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

[jducoeur]

Other people in my local office are probably happy that I had the foresight to purge the fridge on my way out on that last day in March 2020 -- nobody would have been happy about that milk more than a year and a half later.

Yeah, really. My parents live on Sanibel Island, and had to flee ahead of Hurricane Ian.

When my brother got to the house a month later, to start inventorying the disaster of the lower floor and demolishing the walls (they live on a high point, but still got five feet of water), he found that the upper floor (the main living space) was in great shape. Except for the fridge, which was basically a hazardous waste zone to the point where it simply had to be dragged out and thrown away.