After five years of working full-time from my home office today was my first day back to the office. Usually I get up around 7:00 AM and just walk to my office after making my wife a cup of coffee. There I start checking and answering my emails and Teams messages and checking on all of our systems to make sure everything is running the way it is supposed to.
Today I got up around the same time, packed my backpack and headed out to another town to catch the light rail to Seattle. They told us that we are coming to the office to increase collaboration and team building so we should prioritize talking to people over everything else.
Well I finally boarded the train around eight in the morning. There are no spots to park around train station, the last of those are gone by six in the morning so you have to park away illegally by businesses and quite a bit away from the station.
That is a good thing for getting more steps as a fair amount of walking is required... The Sound Transit canceled all the direct busses from suburb cities to Seattle, because they built this new light rail, but the closest station is about forty five minutes drive and not nearly enough parking available.
The trains are quite full as well, but at least they are fairly fast and by around nine twenty I was at the office. As you can see my office cubicle is fairly barren, and it doesn't come with trashcan. It also doesn't come with a name tag, just a number as we are supposed to rent these online every week and you get a random one every day you are in the office.
As I came in people were already there and everyone standing around and talking, quite loud I must say. I joined in as I was supposed to. By the time I got to my computer it was around 10:45 AM, I opened my email and saw a bunch of messages from my customers and a few from vendors, but before I could reply to a single one my boss showed up and we went to a conference room.
My boss is also in the cubicle so don't have an office, the only people with offices are C level. So this was the first time we did an annual review in person. He said that despite their tradition of not giving merit pay to those promoted to a different classification the C level people felt bad talking it away from me because of everything I accomplished last year for the organization.
So that was nice and good morale boost. Expectations for next year are very high though. He emphasized that I am now in a leadership role and that I am expected to not only set a strategic direction for our technology, but also make sure that the teams I lead are supposed to deliver more with less resources and in general find ways to reduce costs and influence upper management and build business cases for my proposals. Oh yeah and still make sure that all other work gets done as well... No pressure LOL.
After we got done with the meeting it was time for the lunch. I firmly believe that we are back downtown Seattle to bring back our lunch money, parking and in general make Seattle look like it is a busy town. So to protest that I decided that I will not spend $60 per day on parking and not to go out to lunch.
My coworkers who did go out spent between $40 and $60 on their lunch. So I had a quick lunch that I brought from home at my desk and went to the gym downstairs. It was nice to use a bunch of machines that I don't have in my home gym.
After working out I finally got to answer a couple emails and then I was off to a meeting with the other architects. Then I met with our CTO and Deputy CIO.
When I was back to my cubicle I was about to open my computer when a couple coworkers showed up and we spent the rest of the day chatting on topics that had nothing to do with work, but hey team building is important lol.
It was time to go home. All in all I got done about as much as I would normally accomplish by ten in the morning at home...
There seems to be quite a bit of chop in the crypto market the last few days. ETH and BTC backed off their highs. SPS is as usual flying under radar with not much going on. And Hive is looking like it might retest the recent lows of seventeen and a half cents.
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