Why I’m ambivalent about working from home

This post is a shamelessly opportunistic stream of consciousness follow up to Larry’s Why I Hate Working From Home and Jeremy’s Why I Like Working From Home. Larry’s is a response to his employer’s unwelcome shift from office to remote working across the board, and Jeremy’s more of a summary of a self-employed life. (I’ve never been able summarise, so this might be unfair; read their words first).

Like theirs, mine is a personal view. Unlike theirs I couldn’t have written this without standing on the shoulders of their giant-ness.

Erm… there’s aren’t any indications from my employer that it’s likely. Winter’s pretty much over here and there are no stay-at-home mandates, thank goodness.

Then

My experience of working from home (or working at home as I still think of it) is limited to a total of 6 months enforced by the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. 6 years ago now. I was lucky enough to be loaned a laptop, so I could choose where I worked. Dining room table it was, spread out but stopping the proliferation of newly folded clothes we usually see.

A dining room table repurposed into a working desk. Laptop, mouse, headphones, reading glasses, phone stand, notebook, 4-colour pen, opened beer, telescope…

What

I’m pretty tech-savvy so already had links to everything I needed – apart from paper records of course. And in fact I prepared the guides for the department to make their transitions easier. SharePoint, at least for me as a content creator and user, holds no scary corners now.

Teams, the Microsoft thing, was a godsend. I’ve heard other services are somehow better but I integrated SharePoint and Teams and built something useful we still rely on.

Free of casual interruptions, although my productivity didn’t exactly soar, I found my focus on even complex tasks was easily maintained. I hacked hours off jobs, created new methods that made things sustainable, and checked out all the major productivity/project planning methodologies/sites until I found one that clicked for me.

I found a comfortable niche.

Oops

My wife hated my constant presence. Hated the fact my posh headphones leaked the other side of conversations (and the music I used as a daily crutch – from bands I’d never previously have listened to). Hated my muttering when working through stuff. Hated the simple fact that she still had to travel into work.

My daughters were off school too, compounding the strife at home. I attempted to enforce a framework of study and rewards. Eventually the schools caught up and imposed some order to their education. I discovered I can’t teach, not as bad a thing as I’d thought when I began.

Now?

Not sure. I wouldn’t want to do any of it again, but if circumstances dictated I could. My girls are older, one’s at university and away most the week. The other in her final year of high school has a degree of independence I simply didn’t at her age.

We had the garage converted from a dumping ground into a room (with a heavy fireproof so sound-deadening door) and so I have choices.

We started a new contract with our broadband supplier, so speeds are easy multiples of what we had 6 years ago. 6 years ago I had to set up a supplementary router to work around a wireless bug in the ISP’s device. Again a validation of my expertise in areas unrelated to my work. (I use the term ‘expertise’ here, I think it means what it might not mean).

Bottom line

Anyway, if my employer decided to retain my services as I head towards retirement and thus obsolescence, I’d do it, sure.

What it’d do for our mental health, who knows.

When I started my working life, and even though I acquired my first home computer that year and bought into the ‘computers are our future’ ideal, no way could I have envisaged doing my job at home.

Would I want to?

Not in the same way, heck no.

And I would rather not prepare for the chance it might happen.

But maybe I don’t need to?

Stray

We walked Pumpkin dog before lunch today – later than normal. Halfway round we came across an unattended dog, a labrador-spaniel cross. No name tag on the collar. He was very friendly, more so when he figured out we had a small bag containing Pumpkin’s treats. We asked people around if they’d seen anyone looking for lost dog – it was little early to call it a stray. Nope.

A labrador-spaniel mix dog. Ralph (microchip name Percy/Percival). He's younger than he looks in my photo. — A labrador-spaniel mix dog. Ralph (microchip name Percy/Percival). He’s younger than he looks in my photo.

He followed us and continued to follow us until we got close to home. Uh-oh.

So on the lead he went and we invited him inside. I looked through local Facebook groups, nothing. Decided to post. As far as I know the posts still haven’t been approved.

Rang the local RSPCA. Number rang out 3 times, no opportunity to leave a message.

Looked on the local authority site, found a number of a national dog collection service, rang it, left a message.

We filled a water bowl, got an old and way-too-small dog bed down and I gave him some food. And treats.

Rang the 24 hour vet, asked if they checked microchips. Yes. And they could fit us in even though it’s emergencies only today and until the holiday weekend ends.

Half an hour later we were at the vet. Luckily the dog was indeed. Chipped, yeah. A local-to-us owner then, the vet receptionist rang and left a message…

About an hour later we got a call, the owner was on his way…

Turns out their teenagers left the door open while the adults were preparing for a family thing later. Anyway, grateful owner took the dog off our hands, and it seems my comment about ensuring the dog got a name tag flew right over his head. It seems they think he’s safe out of doors on his own – he’s ‘usually’ to be found on the area between the countryside and housing estates. And now we know they don’t care enough to get a tag they can secure on his collar – ‘it’s always coming off’.

Anyway, at least we know what to do next time.

Should we have reported the owner for their dog not having a tag – a legal requirement here in the UK?

Surf.social

(After spending time ‘testing’ I’ve added a few more notes in the addenda at the bottom. I’m likely to update this post as things progress… or ignore it entirely).

Well, the itch to try Surf.social (a new social and all-internet aggregator from the people who make Flipboard) became too great and I reached out to them. @marci@flipboard.social (internet royalty!) saw my plaintive cry and set me up with an invite code. Thanks Marci!

