The clock lies

The countdown clock is off a bit -- the Great Escape is now barely 4 days away. The U-Haul is reserved for noon on Friday, and by Sunday morning we should be somewhere in Tennessee heading north. We are getting into that phase of moving that's always a nuisance: wanting to finish packing, but unable to because I can't decide if I'll need something in the next 72 hours or not.

Thanks to a fortunate coincidence, though, it appears I will be gainfully employed awhile longer. I was in the process of persuading my manager to allow me to telework when Large Nameless Agency took the issue out of our hands. It was coming dangerously close to me trotting out an ultimatum: I telework, or I retire. That discussion has now been postponed for a few weeks.

It appears LNA screwed up (what a shock!) in planning for the upcoming office shuffle. The journal is slated to exit its current leased office space to move into space in one of the buildings on the main LNA campus. That space has to be remodeled to accommodate the "densification" of personnel (i.e., walls have to be ripped out so existing offices can be made smaller and more cubicles can be crammed into the square footage). And where were the cubicles and office furniture (workstations, etc) going to come from to put into that new space, you ask? Recycling, of course. They're going to take our current work stations and cubicles and move them.

A good plan, but one that contains an obvious flaw: those work stations are being used. What happens to the employees while the fixtures in the leased office space are disassembled, moved, and then reassembled? Where do they go?

Answer: they telework. The word came down last week that everyone at the journal gets to work from home for most of November and part of December. Everyone on the journal staff has to be out of his or her current space by November 10; they'll get to move into the new LNA office space sometime after December 5. Mass panic ensued, with one exception.

Me. The person over in the corner quietly doing the happy dance. I've just been told to work from home. No one's bothered asking where "home" is. I have been trying to tell them, but, as usual, everyone is so focused on their own problems that it's not really sinking in when I say stuff like "I need Friday off to load the U-Haul" and "Here's my Michigan phone number." Oh well, I tried.