“Remoted” – Workday Five

The day planner page has turned to a new week. The work of Remote Workday Five was thankfully less hectic and stressful than the previous week.

With no separation between work and home and the home-office set up in a prominent room in the tiny house, there is no escaping it. With no other humans in the physical realm and little variation between the days, the remoted stretch already feels like it’s been significantly longer than the calendar indicates. 

It’s now clear that the time is long past when the second bedroom upstairs should have been set up as a guest room/office as intended when I bought the house. There are reasons it is not yet done.

The reason I work out of the dining room.

Because the house is a bungalow, there is no attic storage to speak of. The house is in the flood plain on the wrong side of the flood wall, and the basement sometimes takes in water, rendering it an unsuitable option for storage.

It also seems that I may own too much stuff, and what would normally be stored in a basement or attic is shoved in the spare bedroom. Boxes and storage tubs that were once lined up in orderly rows along the walls have been rummaged through and not replaced neatly. The overall theme of the room is closer to shit-show than guest room/office and it’s just one tiny step away from being featured in an episode of Hoarders.

Someday, when time, money, energy and the return to a normal life free of social distancing allow, a carpenter can be found to execute an idea to help organize the room. A hole will be cut in the guest room wall on one side of the room for the installation of insulation. Instead of just closing the hole with drywall, a built-in dresser and shelving will be installed into the wall in the space between the wall and the slope of the roof. The room will have a bed and a desk with a computer with a current operating system. The morning light is beautiful in the spare room, and it will be a pleasant space in which to work. This is the fantasy.

Today, while working at the reality of the dining table/desk that is slightly too tall while seated in a dining chair that is padded but still uncomfortable for an all day stretch, it was hard to fend off the regret of not having set up the spare room.

As a short-term solution, it might be possible to at least tidy up the space near the desk, but there is still the matter of the 10-year old mac with the tragically outdated operating system that occupies the desktop. When I got the new laptop a year ago, I stepped away from the desk and the mac and never went back. Looks like it’s time to return.

Lessons from Remote Workday Five

1. Working remotely removes the opportunity for the morning greetings and minor chit chat that happen in the office. Remote work seems to just dive headfirst into the tasks without any pleasantries. It’s important to stay in contact on a human level as well as on the projects and statuses.
2. When it sounds like a dog standing near you is about to barf, and the thought dances through your head that you hope he doesn’t actually barf, but if he does barf, hopefully it’s not on the power strip into which the computer and phone are plugged – follow your instincts and respond. Yes, he was, indeed, barfing over the power strip. Ewwwwww.