I have a plan, a good plan, for today. I’m escaping to my lab for a good chunk of the day to do mindless, mundane stuff. It’ll be fun.
Let’s see…first on my list is to make more flies. Then I’m going to scrub out a backlog of fly bottles and get them into the autoclave. Then I have to start rotating spider cages — I have to wash a half dozen cages and do some repair of frames, move a half dozen spiders from old stinky poopy cages to the new shiny clean ones, so I can wash those cages tomorrow and shuffle around some more spiders. I’ll also do some general tidying up before feeding all the baby spiders and coming home.
So there you have it, the glamorous scientific life. At least it’s all stuff one can do during a pandemic.
My getaway is a simple lean-to I’m building with a friend. It takes some 30 minutes to walk, and since it’s more than 100meters from the trail nobody comes there.
When mandatory WFH started, I briefly felt a little trapped. After a couple weeks, it hit me. Woohoo! I have a door I can shut behind me. That is a luxury I have been missing at the office since my grad school days, when I briefly held a much-coveted windowless mini-office inside an office, owing to my advisor’s seniority.
The open plan office has got to be the dumbest idea to come down the pike.
PaulBC @ #2 — Indeed. Most of my career (since 1984) I’ve been in “cubes”…semi-open office spaces. Lots of distractions. Today’s take on the open office…rows of 12 foot long tables with hundreds of people milling about…would drive me nuts. For several years I actually had an office with a door, which was very nice. Fortunately, I’ve been WFH since July 2019 which is my favorite.
Sounds like comforting work actually.
I’m glad I can’t work from home. I can’t get anything done there. And I don’t want to either. Home is MY place.
Erlend Meyer@5 I used to feel that way, and I have been able to WFH optionally at least one day a week most places I’ve worked in years. I took advantage of that when I had a long commute, but I didn’t like it.
In fact, I would still prefer having a place to go that wasn’t home if that place had a door I could shut behind me or even the privacy of a traditional cubicle with high walls. I work with people who know of nothing but open plan offices and it’s funny to watch them move to public spaces like the cafeteria area just to get some privacy. I don’t know if the intent of open plan is to save money or give employees the sense that everyone can what they’re doing all the time, probably a little of both. In some forms of collaboration, it might work, but I don’t see what’s wrong with cubes honestly. Even something along the lines of library carrells would be preferable so you are not facing other people.
@PaulBC#6:
I think the primary reason is reduced office space, but increased peer pressure might also factor in. My experience is limited to some very gossip-prone environments, but that could be coincidental. All in all I don’t think the model stands up to scrutiny. At least not without a large number of exceptions.