GameKnights - The Official homepage of Wednesday Night Game Night

Also not to derail this topic but this is my bullshit of the week.

A grown man should never have to add Comic Sans support to his website.  Ever.

Damned Comic Sans!!

And I agree in general with what you said regarding my situation, Adam, except that part of management expectations currently is that users are able to VPN and RDP from personal computers in case of a situation where they cannot come into the office (especially a situation like a fire in one of the office buildings that renders it uninhabitable). That's what makes me so upset. They say in one breath that we should support remote user capabilities like that, then in this book put forth policies that make it technically impossible.

And I agree in general with what you said regarding my situation, Adam, except that part of except that part of management expectations currently is that users are able to VPN and RDP from personal computers in case of a situation where they cannot come into the office (especially a situation like a fire in one of the office buildings that renders it uninhabitable)

This is kinda what I'm getting at with "company culture" thought.

25 years ago if an office fire rendered the office uninhabitable, you couldn't work.  End of discussion.  Company takes losses, customers deal with downtimes.  Full stop.  Your emergency planning in that case was you either fell back on older tech or you had additional equipment and you put mission critical people on them at another site.

What happens today is companies figure out "hey wait a minute, we all have computers at home, I can turn my home into an office.  And hey, if my employees own computers, I can make them use their personal property as if it was company property instead of paying for emergency equipment myself!!"  It's irresponsible, lazy, and again to throw out the Shadowrun slang, something they get away with because we're wage slaves and we need the job too much to think about how much company policy violates our rights.  We're also so much more comfortable on our own devices that we relish the opportunity to work on a machine we have full customization over rather than think "hey, the company is using my property and I'm not being compensated for it!"

So yeah now the company can maintain service by exploiting the personal property of its employees at:

1. No additional compensation from the company to the employee.  You're just expected to do this.  it is not overtime.  You are not compensated for the use of your personal equipment to work, or the internet service you pay for to do this work, or the cell phone minutes you burn to get the work done.
2. No overtime for working at a time when company resources are not available (aka when the office is 'closed').

That's how I feel about it anyway.  I telework because the company provided me a laptop with which to do it, and it is a nice laptop, one I'd hesitate to spend the money on myself, both because of its cost, and because it is equipment that I would find brilliant for the specific task work asks of me (Web Dev) and not what I would need my personal equipment to do (gaming).  When I write this post though I do think about how much more bandwidth I spend on Work From Home days and if Verizon does any hidden throttling, how WFH gets me closer to that.  I also am not turning off temperature control at home, so I'm flipping the bill for the more power that gets spend when I WFH.  The wear and tear on my furniture also goes uncompensated.   On days when I can come to the office and I'm choosing not to, it would not be fair to expect work to compensate me for that.  On days when I cannot come to the office because the office is closed (or on fire or flooded or destroyed in an Earthquake) I should be compensated IMO.

EDIT: Edits because I am stupid tired

This post was edited by machvergil on October 16, 2015, 4:54 pm

My work couldn't understand why I was ****ing livid about having to upgrade my phone so I could install their app which lets them use it as a beeper/pager.

Then they couldn't understand why I was pissed that I had to pay for a data-plan so that the beeper/pager function could continue to work when I left hospital WiFi range.



Of all the interns/residents who were annoyed by this, I actually held out for several months before finally giving in and upgrading from my wonderful "slide-out" smartphone. It's not that I dislike the vastly improved haptic-touch of the modern era or anything, but to this day I still feel the size is just a wee bit bigger than I'd like.

-AHMAD

They required you to use the app?  Didn't they issue you a beeper?  Why couldn't you just continue using the beeper?  That was something they offered at Beaumont, but I thought it was the stupidest thing -- you can leave a beeper at home when you go away on vacation, effectively cutting off communication with work who (in theory) shouldn't be bothering you anyway.  It seems very shady to force you into something like that.....

They did issue me a beeper, but the beeper had issues. There was a significantly greater delay on recieving pages, some nurses complained that I never responded to messages simply because I never recieved the pages that were sent a certain way. And I could never respond via the pager, which meant that when a peer sent me a text-page I was either stuck calling them back (often annoying) or leaving them wondering if I'd gotten it or not (potentially bad for my reputation).

Don't misunderstand me, I don't mind the app or anything, it's fine. But I do wish that they'd given me some money to reimburse at least part of the upgrade/buy-a-plan costs. I'm 90% sure I'd have skipped the data-plan for my smartphone without the need for 'always-online apps'.

-AHMAD

Just worked my first day as a sub in the Oak Park area!  It was fine - kinda like doing the first day of school, but everyone has been there for a couple months and knows each other and I don't know them.  Overall it was a fine day. 

Here's the big reason I wanted to share though, the website for getting posted jobs and such?  Totally says it's optimized for Internet Explorer 6 for windows machines and Mozilla for Macs.  Not Mozilla FIREFOX mind you, just Mozilla.  It seems to work fine on Firefox, the only thing it seems to be confused about is what to show me after I hit the logout button. 

N

Here's the big reason I wanted to share though, the website for getting posted jobs and such?  Totally says it's optimized for Internet Explorer 6 for windows machines and Mozilla for Macs.  Not Mozilla FIREFOX mind you, just Mozilla.  It seems to work fine on Firefox, the only thing it seems to be confused about is what to show me after I hit the logout button. 

Oh

Oh god

It's 2004 all over again.

Someone hold me.

We've had trouble with our backup software for a while now. We run full backups over the weekend, and then incremental (what's changed only) backups on the weekdays. My full backup jobs that run over the weekends get stuck about half way through every single Saturday for like a couple months now. To get them running again all I have to do is restart the server to get the jobs that were stuck to recover and restart (then on Monday clean up any duplicate backups if there are any). Since the workaround is relatively simple and work has been busy getting HIPAA compliant recently I haven't actually tried to get in touch with support for my issue.

Well things are less crazy now, so I've begun working on the issue. Last Friday I tried recreating the backup job where things get stuck every week in the hopes that something went wrong in that job's configuration and this would fix it, but it didn't. So yesterday I resolved to get up at 4:30am after the incremental backups for everything had finished to run a full backup of the job that always gets stuck. That way I could open a ticket with support and show them exactly what was happening.

Unfortunately the job ran flawlessly last night! And support for this software is very frustrating to work with if you can't show them exactly what is going wrong when it is going wrong. (They're a nightmare to work with for intermittent problems as they just declare a problem solved if it doesn't show up the first time they try to do something with you.) So in trying to plan my next move I check for updates in the backup software and see that there is a new one out.

This makes the next best move to install the update, so I set it to doing that. After about an hour of the progress bar sitting at 99% and not moving the thing tells me the update failed to install. Unfortunately it messed something up with the software because the backup software's services will not start now! So I'm opening a trouble ticket with their support for an entirely new issue that showed up from me trying to fix the older issue.

This article is aggressively true about teaching middle school.  I'm fine with the "69" stuff - math teacher, it happens - but like, this is a great window into the reason why I prefer teaching middle school to teaching high school. 

N