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Sausage Party
Jan. 5th, 2007 12:15 pmWhy did I come into the office today? I've had some nicely productive days at home this week. I have a meeting this afternoon, but that's not for hours yet. I guess I just like the walk. News flash: I can take long walks without having to sit in a cube farm for six hours halfway through. Yeah I know.
One result of the contractor-empowerment thing I posted about a couple days ago is resolve to bill a full work-day for every day that I work. Um... wait, so what were you doing before? Eh, I don't even want to talk about it. The point is that ITA agreed to this arrangement because they wanted to take me on part-time, but had no infrastructure set up for that, but on the third hand had been meaning to investigate bringing in some contractors. So they'd been expecting me to bill in day-long chunks, and let us say that they've been enjoying quite a bargain from me instead.
As for the work-at-home thing, even if the intent was to let me be a fakey-fake part-time employee, the true fact is that I am a contractor and I should treat myself like one. And I mean, hell, why not: I get no benefits and my scale kind of blows, compared to other software contractors with my skill and experience. OTOH I don't have many of the responsibilities that my full-time ITA friends must shoulder, such as on-call support periods and having to attend frequent meetings. I think that being in the office by default also falls into this category.
My situation in the ITA office does not present an optimal work environment for me. I sit in an all-male cube farm, and it's probably an experience closely resembling what you imagine. The monogenderedness of it is a real issue for me; Harvard had a swear-to-gord fifty-fifty split among the scientists there, even if all the tech and admin staff (incl. Y.T.) fell along the usual gender lines. I worked with the scientists enough to get workish exposure to both men and women and this was important to me. I do not get that here.
But that said, I kind of don't interact with anyone here. There's rarely any need to. The cube is a three-walled, one-man dealie, I get to use my own computer - my nearly six-year-old iBook - through which I can pump pink noise into my ears at will, drowning out all the ambient conversation. So I'm actually fairly well personalized and isolated here, which is nice. But what's the point when I can just be home, surrounded by my very own environment and comforts, instead? The worst thing I get there is Nicky barking once in a while. Feh.
Going to make some changes.
Confession: I'm kind of over geeks and geek humor and geek culture and all of that, and I have been for some time now. You may call me a geek if you wish and I suppose I wouldn't be able to deny many of the line-item reasons you'd have for doing so. But I don't identify. Most of the time.
One result of the contractor-empowerment thing I posted about a couple days ago is resolve to bill a full work-day for every day that I work. Um... wait, so what were you doing before? Eh, I don't even want to talk about it. The point is that ITA agreed to this arrangement because they wanted to take me on part-time, but had no infrastructure set up for that, but on the third hand had been meaning to investigate bringing in some contractors. So they'd been expecting me to bill in day-long chunks, and let us say that they've been enjoying quite a bargain from me instead.
As for the work-at-home thing, even if the intent was to let me be a fakey-fake part-time employee, the true fact is that I am a contractor and I should treat myself like one. And I mean, hell, why not: I get no benefits and my scale kind of blows, compared to other software contractors with my skill and experience. OTOH I don't have many of the responsibilities that my full-time ITA friends must shoulder, such as on-call support periods and having to attend frequent meetings. I think that being in the office by default also falls into this category.
My situation in the ITA office does not present an optimal work environment for me. I sit in an all-male cube farm, and it's probably an experience closely resembling what you imagine. The monogenderedness of it is a real issue for me; Harvard had a swear-to-gord fifty-fifty split among the scientists there, even if all the tech and admin staff (incl. Y.T.) fell along the usual gender lines. I worked with the scientists enough to get workish exposure to both men and women and this was important to me. I do not get that here.
But that said, I kind of don't interact with anyone here. There's rarely any need to. The cube is a three-walled, one-man dealie, I get to use my own computer - my nearly six-year-old iBook - through which I can pump pink noise into my ears at will, drowning out all the ambient conversation. So I'm actually fairly well personalized and isolated here, which is nice. But what's the point when I can just be home, surrounded by my very own environment and comforts, instead? The worst thing I get there is Nicky barking once in a while. Feh.
Going to make some changes.
Confession: I'm kind of over geeks and geek humor and geek culture and all of that, and I have been for some time now. You may call me a geek if you wish and I suppose I wouldn't be able to deny many of the line-item reasons you'd have for doing so. But I don't identify. Most of the time.
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