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Working from home Y/N

On Teams / Skype, it shows you're "active" and working as opposed to "away" and asleep on the sofa. A friend leaves his mouse on the washing machine when its running to keep the mouse moving when its on the spin cycle

Friend of mind had hers attached to a fan that moved from side to side continuously.
 
Back back the office out of choice since August.

I've been very lucky though. We're encouraged to WFH, but welcomed in if we prefer to come in. It's very clean and safe here. Hardly anybody here still. Plus, to put everyone at ease, they've offered everyone over £50 a day in travel/parking expenses. So I could literally Uber to work and back if I wanted. Not that I am. I don't want to add to London's congestion.

I'm just expensing the train in, and sometimes the boat home to Putney.
The boat ! :cool:
 
Well DDL, (who bought the rights to the defunct Anki) have demanded a huge amount of money to allow Vector (robot) to function. I and thousands of other Vector owners are really pissed off.
That's a bugger. Is there no way of hacking it to regain control?
 
I don't understand chairs. I have a wooden dining chair which I use in my office. The Student always requires a cushion, what is wrong with the padded rear end that god gave us is what I want to know. I am very comfy on my wooden chair 8 hours a day, you just need buttocks!
 
All this washing during the day and attaching your mouse to a fan, for my money the best way to make the day go quickly is actually to do work. TBF if I don't do any work for a couple of days it becomes obvious to them in the office.
 
I don't understand chairs. I have a wooden dining chair which I use in my office. The Student always requires a cushion, what is wrong with the padded rear end that god gave us is what I want to know. I am very comfy on my wooden chair 8 hours a day, you just need buttocks!
If you are working at a desk using a dining chair, you can fully expect to encounter some back problems in the long run. Dining chairs and tables are made for eating at, not working at.
 
If you are working at a desk using a dining chair, you can fully expect to encounter some back problems in the long run. Dining chairs and tables are made for eating at, not working at.
I do wonder what DSE horrors are being stored up for the future with what is going on. I'm lucky that I have room and can afford to get a proper desk, chair and big monitor but a lot of people won't be able to. :(
 
If you are working at a desk using a dining chair, you can fully expect to encounter some back problems in the long run. Dining chairs and tables are made for eating at, not working at.
Not sure I agree, my butt provides padding. I have used my kitchen style chair since the start of lockdown, and a table (slightly lower than a desk) to work on, I haven't had issues and it has been a few months now.

I have my late dad's "office chair", in the other room, it features a sculpted wholly wooden seat, with a leather padded back. Very comfortable.
 
There's a thread about this.


Like weltweit I have a very basic chair. Evidence for the benefits of expensive "ergonomic" chairs seems rather sketchy and I suspect a lot of what is sold to be, if not 100% nonsense, at least partially nonsense.
 
Not sure I agree, my butt provides padding. I have used my kitchen style chair since the start of lockdown, and a table (slightly lower than a desk) to work on, I haven't had issues and it has been a few months now.

I have my late dad's "office chair", in the other room, it features a sculpted wholly wooden seat, with a leather padded back. Very comfortable.
It's not about padding. It's about posture. And a hard, flat dining chair seat will be doing nothing for that. It will also be impairing your circulation to your legs. And if you're using a laptop, your upper body posture will be all to shit as well.

One of my former students is an ergonomist. She spotted me sitting in a dining chair on camera, and messaged me to point some of this out. I got - on her recommendation - a reasonably decent IKEA office chair, and have noticed a significant improvement in things like shoulder pain, twitchy legs, and a long-standing issue with my mouse arm.

Your mileage may vary.
 
Exactly - there's a reason offices have good chairs. If workplaces thought cheap kitchen chairs were good enough then that's what all offices would have.
Workplaces want to be seen to do the right thing. So they buy chairs with "ergonomic" on the label.
 
There's a thread about this.


Like weltweit I have a very basic chair. Evidence for the benefits of expensive "ergonomic" chairs seems rather sketchy and I suspect a lot of what is sold to be, if not 100% nonsense, at least partially nonsense.
I suspect that you are right in that anyone with an interest in flogging office chairs is bound to be pushing that angle...but that doesn't mean that the premise on which it is based is invalid. Dining chairs are not designed to be sat in for hours on end, in the way office chairs are. They usually have flat seats, which - unless you are quite fortunate in your physiology - tends to encourage slumping in the chair, and even more so if you are squinting downwards at a laptop screen on a table.

Laptop keyboards are an ergonomist's nightmare, too - their location in relation to the screen owes everything to the physical constraints of laptop design, and nothing at all to ergonomics or health. If you prop the laptop up so that the screen is at a natural eye level (which is where it should be to reduce neck strain), the keyboard's unreachable...so at the very least, laptop users will need an external keyboard (and, ideally, monitor...at the right height). While this paragraph isn't specifically about the ergonomics of chairs, it should be fairly obvious that the whole "system" is what influences posture, and therefore health. Perhaps, with an ideal computer setup, the limitations of dining chair/table are less, but I don't think we can just write the whole ergonomic thing off as a cynical income boost from office equipment suppliers.
 
I have no choice, as my work is freelance and online anyway. If I continue this way then I will be working from home for the forseeable future. I don't mind it that much. I get a lot more done that in an office with distractions. I will, however, be much happier when I move house and have an actual office as opposed to a tiny desk in the corner of the bedroom.
 
Still haven’t done it, most of my team seem to do it though. I’ve been in my public sector job for 4 weeks, I expect my laptop sometime before Christmas in time for the 94th wave.

I don’t mind that much as office attending get me up, dressed, washed and out of the house and I’ve always done it. Plus I have a short drive
 
I find it absolutely impossible to stay focused for the whole day, I start early (usually 6 but sometimes not until 8) and work reasonably well up until 12:30pm when I have a daily catch-up with the boys/team for a half hour, then take lunch for an hour, after that tho' I find it hard to get back into it unless I'm doing something considered very important. But I do like it.
 
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