On Working from Home

I had a run-in with my manager yesterday.  We normally get along fairly well — I work a white collar job in IT/programming, I’m pretty self-directed, and he mostly lets me do what I want, as long as I am up to speed on the bigger-picture goals of the team and department.  We have weekly check-ins — 1:1 meetings — where we catch up and make sure we’re still happy with one another — mutually slurp a little slock, figuratively speaking.  Ohhh you’re so good me likee, baby stay with me forever, never leave me.

Yesterday was a little different.  Instead of talking all sweet about what a great job I’m doing, we talk about coming into the office.

I work from home.  I’ve worked from home since pre-covid days, since 2017.  Even prior to 2017, I worked from home three days a week and schlepped in for a mere two of them.

You may think that this is lazy.  I don’t see it this way.  I often work at crazy hours — get up at 4:30 AM to do stack patching on mid-tier or back-end systems that always need to be up and servicing requests.  Working from home is a way to get some life back.  If I didn’t work from home, minimally, on the days when I am forced to work “out of bounds” — before 8:30 AM or after 5 PM — then my days would go:

• Wake up 4:30 AM,
• Work until 7:30 to finish tasks
• Do some minimal grooming and throw food down food hole
• Commute
• Work 9-5
• Get home 6 after commute
• More food down food hole
• Stare at wall for 20 minutes and want to die (this actually is my way of meditating and refreshes me somehow)
• Work out for an hour doing something
• Get home 8:30 PM, realize I had zero leisure time during the day, hastily binge-watch youtube or return a phone call from my mom or throw a load of laundry in, read a book while eating an entire pizza in an attempt to cheer myself up and almost always failing
• 11PM drop into coma

If you have too many days of this in a row, you will quit.  I know because I’ve had jobs where I used to have to do this and I quit them.  This is a burnout schedule.  It is also an impossible schedule for someone my age — I don’t have the energy to perform in this way anymore — and my wife would get angry/depressed that I wasn’t spending any time with her — so it’s also a “relationship ruining” way to live.

If you don’t care about the function or purpose of your job — and you don’t particularly enjoy the actual work, either — this way of life will quickly feel absolutely soulless.

In 2017 I told my job:  I need to work from home four out of five days a week.  They refused this request.  I had back problems at the time  (still do) and decided to go to the doctor, get notes about my condition – spinal stenosis, severe sciatica, exacerbated by driving.  I made it a big HR issue:  said it was a health problem for me to commute.  I went through three straight months of having two meetings a week with an HR rep, my manager, and my director, during which I was often made to feel exposed, like a giant pain in the ass, a whiny little entitled bitch.  I didn’t care — or at least I tried not to care..  I knew I was going to quit that job if I couldn’t get my way, so I was going to see how far I could push it.

My manager really wanted to keep me there though.  In his words, I have certain talents that nobody else on the team has.  In my words, I can actually program, I can automate jobs between disparate systems using robust logic, fault-tolerant, 100% up methodologies that actually save work and improve overall functionality of the services in various datacenters.  I reduce noise and save effort.  Before I joined this place in 2012, there were problems all the time — problems result in page-outs, getting called at home at 2AM, unnecessary weekend work when something crashes.  By 2015, most of these problems had gone away because I’d identified them and worked relentlessly to fix them.  No more unexpected off-hours bullshit.  Some amount of Balance to the Force had been restored to peoples’ lives.

So after three months of those meetings in 2017 they finally relented, bent rules and said OK, we will do a special case for you.  You can I can come in 1-day a week.  Unofficial.  They took photocopies of my doctors notes and put them on file somewhere.  They said we will do check-ins once a month for 15 minutes to see “where I am” with the back problems.

For the first year, we did those check-ins.  Then we stopped those too — my manager said he took some action to make that happen.

Since then I barely go in.  And it’s been a life-changer.  More on that later.

---

Back to that meeting with my manager yesterday.

Since Covid hit, the job has offered a great deal of flexibility to IT workers.  They needed us — we keep systems and services up and running — we support vital shit like course registration systems, financial aid, HR stuff, blackboard, canvas, all kinds of academic stuff that makes the school run — and they knew that we’re generally underpaid (academia’s salaries for tech are lower than industry standard) and they knew the job market for people like us is generally great.  So one of the things they did — and they’d never done this before, it was an astonishing move for them — they said:  Fine you can work from home indefinitely.  To the entire IT department of 300 or so people.  They did this after years and years and years of fighting any and all requests to work from home tooth-and-nail.

But recently they’ve sniffed that times have changed — the country is either currently in a mild recession or will be in one soon — there are widely publicized reports of layoffs from tech giants.  Management feels they have the upper hand now.

In December of last year, it came to a head.  Everyone needs to come back at least 4 out of 5 days a week.

Asses in chairs, people, asses in chairs.

I’ve been completely ignoring this request.  My manager had sent me a few emails asking where I was on the days when I was supposed to be in the office — I ignored them and would instead respond to a different email he had sent — a request to do some work — with a “OK that work is done” and some details.  In other words, I would remind him I was working instead of directly responding to his stupid requests for me to come into the office — I was trying to remind him that my productivity has nothing to do with me being in the office.

OK.  That’s a lot of backstory to get to what I wanted to talk about, which is actually a pretty simple thing:

My manager said in our 1:1 yesterday that I have to start coming in again — that “people are noticing” that I’m not coming in, and everyone else is coming in (and grumbling about it) and he can’t have me being a bad example — he can’t have such a visible exception to the policy — it’s bad for morale.

