My Office

                I have a love/hate relationship with the office that I am renting. I signed a twelve-month lease, and I believe I have four months left on it. The first few months were like I was in Disneyland. I would think about the office when I was at home, and I would make up excuses as to why I needed to go to my office on a given evening. The office was a great getaway for nights when my wife/daughters were visiting my in-laws. I could relax in my office, play games, and do some coding.

                The reason for getting an office in the first place was to eliminate distractions. My previous job had me working from home two days a week, and I was finding that nearly impossible to do for a variety of reasons: 1) My wife and daughter (I had one kid at the time) made a lot of noise that I could hear from downstairs. Under normal conditions, this would be fine, but I was always finding myself under tense circumstances. 2) I had an extremely annoying colleague. This colleague was and is a nice guy that would do anything for anyone, but he was unsure of himself and was always pinging me with questions every 5-10 minutes which destroyed any train of thought that I had. Working remote was only a minor reprieve from him as he’d still find a way to bug me. 3) As mentioned earlier, the work stress for this job was the most of any job I’ve ever had. I had to work with colleagues from across the world, some of which I clashed with for cultural reasons (Costa-Ricans are just lazy, and Swedes don’t explain themselves very well). I had deteriorating management, two of whom were later removed, and a host of demands and timeframes that were unreasonable.

                The physical space is nice, no complaints. It’s a bit small, and I thought I’d have issues with it, but I don’t. I put a futon on one side of the office as I like to take naps, but I have found that my focus (by and large) prevents me from taking naps – which is good. I have a walking path behind the building, and I utilize it every chance I get. It’s a wonderful escape from the daily grind. I think exercise is the key to mental/emotional wellbeing, I really do. I used to train in jiu-jitsu a few jobs back and found that it stimulated my mental side so much that I wasn’t really missing out by attending (instead of being at work during that hour).

                I noticed in early 2019 that I was beginning to have a bandwidth problem at the office, so I ordered a wireless adapter that said it could reach about a mile. Those claims would later turn out to be bogus as it seems to only span a quarter mile (on a good day). On a fantastic day, I’ll get about 25mbps on the local network (ethernet) which for my routine is great! On a bad day, I won’t get anything, I’m dead-in-the-water at 0mbps. On an average day, I encounter good times and then I encounter packet loss and very poor speeds. I have lost countless hours of productivity, and this can come at times when I absolutely need to operate at my best.

                I can’t take it anymore. I won’t renew my lease. The situation at home isn’t that much better. Lately, we’ve been encountering random network drops which can directly be attributed to CenturyLink. I also feel like my router is slowly failing as our Echo Dot cuts out at times, and my laptop has sluggish speeds when watching Scooby Doo with my daughter. The goal now is to 1) Wire up the entire house with Cat6 ethernet, 2) Get a new Gigabit Router with three Antennas, 3) Get Fiber or Business-Level Internet, and 4) Set up an office downstairs with a devoted connection (separate from the rest of the house). What about the problems mentioned in paragraph two? I am going to retrofit my old boombox to connect to a Bluetooth adapter and I’m going to blast white noise in the new office. I’m sure I’ll have other issues, and I know it won’t be an easy adjustment.

                I’m not bitter about the office experience. Overall, it was a good lesson. I made some mistakes, and I made some decisions that were wise. I got to invite friends over to play Magic: The Gathering in the nice shared boardroom. I got to take a lot of quality walks. I had plenty of good hours of peak mental focus and clarity. I learned a lot about myself, the things that make me efficient and the things that don’t. I’ll miss this office, in some ways. Maybe, in the future, I’ll get to build my own office somewhere.