[Musings] The Distributed Life, part 1
This will be the first installment of hopefully many where I will share my experiences of living a distributed, colocated life. Here is the setup:
Subjects: husband (me) + wife
CoLocs: two cities 87 miles apart, two houses, we'll call them House A and House B
Her Job: Graduate Student
My Job: Nerd-related work in computers involing things that end in NIX.
The thought of finding a new job in this tight job market scared me. So I was able to swing a deal at work where I can work 50% of my work time in the office at location A and 50% of my time working from home B. My team lead and his boss are great, they are supportive and are helping to make it work. Human Resources however is a different story. They saddled me with a three page document about about what I owe the company and when. Guidelines and rules for me to track my time. Stipulations for my home office, how many phone-lines are required, and requirements to my voicemail so that I can be paged immediately when someone leaves a message. Of my team members, I am now the most available, the one who can be contacted anywhere in the US at any time. This was a compromise between me and my employer. I am grateful for it. We both gave a little, but HR made sure that I gave more, and not so subtly reminded me of who is the hand that feeds me. Vacation time cannot be take out of time I am to be in the office and the first complaint by the customer or a co-worker regarding my responsiveness and availability and this setup becomes null and void. Damn my HR sucks. But my lead and his boss are great, they understand the stress this lifestyle will put on me and they want to work with me to make it work and play it loose to see how it goes. If I can pull this off, others in my workplace will be able to benefit from my efforts and do the same.
2 comments:
Wifely posting:
For a company with an established work-from-home policy and several employees working from home in other offices, this transition was made remarkably painful for you. I think the stickiest part of this transition for me has been assumption(s) of our friends that we are separated/divorcing/seeking other lovers; when reassured that none of the above is true, many of our friends nonetheless seem to be waiting for us to fail. Thanks, guys.
I agree with that. Between my local (in)Human Resources person making my work/life transition harder, many of our friends have expected us to fail, I find their lack of faith, distrubing. (however I must note that our closest friends, and most of our family who know us, know we will succeed).
So far it has been better than expected. I find this actually less stressful than being in the office locked in my cube for 40 hours straight.
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