At work I was previously working from home the majority of the time, and in the recent months there’s been an initiative to bring people back into the office. Right now my office-to-home ratio is about 60/40, and for the most part I’ve been challenged by being in the office. While I admit that working at the office increases my technical productivity (less distractions with the temperamental home computer) – my overall productivity has decreased with the amount of distractions. With many recent job cuts my work area has been reduced to essentially a ghost-town. Once upon a time my aisle had 14 offices, but over the years that has been reduced to four people, three of which spend most of their time from home. Sometimes things are lonely, but I have grown to appreciate the quiet atmosphere.
All that changed today.
Right now we’re doing a bunch of building-moving, and with it there is an attempt to consolidate the current occupants on my floor and move us either upstairs or downstairs. As they are in the process of moving everyone, they’ve arranged our area as a temporary work area, where people will work for 2 months before they permanently move. Today they began converting all of the work areas around me to have the new equipment and furniture, so I’ve been working in a construction zone throughout the day. I’ve been listening to a lot of music and podcasts to help reduce the distractions, but this is a polar opposite from the quiet area I’ve enjoyed. Now I have a slew of new neighbors, none of which I regularly with with. I find myself looking forward to moving myself just to be able to connect with people in my organization.
To make matters worse I went to go buy a pop this afternoon, only to find that they’ve raised the prices again. It’s now $1.25 for a 20-oz bottle! How outrageous! After a 25% increase from the original $1 price I’ve thought about setting up my own back-alley pop business just to bring some competition to the thugs running our vending machines. This is nuts!