office check-in

[cellio]

Before the pandemic, I went to the office every day, as one does. Our office manager did what he could to make it an ok environment, but it has the usual pathologies. Pandemic-induced working from home has been good for me in oh so many ways. I'm fortunate to be at a point in my career where I am quite comfortable telling my employer "I really do insist". (There's some pressure, mild so far.) I'll go to the office if there's a specific reason to, like the group outing we had a few months ago, but most of the people I work with aren't local, so going to the office is social, not productive.

On the day of that outing, I learned -- via a coworker finding out the hard way -- that corporate security disables badges that haven't been used in 90 days. That makes sense, though doing it silently isn't so great. Fortunately for me, I last changed my domain password around the time of that outing, so the "time to change your password" reminder serves double duty.

A few days ago I changed my password, and today I went to the office to wave a badge at a sensor. While I was there I cleared out the last of my personal belongings; demonstrably, I no longer need to keep an umbrella or a spare USB charging cable in my desk drawer there.

Comments

[hrj]

My workplace suspends security access after 2 weeks of non-use. It took me a while to discover this since it was years before I was being allocated vacation time in sufficient quantities to be willing to blow two weeks in a single go. Fortunately this is apparent when trying to enter a security gate to the campus, and therefore one is generally still in one's vehicle, which makes it easy to go around to the main gate where the security office is to get it reactivated. (One time, my first day back at work after a long vacation I took the train+shuttle which drops me at the opposite end of the campus from main security. Annoying, but not tragic.)

Recently, when they officially lifted the block on remote workers coming on site regularly (as opposed to for business-critical purposes), there were a lot of reminders that you could check in with security by email in advance to be reactivated. I imagine this reduced the traffic jam at the main gate!

[cellio]

Two weeks? Wow, so a long vacation, or parental leave, or doing a couple back-to-back conferences or sales trips or something could be enough. It's good that you can get it fixed on-site. We're one of many offices owned and administered by a large parent company, so we have a badge reader that's controlled by people many states away (or maybe not even in this country; don't actually know) and you have to send email and wait for them to respond if you get locked out. For my coworker that response came the next day; fortunately someone else could let him in. I don't know if that response time is typical or if they were just swamped at the time.