Subj : Re: Kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out To : Atreyu From : jack phlash Date : Mon Oct 18 2021 09:08:06 on 18 Oct 2021, Atreyu said... At> At the time, and for a time, it just made more sense to take that one At> train from the west-end into downtown. Makes sense. At> Seems to me it makes more sense to drive out to your office then? If and At> when you have to? Exactly. The drive isn't too bad and I enjoy having the hard shift between work and offhours that I don't get working from home full time. That, and I have the freedom to run to lunch or appointments, leave early, stay late, whatever I need to do, which I couldn't do quite as easily if I didn't drive myself. Oh, and one more factor - since it's in a suburb and not in a dense part of the city, I don't have to pay for parking there. At> I lost the full-time office job but remain with the company as their At> sole IT consultant and am invoicing them consultant rates. After the At> loss of the full-time hours I pretty much went the freelancing route in At> 2015 and never looked back. Struggled the first year or so but doing At> okay now. Not swimming in the dough like Scrooge Mcduck but enough to At> afford to live in the downtown-area in a 2 bedroom apartment while also At> being a single custodial parent. I've been lucky to mostly WFH since At> before Covid. Spend most of my days on VPN, RDP and SSH. The American At> client is the exception, thats all on-site travel work. Man, yeah, sounds like you're making "enough" and making that shift before the COVID-19 lockdowns put you ahead of a curve other people in your situation might have had difficulty with. Nice! At> I'm likely one of only two or three techs in all of Toronto that knows At> that particular telephone system at the former company At> inside-out-and-backwards ... an ancient Intertel 8600 series. Dude its At> such a Rube Goldberg contraption but the company owner At> refuses-slash-can't-afford to replace it with something else. The owner At> would rather pay me to look after every freaking tech request no matter At> how trivial. A shit-ton of MAC (move/addition/changes) in addition to At> the network and server maintenance. Ha! My first *real* telephony work was with supporting a huge old Nortel Meridian switch that was in a similar state. Hard to support, but the company preferred to keep it on life support rather than even think about replacing it. Eventually they had a lot of new demands (new call centers, more accounting needs, etc.) and it finally made sense to replace it (although what they replaced it with wasn't much better, but that's another story...) At> The real mickey-mouse-but-high-paying work I do is for an American At> startup that pays for me to maintain cellphone charging stations At> throughout various malls across the city. THAT one is a lot of my bread At> & butter. Hmm. Now that sounds like an interesting gig. At> I like WFH, my daughter goes to high school and thus this place is dead At> quiet during the day, no distractions. But I do miss the noise of a busy At> office... my Amazon Alexa government snooping device has an App that At> plays background sounds ala. white noise. Sure enough, they have an At> office-monotony soundtrack. Ha! The white noise is fine, but my team in particular was usually a lot louder than "white noise". I get some of it though - my partner is also working from home, and in a relatively small apartment, I'm sure we get to hear far too much of each other's constant stream of meetings. :P At> Every so often when I do the on-site work its nice to know I'm out of At> the house for the moment and not going entirely batshit crazy. At> Every so often when I do the on-site work its nice to know I'm out of At> the house for the moment and not going entirely batshit crazy. Yeah. *IF* my company lets us be totally flexible, I'll likely go to the office once or twice a week just to socialize a bit and, really, just get away from here for a while. |08j |15A C K |08p |15H L A S H |08! --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2020/09/07 (Windows/32) * Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (46:1/145) .