Ay'up LP, good to see you around again. Sounds like you've had an interesting good few years anyway!

D'you need any top-up dosh BP?

*shrug*

I have enough savings to get me comfortably through the pandemic and beyond without needing to worry about it, but if anyone really wants to throw money at me I wont complain.

Defo! 

What's everyone's 'rona update now we're well in to Season 2?

I had returned to the office for 2 days/week, but after next week I will be WFH full time again. We were encouraged to return, so people did. Now we've been told to go on a rota and not be in the office full time.

When I was there I preferred to be there, when I'm at home I feel like I prefer being at home. So I guess overall I'm happy being back in the office or WFH. I think the 2 day balance worked for me.

There's been a number of cases at work where people who have been in close contact with those testing positive being asked to isolate for 2 weeks. Quite a large and important team have just gone in to isolation which could be interesting (in a how do we handle that kind of way since they're a team where the majority of their work is very much on site).

We've not had an "outbreak" yet, which hopefully is because our measures have been good enough. Social distancing (though plenty don't) and face coverings on at all times seem to be working. Though I bet if we mass tested all staff we'd have a load of cases.

 

Our London office is gone, lease expired in September. We plan to get a smaller nicer one at some point, for people who prefer it and then some desks for others to come in once or twice a week or whatever. And meetings I guess. 

I went to our HQ in Slough for a meeting a while back, that lot (print, accounts) had been back since May and it was weird. They're all like "want a cup of tea?" relaxed about everything and I was the weird one saying "erm, no?" and stuff. Just familiarity breeding complacency all over the place.

Anyway, WFH full time still. If they close the schools it's going to be horrible, but as long as the boy's back in we're coping ok. If sport shuts down again (lol I did quite a lot of work for the rugby match not happening tomorrow in Twickenham) then we'll be back to needing furlough to stay afloat but for the time being things are almost normal on that front.

Full time WFH here. Some of our offices have opened again in limited fashion, but as I'm 3 hours drive from the nearest one, I rarely go in anyway except for meetings, and they've all been online for quite some time now. Doubt I'll visit a company office until next year at the earliest.

Cases are fairly low here (north of Aberdeen), hope it stays that way!

Seeing as I'm a lazy bastard who loafs around all day long, I can only update for Mrs WilliamA and my kids. Mrs W retires in January, but being a nurse there isn't any winding down on the agenda and she still plods there and back every working day. My son still works from home for Hastings Direct - the only difference being that as of a couple of weeks ago he's now working from our home thus giving himself a pay rise of around £800 plus/month. HD are still quite happy to have most of their staff working remotely and it's looking as though this may be a permanent option for some. My daughter works from home too, but she lives in London. She's a civil servant and her present role is on policy for adult social care. Her boss has been seconded tp work on Covid 19 policy and she's praying she doesn't have to follow.

Still doing 2 in, 3 out, though I did 3 in last week for a nail-biting server replacement.

The old server was a 20-year old PowerMac with the last version of Ubuntu ported to 32-bit powerpc architecture (14.04), and had some inexplicable lockups over the summer, so it wasn't something that could wait much longer for covid to be over.

It started out as a web dev staging server ~8 years ago because I hated ftping stuff about, then it became a sandbox for my time-wasting experiments in server admin, then in March it suddenly became the defacto gateway between our office file server and everyone working from home.

After provisioning a replacement, I learned our ISP had lost the router's login, probably when they got swallowed by a big-ass USian outfit and outsourced their support to Bangalore. I *guessed* the login (the router manual listed several stock user roles, the support folks at least had a working password for one I tried).

To make things extra fun, after getting to the office I discovered the router login doesn't work from the office lan, for reasons no one can explain, and the ISP support folks couldn't figure out how to make the switch, so I got an IT buddy from outside the office to do it.

 

I'm back in the office most of the time, usually Mon-Thu with Fri at home.  I'm watching bots tick over and sometimes restarting them as a side task to my normal job.  The guy that officially looks after them can't be arsed and I don't care too much about going in vs staying home.

There's 1 other person that is working there Mon-Fri because she finds it a massive stress WFH.  We have a variety of babysitters because we have to have a first aider and a fire warden in, so it's nice when they change and we have a bit of a chat to catch up on Covid life.

Basically no work, so that's fun!

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. Any prospect of that changing?

I've been working in the telecommunications department at our local hospital since My 22, 2017.

I route incoming calls throughout the hospital, call emergency or situational codes that effect the entire hospital, page doctors.

I also relay messages between doctors, staff, outside entities (such as police), and sometimes patients, and in certain situations call security and/or maintenance for the various hospital departments.

Night shift handles the department's shift paperwork for all the shifts. The other shifts can be too busy to do it. So it falls to third to get it done so all the shifts have everything they need to do their work.

Night shift also handles recording of weekly, monthly, and yearly statistics for the department, and if needed, tidying up around the office.

My second job at the hospital is as a patient companion. This is an As-needed position, or as some would call it, an On-call position. PCs help care for patients by handling non-medical direct assistance for patients in need; such as helping them get a drink, keeping a fall risk patient from getting out of bed. We also offer comfort to a patient who may be confused, such as one who suffers from dementia or a similar illness, or someone who may have suffered an injury that has disoriented them. We visually monitor the patient, and call the nurse if and when needed. These are just a few of things I've done for patients as a PC since taking the job in 2017.

that sounds like some valuable work to be doing, hats off to you!

Thanks. I do enjoy it most of the time. Every once in a while I have to deal with some rude idiot, but otherwise I like it very much.

I think your point about familiarity breeding complacency is a biggie. I saw that at my office. Plenty of people who have been in most of the time not really sticking to the guidance. Made me feel uncomfortable, resulting in me having an overall feeling of wanting to WFH.

Still haven't picked up any "proper" work, but I've had a bit of ad-hoc consultancy. So not on the breadline by any stretch and it's always part of the risk of freelance/contract work.

Got a few plates spinning now though, so hopefully one of them will work out!

Just getting a bit bored of not being able to enjoy ourselves really - had to put the little extension on hold etc.

Retired (since Nov 2019).

Enjoyed 12 months of retired life so far?

Phew, long time without looking in here. Not sure what made me click on the link in the favourites bar today but here we are.
Well for my update, I work in the IT department of North West NHS trust as a Senior Network Engineer. Its been pretty full on since February this year for obvious reasons. On the one hand its quite draining, on the other hand though its been very exciting throwing solutions together to get the workforce able to work from home.
We went from an average of 20 people working on VPN at any one time to well over a 1000 in less than a month, Firewalls needed replacing, internet circuits upgrading and new services rolling out.
I'm fortunate that I'm based on a hospital site but in a seperate building, so day to day I'm well away from the patients.