My previous workplace was like this. It didn't get to this point, I left before it got to the point of being told you're not allowed to wfh under any circumstances, but I was very confused why I needed to go to the office, to do my IT job, helping people with their computers remotely. I go to the office, to work remotely. Which doesn't make any sense at all.

What is special about the office that allows me to work better/faster/more effectively/whatever? Nobody could give me an answer. I can easily run the tools at home and work fine from there, but I'm not allowed.

My specialty is in network operations, if they want my work to 100% go through their equipment and firewalls and stuff, I can make that happen. With little effort, I can setup a system on a VLAN, and VPN that VLAN to work, blocking it from all other traffic apart from the VPN. It would be the only system on that VLAN (apart from the firewall/VPN device), ensuring no possibility of cross contamination between my equipment and theirs. They even had an openVPN host already configured, which they would only need to generate a connection file for, in order for me to get it working. I can then proxy 100% of my traffic through an office system and it would be identical to being present in the office, apart from me being physically there.

At home I have a dedicated room for my computer activities, where I can close the door and lock it if required, so I can remain undisturbed.

I made sure they understood all of this but they still wanted me in the office at least 4 days a week. I'm still not sure why.

I left that job, and my new job doesn't even have a physical office, so I'm permanently working from home.

Not in the USA, I'm not sure that we have a similar law. Any agreement that may or may not have resulted from the above story, which I cannot confirm nor deny, would have been examined by a legal professional whom is familiar with local laws and if such an error were to have been included in such a document, they would have surely pointed it out.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but if it did, I certainly would have had any such agreement looked at by a professional who is familiar with the laws to the point of knowing if such a thing were not enforceable.

I wish I could say more specifically what happened, including my opinions, or name and shame the company involved but I am compelled to not disclose any such information. I also cannot elaborate on why or how I am limited on what I can disclose.

I feel like I'm walking a tightrope. The chances that someone is going to even care enough to trace my username to my identity, then do something about it, is pretty slim, even if I were to disclose everything, and name and shame as I would love to do... But I'm more honorable than most I suppose.

Oh probably. From everything I saw it was impossible for me to meet their demands.

Partway through my employment I moved to a new home, after a few months my SO got a job. She doesn't have a license but needed to travel about 15 minutes to work (30m round trip). I was basically the only person who could, or would, help her get to work. I worked 9-5, her shift was 2:30 to 10:30.

For a while, my brother would drive her to work and I would drive her home, even that was stressful, because I'd wake up at 6:30 to shower and get ready to leave by 8AM so I can be at work for 9, then I had to stay up to bring her home, which she wasn't out at 10:30 promptly every day, so I'd frequently get home after 11:30. Going to bed at, or after midnight, to wake up by 6:30 AM, five days a week isn't fun, even at four days in the office per week, it was not great.

Thought-out this time I was asking for more wfh, since then I can at least sleep from midnight to 8 AM or so. They wouldn't budge.

My brother ended up having a medical issue that caused him to be unable to drive her to work, so I told my employer I had to work from home, since I have to take care of getting her both to, and from work, and that, at most, the situation would last around 10-12 months (she was working on her driver's license, and that's the minimum waiting/learning time for new drivers, before they can drive without a chaperone); I also informed them that I could attend the office once per week, since she had one weekday off per week as part of her shift rotation. They "compromised" by basically telling me to follow their schedule or be laid off. Their schedule was: in office every day from 9-1. Travel home between 1 and 2pm, and do what's needed to get my SO to work. Once I'm done that, I can work from home when I return from dropping her off (usually 2:30 or 3 PM to 5 PM or so... Whatever our quitting time was), with one day (her day off) fully in office, and one day fully from home. So 3 of 5 days was this insane in-office then drive home and finish at home thing, one day was fully remote, and one day was fully in office.

Needless to say, I burned out fast. Got a note from my doctor saying I was disabled (he didn't specify why, but if push came to shove it would be something mental health related, he never needed to AFAIK), and I wasn't able to work right now, and currently the recovery time needed was unknown. So I went on disability.

I also want to mention that through all the half day nonsense, they expected me to log 6.5 hours in their time tracking software, which is something I struggle with at the best of times. When I'm stressed, the first thing that suffers is my ability to correctly log and account for my time in any system. So I had 4 hours in the morning to work from the office on my "split days" (as I called them), plus, maybe 2.5 hours at most during my work from home time. Totalling 6.5 hours. I couldn't so much as take a shit or I would fall behind on my time tracking. Normally over an 8 hour shift, the 1.5 hours of missing time in the day would be for breaks/lunch. It's hard to take lunch when I'm barely able to make it home in an hour, and barely able to get to/from her work in 30 minutes. I usually work through lunch because I tend to have time where I have no idea what I was doing, so I can't really account for it in the time tracker. With the 1.5 hour block of driving in the middle of my day, plus all the distractions and unaccounted time I know I'll accrue from co-workers pulling me away from my work to ask asinine questions about things that don't have a presence in the time tracking system (all ticket based, and they would ask me about prospective projects that wouldn't have a ticket for months), I knew that what they were asking as an impossible task.

