Our court has now gone to full skeleton crew. I’ve been asked to come in only on Fridays. Most hearings are cancelled, though, so it’s really just to help out as needed, and to work on accumulated civil files.
Anyone in manufacturing who touches product has to come in. I was issued a traveling paper too but I doubt I’ll have to use it.
I am a shift supervisor at a detention center. We cannot close down entirely. The court has released some of the low-risk juveniles, but we are hanging onto the ones with serious felonies, and we are no longer allowing visitors. My boss decided to thin out the number of detention officers working, so most now have one paid on-call day each week, and are expected to come to work on that day only if we call them in for extra help. However, some have mysteriously merited getting two days each week that they get to stay at home and get paid to just be on-call. My boss and two other people in administration are going to stay home every day to allegedly work from home, even though one has few tasks that can really be done from home, and the other has no computer at home with which to do any work. Meanwhile, I and the other two shift supervisors are expected to come to work every day, with no paid on-call days. A number of the officers burn their sick days as fast as they earn them, using them as short-notice vacation days, and one of those officers is getting the two paid on-call days each week. I have been here 22 years and have accumulated enough sick days to call in every day for about 3 months and continue to get paid. So, I could start calling in every day, using up my own sick days, but it really gripes me that people who won’t save their days for when they need them are now getting paid to stay at home. The burdens and exceptions should be spread around evenly, but my boss is one of those guys who hip-shoots his decisions and doesn’t think things through.
US offices closed starting Monday. Some very rare exceptions.
I was planning on working from home next week anyway.
Working form home isn’t too bad for me, but I have two monitors at work and I also like the home/work separation. View is better from the office as well (overlooking the Mississippi, bald eagles are fairly common)
(Not to mention the beach that is popular with college students)
Brian
I work for my state Attorney General’s Office. We are required to work from home 4 days a week and we are required to come in one day a week to do all the things we can’t do from home. So far it’s been rather a mess, because the computer system for all those extra people to suddenly work from home is constantly crashing. It’s very difficult to get anything done.
Latest schedule change (I think the fourth since the pandemic hit): I’m expected to come in only April 1 and 10; they haven’t planned any farther out from that.
Has anyone considered minimizing exposure by teleconferencing trials?
We’re not really set up for it, and the logistics of handling, reviewing and admitting exhibits are challenging. I also personally don’t think you can fully observe a witness and apprise his or her demeanor and body language as well onscreen as you can in person. But it might come to that.
Our business is allowed to stay open, we are classified critical and besides we don’t have members of the public visiting. We are mostly Internet/mail order based. We take precautions like washing hands when coming and going, wiping down doorknobs, keyboards, chairs etc. with a mild bleach solution each day, and not letting delivery people etc. inside. For incoming packages we spray them with Lysol and quarantine them for 2 days.
Starting about a week and a half ago, we were asked to telework as much as we reasonably could. Michigan’s governor implemented a lockdown starting at midnight on Monday, so now we can only telework.
My answer has changed to “Working from home is optional, and I’m doing so.”
Shortly after my first post in this thread my conscience started nagging me, and I worked from home on Friday. I went back to the office on Monday, but that afternoon I asked my boss if I could telework for the rest of the month (I’m sure it will be longer, but having a target return date felt better). Of course, he said yes. My office is still open, and will likely remain so, but more and more people have started teleworking. Even my boss is teleworking this week (at least).
I have a good home office setup, and both my job and those of my colleagues can (mostly) be done from anywhere. I know how lucky that makes me, and also how lucky I am that my income won’t be affected during all of this.
I have a dog and a big back yard, so I go outside several times a day. It’s a little weird to suddenly not be driving my 2-month-old car every day, but tomorrow I might take the dog to daycare and/or get some takeout while my area’s nonessential businesses and restaurants are still open.
On Monday, my boss pointed out that if one person in our building tests positive, the whole building will be shut down until a deep cleaning is done and anyone who has been in contact with that person will be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Since we have SCIFs in the building, work would essentially halt for those programs until the building was available again, so he advised me he thought we should all work from home and only come in when we need to work in the SCIF. The fewer people in the building, the lower the probability of program impact.
So I took a bunch of my equipment home and have been working at home since then (I don’t work in the SCIF and only occasionally need to attend meetings that require a SCIF). It’s not so bad, but my kitchen table looks like a lab table for an electronics experiment (two computer/monitor setups, along with various speakers, usb drives, etc.)
I’m following the time-honored tradition of posting to the thread and then reading it.
For what it’s worth, WhatsApp encrypts video/audio calls end-to-end and is fairly idiot proof to set up (especially since you can do it with just a smartphone, so no computers needed).