You know what’s bad for my morale?  Coming into the office, I told him.

He said he’s out of options, my director wants to see me in my chair next week.

I still have back issues, I cannot manage the hour and a half every day in the car without having acute recurrences

He said the exception that was granted years ago has expired.

It doesn’t matter whether the exception has expired, my physical issues have not abated.  If we need to start that process up again — the exception process — then let’s do that.

I don’t know that we can follow that path again.

Well let’s check.  I’ll send another email to HR to get the ball rolling.

He looks exasperated when I said this — I can tell he was upset and disappointed that I’m doing this — I really don’t care.  I do have legitimate back problems but to be honest I probably could manage the drive — I’m definitely using it as an excuse to not come into the office —

But the truth is that I don’t feel like I have much of a choice.  I have to take any option available to me to try to get what I want.

Because I will never again work a job where I can’t work from home.

---

I need to talk a bit about how absolutely transformative it has been to work from home nearly all of the time.

It gave me a new lease on my career.  Prior to that, I thought I was going to have to leave my field permanently.  I’ve been working steadily since 1999 with only rare breaks.  Some of those jobs had me working 60 hours a week and left me feeling lifeless.

I operated in a mode I now think of as perma-burnout.  I still have some PTSD from working that way.  I could barely imagine working the rest of my life — the thought of it honestly made me consider suicide.  Technology and programming can be interesting at times but it doesn’t fill my heart and soul the way that reading, writing, and living do — I needed time for myself to hang around friends and watch dumb movies and read a book and write thoughts on how I felt when something happened to me — I needed to engage the artistic side of me every single day for at least a couple of hours or I started to feel like life wasn’t worth living, like I was some kind of automaton.  And when I finally had a little time to myself at home I found myself to be so overwhelmed by the nuts and bolts of regular adult life — getting your car registration renewed or an inspection performed or repairs done — laundry and new clothes and getting your computer fixed — taxes and restocking your refrigerator and getting your underwear off the floor — trying to make plans to see a friend’s wedding in a different state with your scant 12 days a year off work, or Dad and mom begging for a visit — sitting down and paying bills — finding a time to go to the bank to get cash or do a weird transaction and they’re only open for 3 hours on a Saturday morning and they’re incredibly busy during that time — all of that stuff that adults need to sort and sift through and keep up to date on — I felt so perpetually behind on all of this stuff that it was difficult for me to just say FUCK IT I am going to go skiing this weekend or call up (old friend) and go to vegas or whatever things that people in their mid-20s with some amount of financial freedom are supposed to be able to do — I felt as though the job had utterly taken over my entire existence and I despised it.

Working from home has changed all that.  I still have tons and tons of stuff to do, and I still don’t love my job or extract much meaning from it.

But I can do almost all of my bullshit adult life chores during the weekdays now.  I can go to town hall and get a copy of my marriage license at 11AM on Tuesday, go to a dentist appointment at 2PM Wednesday, and hit my telehealth therapy session at 1 on Thursday, all during the day, all without even having to negotiate anything with my manager — I just take off and do them as my meeting schedule allows.  I don’t waste an hour and a half in the car every day commuting — I can, instead, write on OpenDiary or read or make breakfast for my wife before she goes in to work at her library.  I can exercise, I can have a contractor over the house to fix something, I can run to the grocery store to pick up milk so that when Jennie gets home, I’m home for her, I’ve made dinner already, we can sit down and talk about our days instead of me being like “OH SHIT I JUST GOT HOME FROM WORK I HAVE TO GO TO THE STORE TO GET <ITEMS> THEN I CAN COOK” which is the sort of thing that happens often when you are physically at work all day with zero flexibility — this puts dinner off for at least another hour and if your wife is the hangry sort it might literally result in additional relationship strain and arguments and so on.

Again, working from home — all that stuff is gone.  Life is manageable.  I do what I have to do for the job and when I don’t have to work, I don’t.  I go to home depot and buy packing tape so Jennie can make boxes and sort her stuff – I list items on ebay that we’re trying to get rid of — I plan a meal for guests when they come over to visit on Saturday.  When Jennie invites friends over for a meal I don’t feel resentful — like they’re taking a few hours of my “precious free time” away in a non-ideal way.  Man I used to feel my free time was such a scarce resource that I wanted to always do the things that mattered MOST to me and if I had to, say, see my partner’s unpleasant family instead, I would feel like

OH MY GOD I ONLY GET 10 HOURS A WEEK OF ACTUAL TIME FOR MYSELF AND I’M SUPPOSED TO DONATE IT TO YOUR ASSHAT SISTER IN LAW’S GENDER REVEAL PARTY FOR HER NEW KID INSTEAD OF FINALLY PLAYING MARIO SUNSHINE?  WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS LIFE??

I don’t feel so starved for free time now, so I don’t mind doing this sort of thing anymore — I can actually view those social engagements as “interesting and entertaining” instead of stifling and horrible.  And having the ability to take these attitudes has actually turned me into a different and better person because I can be more casually social — more relaxed with people — because I know that later I will still have time to <read book | play video game | noodle on guitar> …

I won’t do it.  I won’t go back into the office four out of five days a week.

God help them if they push me, I just will not show, I will make them fire me over it.

And I doubt they will fire me over it, given that I’ve already made it an HR issue in the past and I’m about to do it again — my guess is that they’d fear a lawsuit.

But you just never know.