After I felt up to the task of returning to that insanity, instead of keeping my seat warm for me, they laid me off before I was set to return to work. I only felt up to it because it would have only been a matter of a few months before my SO was able to take her driver's test to be able to drive solo, and after 6 months of being off I wasn't suicidal from the stress anymore, but the bills were starting to pile up.

I was able to determine that they hired a new person in the same role I had, who was on probation at the time when I wanted to return.

I'll let you conclude what you want from that. I'll legally bound not to speak poorly of the company, or what happened after my layoff. Everything I've said here is simply the facts of the matter.

In any case, after some thought, I'm glad I don't work with people who would force me into that kind of position for a paycheque. I have a new job now and I'm slowly paying off any accumulated bills from my time disabled and/or laid off. The new company, as I believe I've mentioned, is entirely wfh, and I'm certain if I ended up in a similar spot, they would be vastly more empathetic to my plight. I'm even earning a small amount more per year, not enough to write home about, but it's still a bigger number than I was given at the last place. I'm happy where I am, and I'm largely not stressed, apart from the normal stresses of my job. I no longer need to pay for gas to get to the office, nor parking, since the previous job was located in a nearby city in the downtown area, with no free parking for employees, so I had to get paid public parking out of my own pocket. I estimate the change will save me around $6000/yr or more. On top of my small bump in pay, I should have a bit less than $10k/yr more money to myself. Right now all of that is sunk into repayments, but long term, its basically free money.

Sorry no. I was not a part of the workforce when working remotely involved dial up connections.

I was in highschool when DSL and cable internet became the norm. From then on out, it was all VPN.

When I need to sleep and can't, my go to is a relatively mindless game that I've gotten exceedingly good at automating my way through. Something like Sudoku, solitaire (specifically Klondike), or something. Usually on a digital device so I don't have to move too much to play and I don't have to worry about physical cards, shuffling, etc.

If it's a particularly bad night I can pair that with some music. I find either ambient trance or something similar, to be the best for this. One of my favorite "go the fuck to sleep" albums is called "Dreamland" by Robert Miles (may he rest in peace). Alternatively, I find nature/rain/thunderstorm sounds to be particularly calming for me, though YMMV. The calm pitter-patter of raindrops falling seems to really put me in a sleeping mood.

Combining these generally gets me ready to snooze the fastest. The other option I have is mediation, but you need to be practiced at getting into the right headspace for it to be effective. Meditation isn't really what you're after since you have said that basically sitting around with nothing going on is when you start to panic, which is generally how mediation begins, so I'm not sure it will be super helpful.

The only additional advice, which is a bit of an offshoot from the mediation thing, is that trying to not think is a contradiction. You can't try not to do something; unless you have some issues with impulse control, the "act" of not doing something is the antithesis of trying. You can't try to clear your mind, you clear your mind by not thinking, if you're thinking about clearing your mind, then that's a thought which, if present, precludes you having a clear mind.

You have to stop thinking, not just try to put things out of your mind, but stop all active thought and analysis. It is way easier to say, than it is to do, and I wouldn't pretend it's easy at all. I learned how to do this through meditation, and it's a fat departure from how you normally operate mentally, and not an easy thing to achieve. One of the strategies I've used is when your brain assaults you with a thought, you recognise it's existence, but refuse to interact/engage/analyse it at all, and just let that wash over you, and into oblivion. Again, easier said than done. Not allowing your thoughts to latch onto ideas and allowing your mind to be quiet, without commenting on, about, or examining every passing thought, does not come naturally.

I think of it a bit like this: take the example of your mind being a street in a busy city, every individual on the street is an independent thought you might engage with. This idea is a bit like sitting by yourself and watching everything around you without getting involved. Someone walks past screaming about some topic, like how the world is going to end and you just watch them walk by and don't comment on the matter. You recognise they're there, you just don't get involved. Your passive demeanor does not and should not imply you either agree, nor disagree with their statements or viewpoint, you are just present, observing them making a scene. Eventually they move on to yell about it in another location and you give it no further thought.

