Re: $130 per year?
I'd imagine those exciting plans for next year include "simplifying" the tariffs (i.e. making it more expensive)
521 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Feb 2007
A couple of years ago lived in a small place where the room through which you entered the house didn't have normal ceiling lighting, and instead had to rely on plugged-in lamps. And the only convenient place to plug in such a thing was the other side of the room from the door. So no, it's not always possible to do that. Yes it was annoying. I set it up as described above so I could either turn on the lights from my phone as I approached the house, or do it via a voice command once inside (and it would also tell me a joke).
Or having a massive pile of photos, random bits of paper and possibly even DVDs on the surface of their desk, and complaining they can't find anything, while the desk drawers are completely empty. Oh and I suppose in this metaphor the recycling bin would actually be on the top of the desk too.
It's stories from the future that need a time machine.
This week's submission comes telepathically from a reader we shall Regomise as Tony. Cast your minds back to the 2130s. It was 25pm and Tony had barely started his weekend of being on space-call, when the fluxcaller rang. "Oh Belgium!" he cursed as he threw his moonbeer to the floor, only to see it miss and float away. His space boss gave him the bad news that the space printer was on the blink again and he would have to go there in his space rocket...
"Five reports indicate an inability to steer the vehicle. Seven additional reports cite loss of power steering resulting in increased effort to control the vehicle," the NHTSA said in its investigation document.
So a new Tesla is about as easy to control as my 17 year old banger with a failing power steering pump?
> WFH makes a difference when there is no metrics as to whether any work gets done
Developer-turned-Team Leader here. I have no metrics on specifically who's doing what work, yet still it all gets done regardless of what kind of chair people are sitting on. My team is distributed across 4 different locations around Europe and I literally have no idea (and neither do I care) whether they're in the office or at home that day, unless I happen to see the background of their camera in a meeting. I trust people to do the stuff that our team has committed to, and they repay the trust. Everyone plays their part and it's quickly apparent when someone isn't pulling their weight.
As an aside, in the past I've had plenty of days in the office where I've done hardly anything and also days working at home where it's way more productive than in the office due to absence of distractions.
Is there a feature to go back in time to whenever someone at Microsoft had the bright idea of naming File Explorer almost the same as Internet Explorer, so when you're trying to guide users as to what to do, they keep opening IE instead of browsing files? I have a cricket bat with that person's name on it...
OK, how do you stop the non-morons (aka wife) wandering over and asking you to put a plug on this, take the dog for a walk, look after junior whilst she nips to the shop etc?
Maybe have a grown-up discussion about it? e.g. in my home working scenario, we have an agreement that if the door to this 'office' room is closed then I'm working on something from which I can't be disturbed, otherwise I'm fair game for interruptions. And I usually say at the start of the day what time is good for lunch together.
no-one in the office to ask those 'off the cuff' questions
My team of 9 is split across 4 offices and in my particular office there are 3 of us. Today one of my colleagues is off sick and the other is working from home, but I can ask off-the-cuff questions to any of my other team members over text chat or a quick call, possibly involving a screenshare of some code. In which case it's the same whether I'm at home or here. We still learn stuff via these random chats or side-chats during calls. Although obviously it's not perfect 100% of the time, it's pretty straightforward and our team has been working like this for about 5 years now. We work as one team regardless of location and most of the time I have no idea whether my colleagues in other offices are at home or not.
The problem there is as you say, most people being in one room and some people calling in. For that stuff we try to do it so that either ALL attendees are physically there, or ALL attendees are calling in, even if half the people in the meeting are sitting at their desks on their own machines near each other.
If companies got rid of the requirements for upper case, lower case, numbers, special characters blablabla and just made users type in longer phrases that are more easily remembered, then the ...1,2,3 stuff wouldn't even happen.
Only English allowed?
You jest, but in a previous place where I worked, a manager became frustrated that he couldn't eavesdrop on some conversations between devs (presumably paranoia-driven) and declared "English only in the office please".
Said office was in Gibraltar, where a large % of people speak Spanish. You can imagine how well that was received.