) and send to my closest colleagues a meeting request for the time I’ll be gone but marked as free so it doesn’t block their calendars but they can quickly see that I’m out.

When I'm on a Zoom call, I have to go on Teams and mark myself as "do not disturb" ... and then remember to go back and mark myself a available. Outlook and Teams do not seem to work well together.