{"id":5748,"date":"2020-03-20T20:59:11","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T00:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/?p=5748"},"modified":"2020-03-20T21:02:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-21T01:02:20","slug":"coronavirus-diary-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wrote-about\/coronavirus-diary-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus Diary 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve made a huge mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For the past two years I worked from home. I would sometimes go multiple days between leaving the house other than getting the mail or refilling my bird feeders. I was a government contractor support Webex, and a host of other teleconferencing options for a government agency you\u2019ve heard of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am particularly well-suited for remote work as I\u2019ve had the time (and money) to setup a space that\u2019s not grandiose by any means but far surpasses anything I\u2019ve ever found at a job site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a hand-crank standing desk from Ikea<\/a> that I dearly love. Not always because I want to stand, but I\u2019m tall and often times desks aren\u2019t high enough for me. It\u2019s a huge open workspace I can lay out computers and notebooks and whatever I\u2019m tinkering with at the time with room to spare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have two monitors setup amongst my small army of computers. I have two windows I can open for cross-breeze. I can control the temperature and amount of light at any given time. Those last two are the biggest benefits of working from home. Light and temperature control are so often overlooked at offices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m also extremely introverted. I\u2019ve got lists of books and projects and things to do miles long. To be inside is to be in my element.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My wife and I do not have any children so we are not trying to figure out how to keep small people entertained and educated all day, while stressing about them, and the coronavirus and the state of the world and\u2026 and\u2026 and\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a great irony not lost on me that on my birthday this year, in Mid-February I resigned from my full-time remote job to take another job in an office. Albeit very nearby which allows me to avoid all of the Interstates and Beltway hellscapes of Washington DC area traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it means going to work. In an office. Away from my perfect work place. Right at the start of this outbreak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That lasted a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I was sent back home since I\u2019m in a position where my job can be done remotely. Which I understand is a completely privileged position. The place where I work relies on people being in the office so many don\u2019t have the same luxury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where did I decide to take a job right at the start of a global pandemic where millions of people are being sent home to work or quarantined in their homes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, a company that specializes in remote collaboration of course! My new role is to oversee Webex and Zoom webinars for clients of all sizes including many large companies and government entities you\u2019ve heard of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I jumped out of the frying pan and directly into a seething volcano! It\u2019s been a breakneck pace for the past week trying to get up to speed and onboarded into a new company, all the while everything is on fire!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is how my week has been going. And how next week will go. And how the weeks for the foreseeable future will continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s thrilling being right in the middle or building something and racing to troubleshoot and put out fires with the technology platforms our business relies on. All while trying to learn the business and how it all works internally. I\u2019ve had just as many people ask me this week how my first two weeks have gone as had said how much they appreciated my help with something or expertise I was able to provide. Or even having a warm body to hand a task off to and trust it would get done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a satisfying feeling knowing I am appreciated and that I can step in and immediately contribute. And those contributions aren\u2019t overlooked. I\u2019m no longer one number on a huge spreadsheet somewhere. A cost for a large government contractor to worry about spending money on. Worried I\u2019ll ask for more or want more out of my position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As much as it\u2019s nice to know I\u2019m an asset, it\u2019s just as stressful. We use a lot of remote cloud-based applications with work and they\u2019re struggling to keep up at times. Zoom and Webex overall seem to be doing a good job at the basics, but not a day goes by I don\u2019t have a stream of alerts and notifications of various issues with both platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the them are simply limitations of capacity. There are only so many phone lines into a country. There are only so many ports for data and voice to travel across. Just as with cars and trucks sharing a road, the same is true for the internet. And we are going to test that infrastructure like never before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m thankful to still be working. I\u2019m thankful to still be healthy. I\u2019m thankful to have been part of a religion for a time that pushed preparation and saving. It\u2019s serving us well as we have safety nets and savings in place for ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if you made it this far, here\u2019s a silly picture of Zoom multi-platform testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Testing Zoom on Mac, Linux and Mobile.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve made a huge mistake. For the past two years I worked from home. I would sometimes go multiple days between leaving the house other than getting the mail or refilling my bird feeders. I was a government contractor support Webex, and a host of other teleconferencing options for a government agency you\u2019ve heard of. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1381,1382,1384],"class_list":["post-5748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wrote-about","tag-coronavirus","tag-remote-work","tag-zoom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5748"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5752,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5748\/revisions\/5752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}