I hope that makes sense. Of course, modern society with all the social interactions we have, whether online or in person, always gives us the option to engage in discussion about everything and we're often encouraged to do so. People will outright ask for your opinion when having IRL conversations at times, which is a prime example of this conditioning. If you're able to break away from the need to have an opinion on everything and anything that crosses your path, and value people's opinions exactly as much as required, which isn't much, then you can break free, and you don't have to bother yourself with everyone's opinion and making yours heard. IMO, there's no value in sharing your opinion, especially when the recipient of that opinion has their own opinion which obviously will not change based on what you could say, so why bother even having one? It takes mental effort and time away from what's important to you to engage in such trivialities, when the outcome is unaffected by anything you think or say. Why invest the time and effort having an opinion when nobody cares what your opinion is enough to for it to have any impact on what happens? This isn't a value statement about you or your opinion, this is a value statement about any would be recipient of your opinion, they don't care, that's a problem, but it's a problem for them to solve; your opinion is valid, and if they can't see the validity in your opinion, why waste your time and effort creating one just so they can ignore it.

You cannot control the actions of others. You can't change what they care about. Both of these things are issues that the opposing individual must address about themselves, that you have no way to change about them. Save yourself the grief, and just don't bother with it. It sounds like you have enough on your plate, you don't need to add their crap to your pile.

With all that being said, it's a radical departure from the accepted social "norm" so it's a lot of stuff that's easier said than done. I'm sorry that you are going through this. I don't know all the details and I don't have the answers; but I've been though some rough shit, and it always sucks. I value you and your opinion, so if you want to reply, I'll be happy to hear anything you wish to share. IMO, it sucks right now but the fact that you're reaching out to anyone for help is a positive sign. Do not be afraid to ask for the help you require, it is not a sign of weakness to need help, it is a sign of strength and character to recognise that you require assistance and you are willing to ask for that assistance. It's brave and demonstrates a strong understanding of when you are unable to handle things alone.

We all need a little help sometimes. If you want to DM me, to inquire further on anything I've said, or to simply rant/vent, or if you just want to chat about technology (or literally anything) as a means of distraction, I'm happy to oblige. I believe my matrix account is linked to Lemmy, so that's also an option.

All the best OP.

Iron man.

I think the third one?

That's Tony's dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.

Version 1.0 released in 2016. I'm pretty sure my process pre-dates this tool.

Looks good, but my collection is already ripped and converted, so I don't have a need for it anymore.

I'll keep this in my pack pocket if I happen to ever buy physical media again.

I use a private streaming application. I don't want to say which one, but popular examples include Plex, jellyfin, emby, and Kodi.

It's not really compatible with the DVD menu systems, though, that would be really fun if it was.

I feel like illegal immigrants is less of a problem than you think it is.

But you're talking about the effects that would happen over multiple generations, all of whom come from essentially poverty conditions.

I am unable to count the number of people who became middle class from a poverty class family, because I'm not aware that it has ever happened. So any children of illegal immigration, who were born in the country who is now a citizen would probably fall into the poorest rentals and communities, which isn't capable of home ownership.

I'm middle class and I had to pair up with another family to break the cycle of violence that is renting. I'm 40 and I'll be 65 by the time we pay off the mortgage, at which time any savings from the mortgage is likely going to need to be fed into surviving, because inflation will have likely spiked the cost of everything to the point where we need that money just to buy food. I understand that's anecdotal, though I have seen others with similar stories. The only people I know of that are doing okay, bought a house in, or directly after college when the average price of a home was half of what it is now.

So if you ask me if these people are raising house prices, my answer is no, because the vast majority of them are impoverished. Those that are not, can afford the time, cost, and effort to go through the proper immigration process, and they become citizens.

Simply: rich/middle class foreigners are immigrating legally. Poor immigrants are coming over illegally with nothing, and given how ruthless our society is, they will not escape poverty in our lifetimes, and likely not in the lifetimes of our children, or their children. By the time they "become a problem" for the housing market, they will be 3rd or 4th generation citizens at a minimum, using their meager generational wealth to finally hoist themselves out of poverty.

My bad, it's been a while.

Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn't want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.

I'm sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don't have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.

I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.

I've always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.

It was late at night and I couldn't wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.

I work in IT and people question my sanity when I'm walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.

I never used it for it's intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.

No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.

I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.

I'm in Canada, so things here are a bit different. On top of that, things differ greatly between physicians.

I went into my primary care physician, and I inquired about ADHD, because I'd done some learning, and thought I had it, but didn't want to self diagnose. I thought he'd give me a referral to a psychiatrist for diagnosis, instead he gave me a survey, which was maybe 20 questions at most, took maybe a minute to fill out. After, he looked over my answers, said something to the effect of "this seems consistent with mild ADHD, do you feel it is affecting your life?" Very yes. Then he prescribed me a relatively low dose of ADHD meds, and as soon as I got that prescription filled, my life changed for the better.

I've been on it ever since and much happier for it. Took like 3 minutes at my primary care physician.

