fortnightly update

[domarzione]

The good: I wrote this for The Old Guard. Which I enjoyed a lot and went on about a bit here. 


The bad: I went from Thursday afternoon "nobody is going back to the office unless they ask to" to Friday morning "you are starting back at the office in ten days" and I have whiplash because I sure as shit did not ask. I am in a High Risk Group and do not want to take the subway to work in a space that Facilities hasn't even done the walk-though yet to determine safety protocols, let alone replaced the air handlers or figured out what to do with the bathrooms that were a disaster before all this. And the ugly is that my boss is basically offering us all up as sacrificial lambs because if he actually dared to tell his bosses "not everyone's ready" they would have said "fine," but he won't because he's got his eyes on the prize and that includes never even offering a modification to their requests, no matter what kind of dumbass results may come. This isn't dumbass, this is something else. I won't be going in every day, but that does not make this better. 


The good: baseball and hockey are back and returning. My Mets rocked today's opener like it was a 2019 AU where Yoenis Cespedes didn't lose a fight with a wild boar and Edwin Diaz didn't get the yips at being in NYC. (And if you think I'm making up the part with the boar, you don't know my baseball team.) I suspect the NY Rangers will have a brief adventure in the Toronto Bubble, but I'll take it. 



Three things make a post, so I'll stop griping now. 

Comments

[alessandriana]

Ah, gotcha. Definitely a tough situation. Do you know if other coworkers are uncomfortable with it? If you could get together with a number of them to push back, at least it wouldn't look like you alone are a troublemaker.

For a while we had a policy that high risk personnel weren't going to be called back into the office unless something major happened (our job can't be performed remotely), but it looks like that policy has been rescinded at high levels of our org. It's still up to individual managers to make the schedules, though, so I think unofficially many are not putting them on the schedule. Still, it's very frustrating.

[domarzione]

Sadly, I am the department rebel/loudmouth. Everyone else is docile to the point of obsequiousness and asking Boss and Supervisors what can they do to help. People asked to start working remotely before we had to. A few will gripe privately, but actually putting up a protest? No, no, despite the fact that we are unionized and short of first degree murder are really hard to fire.

Higher Admin's prime directive is that they hate paying us not to work, for very odd values of work. Snow days? We don't get them. The database has to be taken down for a week? Everyone come in and clean their cubicles for five days. My unit has actually been insanely efficient while we've been working remotely, even if we can't do our primary tasks -- we've all been doing the secondary stuff that none of us have time for in the office. That's why Higher would have been fine with us staying out -- they can look at the stats and see progress. But other units cannot do this and they are the ones driving the "so when is everyone coming back?" questions and my boss lacks the leadership capacity to say "we're fine where we are and here are the numbers to back it up."

[alessandriana]

That sounds really frustrating. I'm sorry you're getting thrown under the bus like that. :\

I finished The Old Guard! It was great.