What have you been doing with your new found free time?

Makes sense to me!


https://www.fox5ny.com/news/booze-sales-surge-during-coronavirus-outbreak

txcoastal1 wrote: »

Baby boom in 9 months

Congrats!

From a favorite movie of mine, Slapshot.

I’m getting drunk in the bathroom

phipiper10 wrote: »

Still working 8-10 hrs from home but without the commute I can sleep a little later and still workout before things get started. In the afternoon I see my kids a bit more and I'm probably in a better mood than when i get home from the office! That said overall not much has changed for me. I still spend the majority of the day looking at two screens and on lots of conf. calls.

Stay safe everyone!

Same here only 10-12 hours days. Working for a hospital company, we've been swamped with regular work and projects and now supporting hospitals over all of this has just beaten everyone down.

I've been working from home for 5 years now so this isn't a change for me but the rest of the family is going stir crazy and getting on my nerves.

I don't envy those who are out of work but all I see is everyone talking about what they are doing with their new-found free time and I'm wondering "How did I end up working MORE hours?" I'm salaried too so it's not like I'm getting paid more for this either. But I get to read about how people are demanding more compensation for the work they are doing while I'm told "Be glad you're still working." despite colossal, soul-crushing hours being put in, week after week and no place to go, no place to get a release and decompress.

Then everybody posts all over Facebook about thanking doctors and nurses and cops and firefirghters and ambulance people and grocery workers and so on and so forth. But being in IT, I sit there and wonder how many people actually know what kind of time the people who manage the technology for all those folks are putting in making sure that it all works so they can keep doing what they are doing?

Not to mention that people get to sit on Facebook, or Netflix or Club Polk all day complaining about everything and bragging about their free time and they don't realize that they can do that because some poor schmuck is putting in 20-40 extra hours a week over their regular 40 to make sure all that stays up and extra capacity is getting stood up as fast as possible so it doesn't all come crashing down over people taking videos of their pets out of boredom and sharing them on the internet.

Then there's the people who are now thrust into working from home for the first time ever and they are having a rough time. So they yell and scream at their "idiot IT people" who "don't know what they're doing". I get people are frustrated, stressed out and frazzled over the perpetual barrage of news which is increasingly looking like lies and subterfuge to undermine a disliked administration but that doesn't give them license to be jerks to a bunch of people who "don't know what they are doing". I mean, my IT department, as a whole, is about 280 people. We support about 27,000 doctors, nurses and other medical facility staff as well as all of the business operations people. The majority of our workers are needed at their facilities so nobody is currently laid off or furloughed right now. We need to keep running the business too so everyone who can work from home was sent home. In about 4 days, we procured, outfitted and equipped about 9,000 additional systems for users to be able to work from home and they've been doing so for about 2 weeks now with minimal interruption. That's 9,000 people who still get to stay employed because they were very rapidly facilitated to do so and many of them are going to get a stimulus check anyway. But we don't know what we're doing.

Worse yet, that 280 person staff? That doesn't include our out-sourced 1st level helpdesk people who are all in Singapore. Which is still on lock down for 3 weeks now. They can't work from home because many don't have access to broadband at home nor do they have computers at home. So we've been covering the helpdesk calls ourselves as well as our regular work. And those helpdesk calls have tripled since the work from home started.

Yeah, it's been a rough month and a half and with all this unnecessary panic and fear mongering out of the media that is trying to paint current efforts as haphazard and incompetent means it's not letting up any time soon because of all the people who are buying in to it and screaming for heads to roll over lies and spun news/statistics while cowering in fear and wailing for the government to protect us. It's really frustrating working for a very large hospital company, getting regular updates from our top medical staff about conditions, responses and so on and having to listen to people who know next to nothing tell you that you are an idiot, conspiracy theorist, moron and so on because your company, a national level healthcare company with locations in 47 of 50 states, is telling you with actual numbers and evidence that it's not as bad as what the news is saying and to just keep calm, keep doing the amazing job you are and we'll all get through this.

I can't tell you how many frazzled people I talked to on the phone so far who were having a problem and I had to play therapist to talk them down off the ledge, calm them down and get the answers I needed to fix the problems they had. Most aren't even working in the hospitals, they're at working at home with, like, MSNBC on in the background. I can hear it when I'm talking to them on the phone.

Eh, whatever. I'll shut up now. Nobody really cares about IT anyway and everyone thinks they are smarter than us and can do our job better anyhow.

Sorry if I derailed.