The home office, a work in progress. Tap to view at full size.
I’m a remote employee at Auth0, and as such, I fell under their home office expense and reimbursement policy. It was the perfect opportunity to upgrade to a standing desk and ergonomic chair, which I bought as a package from Autonomous during their Black Friday sale.
The desk and chair were delivered in early December, but I decided to wait until the holidays to put them together as part of my project to turn our guest room into my office (which can still double as a guest room when the need arises).
My only complaint about the Autonomous MyoChair is that it comes with bog-standard plastic office chair casters, which would turn the lovely hardwood floor into a scratched-up mess. Luckily, we live in an age of wonders, which includes these wheels and the ability to have them shipped to me in very short order:
Okay, so it’s not a iPhone box, but it’s still a lot nicer than the sealed bag of plastic replacement wheels you normally get. Tap to view at full size.
I’ve enjoyed a chair with Office Oasis rollerblade wheels before, and they’re worth the little bit extra. They won’t ruin hardwood or laminate floors or leave black scuff marks like some rubber wheels do. They glide over floor or carpet, and they look pretty sharp. They’re so good, they almost make rollerblading seem cool.
Even the way they’re packaged is nice. Tap to view at full size.
Next task: Find something to put up on those walls.
The end of the calendar year is a perfectly good time to go through your kitchen cupboards and look for anything that’s seriously well past its “best before” date. Consider the jar in the photo above. That’s not peanut butter, caramel, or dulce de leche — it’s Miracle Whip from about 30 years ago!
The New Yorker: Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus. “Where does the United States stand in this? Well, the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.”
Creative Commons image by TUBS. Tap to view the source.
It starts when you’re always afraid: This is a 2013 piece by Greg Fallis, and it’s about a phenomenon that’s only ramped up since then. “The United States has become a nation ruled by fear-biters. A lot of our social policies are grounded in fear, and much of that fear is totally unfounded. We’re afraid of terrorists, so we find ways to weasel around the law in order to round up the people we’re afraid of and lock them away forever where we can’t see them. ‘Indefinite detention’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ are other forms of fear-biting.”
Creative Commons photo by Giorgio Montersino. Tap to view the source.
The case against telecommuting:Face Time, a New Yorker article published back in the halcyon days of March 2013, uses the case of Yahoo!’s then-CEO Marissa Meyer’s ending of telecommuting at the company. The article does say that telecommuting is workable in companies with healthy cultures, but there was a trend away from it, and management at the time was all for bringing everyone back to the office. It makes for very quaint reading now.