Working From Home

The same as for many, I was switched to working from home by my employer at the start of the UK lockdown in 2020. As a sysadmin it probably wasn’t as big as adjustment as it probably was for many though. But I hadn’t regularly worked from home before - just the occasional day here or there.

I started working from my kitchen table, on my personal MacBook Air and resurected a monitor/keyboard/mouse that many a computer-person probably has stashed away as spare in their house. Then schools closed and home-schooling began - it was clear this wasn’t going to work very well for long. A trip to IKEA was made - and made again, I’d misjudged the space I’d have in the kitchen to put the desk (The only place that had any capacity spare).

This worked pretty well, I could move around still, I wasn’t in the way of the kids doing their work (luckily I’d already gotten them iPads the christmas before lockdown, they really came into their own) - I also was clsoe by to supervise.

Fairly early on in lockdown, my secondment to Research IT ended and I was back on the email team. It was a little more tricky to do from home, with trusted IPs and having to RDP to Windows based Exchange servers, but still manageable. But I had already felt my time on the email team was at an end for me, hence the secondment.

A friend of mine I’d previously worked with got in touch with me to say there was a job going working at his place, so I applied and got an interview. Of course everything was still locked down at this point and so the interview(s) would be remote - it was scheduled for when I was due to be on holiday - but no worries! Where’s there’s WiFi, we can still do Zoom! I was please to say that I got the job and after a three month notice period joined the company.

This time, the position was to be fully WFH. Yes there may be the odd day in an office, but I wasn’t working for a single campus organisation anymore. In fact only a minority of people I would be working with would be based at the same ‘office’ as I was anyway. So, time to commit to this wfh.

There was some personal changes over this period of wfh too. Divorce, a move to live with my girlfriend, who became my fiance. She also brought opinions on my wfh setup, helping me to improve things. As I sit now I’m in the third iteration. I’ve moved from the kitchen of the old house, to under the stairs in the middle of the new house. From in my sons bedroom and now, hopefully for the long term (until we move haha) the living room on a much larger desk. With this move I’ve treated myself to a better USB-C dock (living the one cable life now - power/display/networking/usb all in one). I’m still happy with the 24” Apple LED Cinema display, but wondering about swapping the stand for a VESA mount.

D