I’ve installed the beta app within the iOS TestFlight environment and signed in using my Mastodon credentials. Easy.

It took a while before the splash screen gave way to the intro (I succumbed to the urge to force-close it), and now I’m in!

Unstructured observations:

Adding sources to one’s Home feed or a custom feed using the built-in search page is fairly intuitive and quick. Just type something and a range of source types appear. Magic?

Me first, though I’m no narcissist. I hope. My Mastodon bio page is a bit truncated but it’s probably too big anyway.

The Feeds, Posts and Discuss tabs behave differently to each other.

Feeds shows one’s feeds (Home and custom).
Posts is a Flipboard-like flip interface with a limited number of one-at-a-time posts shown.
Discuss has a free-scrolling list of the same posts, again a limited quantity.

Right now my Watch, Read and Look tabs don’t have any content, and because it’s a beta I can only see the top of the words “Nothing is here right now”, with no ability to scroll down. I’m using a beta of iOS 18.3 until the next public update, and on an iPhone XS.

Ah, it’s variable, I looked at another feed and can see the whole message now. A good thing I’m used to pretending I properly beta test stuff isn’t it!

Picking an individual account to follow in a feed either shows nothing for a Micro.blog user’s account (I guess it’ll take a while to populate) or, in the case of the RSS feed for xkcd.com, another Flipboard flip layout. Incidentally, I initially used Surf.social’s browser setting to open in an external app, not sure I like it so will change.

And the xkcd feed truncates the images, based as it is on their height not width; I’d prefer to see the whole thing previewed but maybe that’s just me?

I do like Surf.social’s search. It’s a world apart from Mastodon’s because it finds stuff. (I know Mastodon’s philosophy is to limit visibility and thus the likelihood of abuse; so this is not a complaint).

Whoever’s working the Surf.social account right now sent me this very useful reply:

“Here are two ideas to dive in:

Start by surfing some of the great custom feeds we’re featuring in Home. Try tapping the Sources tab to get a sense of how these feeds are built.

Tap “Create a New Feed” to get started making your own custom feed. Once you’ve done this, tapping the star icon will let you choose between adding a feed to home or other feeds you are making.

The email you got from us should have more suggestions!
Contact us at support@surf.social if you have any issues
Otherwise feedback@surf.social is welcome
Ride on… 🤙

And with that I’ll stop writing and just have a play for a bit.

Addenda

(Listed in the order found, feedback for some sent to the developer via the TestFlight app):

I’ve explored a bit more and thanks to Marci added a ‘Puppy training‘ feed container containing their ‘Dog Training. Help!‘ feed container. It’s a really cool concept and it just works. Feeds of feeds in feeds, oh yes.

I’d really like to be able to add RSS feeds by URL but it doesn’t look to be possible, at least not yet. For instance I have feeds for a couple of subreddits I moderate; I’m sent either new posts or new comments in those subreddits, and I get my post submissions, saved links and incoming messages from across the network. I’ve a couple of custom Google News searches running too. When RSS feeds arrive I’ll be happier.

I recently signed up to the Bluesky.social network to follow accounts that primarily exist (or until recently) existed on Twitter – and do not exist on Mastodon, not yet. Now I’ve not looked in Twitter for a while. Whilst my timelines there aren’t as ‘polluted’ as some I’ve heard about I’m just opposed to using it since elmo bought the place. I’ve been careful who I follow to maintain a degree of sanity. However, Mastodon is where I want to be, and that’s why – for me – Bluesky isn’t comfortable. Using Surf.social removes the need to check Bluesky – and so I can focus on what I’m interested in without necessarily seeing any discussion.

Mastodon polls don’t show the available options, only the supporting text.

Update: I thought at first there was no ‘proper’ method to remove a source from a custom feed – that one must select it, add and then select the feed from which it must be removed. The dialogue then shows the operation’s success. And so I said “Early days yet.” However I found what’s likely to be the intended method of removing a feed – select the ‘…’ menu at the top of the feed and choose the option to remove from there.

Viewing a Mastodon thread a post is linked to still sends me out of the app despite me deselecting the ‘Use External Browser’ option in Settings.

A feed’s Watch (videos), Read (articles) Listen (new to me, no content yet) and Look (somehow different to Read) tabs now have content. Too granular?

The Listen tab is probably a placeholder for me because I haven’t added any podcasts yet.

Bug, or just my ineptitude: Attempting to add Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent food series ‘Eat This Podcast’ by searching first for his name brings it up in the Podcasts section (complete with familiar icon and description) but then attempts to add a ‘November Learning’ feed. Searching by its title instead simply fails to find the podcast feed in the Podcasts section or anywhere else.

Update: I really really do like the way the feed ‘containers’ work. I’ve setup 4 so far:

‘Puppy training’ (containing Marci’s feed),
‘Quotes’ (quotations),
‘bazbt3’s feeds’ (unoriginal I know),
And one called ‘All’, containing the preceding 3.

So I’ve gone 3 levels deep.

Ok, quite a lot of the feed items don’t render particularly pleasingly, and I should probably turn off auto-starting videos (if there’s an option to), and I still don’t really understand why there are so many tabs and what they’re used for. But the app has promise, and I can see why the Flipboard team decided to make it, it’s kind-of… liberating.

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