Dreamer's World March 22 2015 - Seriously Considering A Big Change

    Sunday has arrived. I have been seriously debating a serious change at work for some time now. April 1st marks the 4-year anniversary of when the remote office I work at was established. The office is located on the bottom floor of a townhouse that is owned by the CEO of the company that I work for. This has made me the de facto property manager for this office and the townhouse in general ever since. This collateral job has never been in my job description, and it has been a hassle from day one.

    The situation became even more complicated when the upstairs portion of the townhouse was leased out to a friend of the CEO. This friend owns his own company, and this means that whenever something has to be done at the townhouse, it becomes a political issue. Regardless of my unofficial position of representing the company and CEO while at the townhouse, everything is getting done behind my back. More accurately, this means things are NOT getting done. I have been the person responsible for pest control and maintenance issues at the townhouse, as well as ordering the paltry amount of office supplies that are needed to keep the place running.

    Ordering supplies has become particularly difficult. Since the orders are so small and so infrequent, they generate endless cycles of email justifications and result in the process taking several weeks. I do not take this personally, although it does irk me that I amn not authorized to make the necessary small charges and then bill the company. Ordering toilet paper can take 2 weeks. I am tired fo the struggles every time something like this needs to be done.

    I am not a fan or working at home. The apartment is not large enough to have a purely private office space. However, I think that the time has come to tell the company that I will be teleworking the majority fo the time from now on. Numerous requests to provide professional office space for myself and 2 coworkers has fallen on deaf ears. I think that it is time that I began working from home to avoid the hassles and at times, near arguments with the people living upstairs at the townhouse.

    Having said that, I plan to notify my supervisor of my decision when we hold out weekly 1-1 conference call on Wednesday. I will be letting her know that no later than 01 April, I plan to work at home for the vast majority of the time. I also plan to let her know that my intentions are to cancel the bi-weekly cleaning service that is conducted at the townhouse, as well as the quarterly pest inspections. If those services are required in the future, the tenants upstairs can make those arrangements.

    The main obstacle is the space available to work from home. i have to coordinate that with Hal. The best solution would be to disassemble the bed frame in the guest bedroom and plae it against the wall to clear up floor space for a small computer desk to be placed in that room so it can have a connection to the router. I have been looking around at something to put in the room and I found a nice alternative at IKEA, which comes as no surprise to me.

   

     This is a small secretary type desk that I saw at IKEA. It is small enough to not cause a lot of chaos in the bedrooom once the bed is out of the way. Of course, Hal has to agree to this change, and I will ask him about it when he gets home this afternoon. If he is OK with this, I can get the desk and be all set to begin permanently working from home by 01 April, as I hope to.

    This desk is not large, by any means, but that is the advantage of it. I can make it work for me by streamlining what I really need compared to the setup at the office, which provides lots of space that ends up as nothing more than clutter. It would be a tight fit as I adjust to it, but it would be the best option to work with here at the apartment.

    I will research this, and check with Hal. If things go well, I will move ahead with this over the next week or so. After Hal got home, we discussed things and for the immediate future, I am going to try rearranging my existing desktop space to accomodate the laptop and see how well that woeks. Hal doesn't want to disassemble the bed, and I understand why because it would look rather tacky with mattress and springs up against the wall. So, I will try the new setup and see how well I can manage things. Perhaps this will be the solution for everything.

    This does not change my intention to begin working from home on or near 01 April in any way.