I worked over night last night. And during the night an ice storm strolled through. I was really stressing the drive home during the morning rush hour traffic. But much to my surprise, people decided to stay the f’ home.
This is something I’ve never experienced pre-covid. I guess the forced quarantine stuff made people realize staying home ain’t so bad. Also, lots of folks at my work Emailing in to let everyone know they will be working from home.
Yeah, I was surprised that yesterday morning before it even got bad, I got a set of emails from upper management saying that we should just work from home unless there was some very compelling reason we had to be in the office.
That’s a 180 degree turnaround from pre-Pandemic management which had the attitude that we should be in the office, come Hell or high water, unless we wanted to take vacation days.
I for one, am all for it. While I always ended up enjoying the enforced snow days, I greatly prefer not burning a vacation day for them and merely working from home like I already do 3 days a week.
In criminal law cases, a lot of court appearances are just status checks - the judge asking what’s going on, with the usual response being that the defense needs more time (maybe to review evidence, or interview witnesses, or negotiate a plea). [there’s a strategic advantage, as well, to letting a case age. Witnesses sometimes get scarce, or forgetful]
It’s actually rare when there are witnesses giving testimony, or the lawyers are arguing case law, both of which might benefit from being present in court.
During Covid, judges figured out that these “pretrial conferences” can be done via Zoom. Not only was it safer, it proved so much more convenient to just sit in your office and login remotely for the 2 minutes you need to get another date to check status.
Fortunately, many judges have kept that up.
It’s especially useful when you are double booked, and have hearings in 2 jurisdictions at once. I’ve frequently stepped out of a courtroom and gone into the hallway to do a video call with a judge in another courthouse.
In Civil Cases we’re saving a ton of time and money doing all depositions remotely. Also, as you state, most judges are allowing routine hearings to be remote. We’re also doing a fair amount of remote jury trials, which is a huge money saver. Even with in person trials, judges have become much more flexible about allowing witnesses to appear via zoom.
Other than losing my elite status on my favorite airline, it’s all good.
I as worried about that, but the snow day earlier this month said “It is not expected for most faculty and staff to work during the closure regardless of work modality.” So even though I can work from home, and was planning to work from home, I didn’t bother to work at all.
Much better than, “if you can only work on site, it is too dangerous to come in, so you get the day off, but if you can work from home, then you have to work from home, sucks to be you.”
I drive down to Denver 100 miles one way about once a week to take care of my mother (now taking care of her estate since she has passed)
At first, it was great. The roads where empty.
I work from home now. Full time. I mostly work a regular schedule but that’s pretty much up to me. I’m saving 50 miles of driving a day. About an hour and a half. That’s huge.
On the other hand… We are in a resort community. Many people missed their vacations, didn’t want to fly etc. Our community is a 2 hour drive from Denver. Many people that can work whenever and wherever are just popping up to the mountains. We used to have a fair amount of second home/condo owners that would rent them out to seasonal workers and what not. That seems to be drying up. I think (not verified) that people are spending much more time at their vacation properties because these folks can work from anywhere.
It’s now as crowded up here as it’s ever been. The roads are crazy busy, but at least I mostly get to stay off of them.
Anyway, I love working from home. We should have been allowed to years and years ago. In fact, I got a bur under my saddle right at the beggining of COVID and emailed the entire department about working from home. Some people could. Some could not. There was no policy. Pissed me off.
I was chastised for that. I really should have just emailed the managers. Not the entire department. Then, the very next day we where told that we are all staying home because of COVID. Was told probably for about 2 weeks. We even got an extra stipend to work from home Seemed odd to me, working from home saves me money. But I guess some people just didn’t have a good way to do it.
My department is GIS an arm of IS/IT. The 16 of us got 300 people set up to work from home in 72 hours. Amazing really.
All those years, traveling to, and working in the ‘office’. What a huge waste.
Even when there isn’t an ice storm, I have noticed that traffic is much more cyclical now. I communute across pretty much the entire length of Dallas Proper, and Mondays and Fridays–especially Fridays–are noticeably lighter. I assume a lot of people are now allowed to work from home some percent of the time, and they tend to chose Monday and/or Friday to stay home, with Friday the first choice. On days when bad weather is predicted–not like this, but just a storm or whatever–it’s lighter. Heck, when it’s really cold, it’s lighter. This is especially noticeable in the mornings, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, Tuesday-Thursday are worse than they’ve ever been. It’s very noticeable that a crap-ton of people moved into the metroplex over COVID. My commute home Tuesday-Thursday is 45 minutes to work, and an hour home. That’s a good 15 minutes longer each way than it used to be. Monday and Friday are more like 25 minutes to work/45 minutes home.
I did Zoom jury duty for a civil case (I didn’t get selected) and it was great. The court was pretty far from me, and would have taken forever to get to given traffic. I hope they keep this forever.
It’s much more than just attitude that changed. Massive amounts of infrastructure and education had to be put in place to allow work from home during COVID. Networking equipment. VPN servers. Firewalls and other security services, both hardware and software. Patch management and software/security updates were a near Herculean task all their own. Then there’s the thousands of users that had to be issued laptops. All in all there were millions of dollars of capital outlay required to spin up remote work.
Now that all of that has been done and everyone is comfortable with the setup it’s easy to say, hey, work from home tomorrow. Pre-COVID, not so much.
But yeah, everyone got an email from leadership along the lines of stay home unless you absolutely have to be in the office. Stay safe.
Alas, with Covid and us beginning to work at home came an end to the no-work snow days hourly staff used to have. While I like working from home I admittedly resent being home all day working, and not being given any time to deal with the December-January snow until it’s dark out. At least in February it’s light out for another 30-45 minutes after work.
I just take a long lunch break to deal with snow or running errands. I adjust my schedule as needed. Can you do that elfkin? Not sure what field you are in.
I’m hourly too. We call it flex time. Just get in your 40. And get your job done.
It’s very nice really. Sometimes I have a 50 hour week. Sometimes 30. Sometimes I work nights or weekends. No one cares. Well, they got mad when it looked like I was putting in too many hours and only claiming 8. Now I just claim 8 and do what I need to do.
That sounds nice. We have to punch in by 8:07 and out by 4:37, or have our supervisor approve the deviation from our normal hours. It was far less strict before the university started using Kronos 2 years ago.
What COVID taught our department is that ‘time’ supervision is not really necessary with a good dedicated team. Can’t really do it anyway with most of us working for home or some sort of hybrid plan.
In the parts of Los Angeles I commute across, Thursday evenings are now the slowest rush hours. Friday mornings are the fastest. Friday evening rush hour starts earlier and goes longer (likely due to people starting weekend plans early), but never gets as slow as Thursday evenings.
Yes! I am hoping society can keep this feature once more of us can agree that Covid isn’t a health emergency anymore. I do not drive to work for my commute, but I am also a service industry worker for a corporate client. So, generally if the clients aren’t coming in because of bad weather or bad health, we are kind of off the hook.(If it’s safer to not travel or show up for a meeting at death’s door, people don’t do either one.) It will not be busy and nobody’s going to be a pain in the ass and hang around because they’ve got nothing better to do.(like it would be, if I worked in a public coffee bar.) It kind of takes the pressure off having to go to work anyway. : )
I will say that this has turned Tuesdays into our new Mondays, since people don’t have to start their 3 or 4 day work weeks on Monday proper.