Meanwhile, my brother went to his primary, who referred him to a psychiatrist, who did weeks of discussions and examinations before any prescription was provided for him. He also has ADHD.

Different physicians, different people, different experiences.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you're doing, but shouldn't be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

For anything times 5, I just take the other number, half it, and then multiply by 10. Voila. Times 5.

I expect horny jail is probably a lot of solitary confinement, with moisturizer and tissues.

I have none of these things.

The convenience closes at 11:59.

I guess I'll starve until morning.

I have my own hotdog toaster, tyvm.

I will thank you not to discuss it.

Hopefully you donated it, instead of just throwing it directly in the dumpster.

There's still people who use them and not all of those people can afford one.

Both of you, to horny jail!

I use a bidet, I still need TP to clean up after the water does the job.

I know fancy bidets exist that will blow dry your arae, but what do I look like? A rich person? We got ours from Amazon for like $20.

TP use is way down, but it's still needed in many cases.

I have four in the house and none of them screw with our tp.

You just have a cat that's more of an asshole than usual.

TP, shitposting.... You don't see the connection?

The original toilet paper was pretty much that, from what I understand.

IDK for sure, not like I'm some toilet paper historian.

I dunno if I'd say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you're just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as "friendly" as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I'm not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There's always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I've been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don't use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don't feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

Separate, but together, we stand.... Or sit.

IDK what's going on in this metaphor.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, and IANAL, but my understanding is that to own land (which would contain a house), in a country, you need to have a contract with the government where the land is, thereby identifying yourself as a foreigner.

It would seem that if this insane claim was actually a problem, where foreign persons were buying homes and then living in them, illegally in the USA for an extended period of time, that such a problem would be easy to solve?

"This home has been occupied by a Spanish speaking family, and it's owned by a Mexican citizen" would be a good reason for border services to go knock on the door and be like, who the hell are you people and do you have the legal right to be in the country?

IDK, but it feels like a problem that would fix itself.

Also, most illegal immigrants are fleeing their country with little more than the clothes on their back, nevermind enough cash to buy a house. I'm sure some rich people can do this but are they really the problem? If they want to live in the country and spend their wealth here, why would we want to stop them?

The whole argument is nonsensical to me.

I like this one more.

This is the main reason why I quit Facebook and other services. Anytime you access them from mobile via a web browser it corners you into a "download our app" page. Facebook started doing it with messenger and I knew I had to get out.

I'm not giving Zuckerberg that level of access to my data.

IMO, billionaires are a symptom of the system in which I'm underpaid, which is the cause of a nontrivial number of my concerns.

Financial stress has been a constant companion for me, money doesn't solve all my problems, but it certainly would relieve my financial stressors.

If billionaires were less common, it would be because they invested more into their workforce, and paying them appropriately for their contributions to the business. Billionaires exist because a large group of people worked very hard for less money than they deserved, so that they could become a billionaire.

The reason we should be angry at billionaires is because they're usually the one dictating how much our contributions are worth (or rather, how much they're not worth). They make the rules, set the goal posts, and determine how valuable we are (how much we are paid).

They're a symptom of a broken system, they're also the reason why the system is broken.

So I disagree with the initial assertion that my problems are not because someone is a billionaire. A nontrivial amount of my problems are exactly because someone is a billionaire. They stole the wages that I deserved (along with untold numbers of my co-workers), so they could become a billionaire, and I can be drowning in debt trying to make it through, paycheque to paycheque.....

Fuck billionaires.

IKR, my SO owns two.

IDK what OP is on about, though, I've never used one.

sometimes people just ask if I didn't sleep well last night if I don't.

I've heard this is a thing.

I'm a dude, I never sleep well. Anytime I look in the mirror, I can certainly tell that I didn't sleep well, but I'm almost never asked about it.

I went for a sleep study earlier this year, I'm meeting with a doctor to discuss the findings in a couple of weeks. Hopefully I can get better sleep soon.....

Even with that being said, it would be nice if someone cared enough to ask about it. At the same time, I can also see that getting asked that question a bunch, regardless of how well you slept, would be pretty annoying.

IDK. Everyone asks what I'm doing, never how I'm doing. It's fine. I survive.

👀

I'm generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn't even occur to me to recommend. I generally don't get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that's where my knowledge generally is. I can't really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I'm mostly lost on how to fix it.

There's enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what's happening and fix any problems.

He'd just be an idiot faster.

Oooh. That makes more sense.

In less humid/hot locations, this isn't really an issue. The outside of the bowl is cold, but rarely collects condensation.

The only way for it to get wet and create a problem is when guys have bad aim and don't have the decency to sit down because of their bad aim.

If you use the TP after that, you get what's coming to you.

Imagine getting an asshole splinter?

Weeeeee

Booooooo.

OP is still right, but I hate what you've posted.