One, my workspace at home wasn’t conducive to doing it. My home office, in the back room, doesn’t have a large desk, nor much working space. To run the process, I need to go through the catalog’s “dummy book” (printouts of each page of the catalog as sent to the printer, though I strip mine down to only the pages that have product offerings). In the office, it takes my entire desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two, I have to have hard copies of the pages. I don’t have a printer at home, and if I did the paper and ink I would go through to print these materials out for work would bankrupt me. While PDFs exist of each page–I make my dummy book by printing the PDFs at the office–there is not a unified PDF to work from. If I didn’t have my dummy book at hand, I would have to juggle hundreds of PDFs–the catalog is typically over 500 pages each month–to get the page numbers for the procedure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three, I would usually be working on the pre-procedure reports almost up to the point when I could begin the procedure itself, and working those reports, which involved comparing the data in the system against the page layouts, also needed to be printed out. I would have to be in the office anyway<\/i> (see number two above), so I would roll from the preliminaries into the procedure, wrapping up two, mayube closer to three, hours later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In short, for reasons of materials and space, even in the darkest days of COVID, I came to the office to run the “Page & MCBA Number Update” procedure. I would work late, and spent the next day working with the order forms generated by the procedure and prepping them for layout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday, at the office, I wrapped up work on my pre-procedure tasks in early afternoon. My reports were done. My dummy book was complete. I couldn’t begin the “Page & MCBA Number Update” procedure yet; another department had reports on the data still to work through, and that would take another hour, hour and a half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An idea occurred to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What if I went home and finished my day from there? I set up a computer in my front room in the spring, and I had more room to work there. I couldn’t see any reason why the procedure wouldn’t work from home, and I would gain experience that could help refine it in the future and identify problem points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I boxed up my dummy book, packed my things, and headed home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I got home, I fired up the computer in my front room. That computer is an AceMagic mini-PC, and it’s pretty nice. It came with Windows 11, and I replaced the M.2 SATA it came with, replacing Windows 11 with Linux Mint Debian Edition. I also had a spare SSD that I installed, and over the last month I have been experimenting with the i3 window manager inside Linux Mint 22 MATE. I configured both Linux installations to connect to my work computer, and I decided to run the procedure from my Mint 22 MATE-i3 Frankenstein<\/a>. The reason–if I opened another window beside my remote desktop, the remote desktop would be oriented vertically, and that’s an alignment I like in the internal software used when running the procedure. I would have manipulated my window sizes to orient it that way, but I decided to let i3 do it automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could not start immediately. I still had to wait for Order Processing to finish their work. When they were finished, I began the next phase of my my work day. Running the “Page & MCBA Number Update,” I had no issues. It took more time, but everything worked exactly as I expected it to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early in my Diamond career, I discovered that Green Day’s American Idiot<\/i> was the perfect tracking music for assigning the page numbers. I could tell, based on where I was in the album, how I was doing in assigning numbers, and I would typically finish the process in “Homecoming” (the penultimate track), only rarely getting into “Whatsername.” So, it would take about 50 minutes to assing the page numbers for the entire catalog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last night, it took about an hour and a half. I put on 21st Century Breakdown<\/i> after American Idiot<\/i>, and I was well into that when I wrapped up work on the procudure and could save.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After that, I ran reports for the UK offices, generated order form and catalog Word documents, sent some emails, and started some files I would finish in the morning. I wrapped up my day at 8 o’clock, having done everything I needed to do and then some.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike the previous 200-odd months, I didn’t then have to drive home after finishing the “Page & MCBA Number Update.” I didn’t feel a need to hurry to get out the door. I felt relaxed and comfortable. I had effectively moved my commute home from evening to mid-afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a unique confluence of circumstances that made it possible for me to run this process from home, circumstances that may never happen again. Yet, I also know that if the “Page & MCBA Number Update” needs to be run remotely, it can be. It may be that, in the absence of a physical dummy book, more generalized page numbers are used–the section this item is in begins on page such-and-such–rather than the exact page. This may be something to discuss in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that “unique confluence” happens again, I will more likely than not avail myself of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wallpaper on my computer comes from here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four and a half years after going work from home, yesterday, for the first time, I executed one of my key job duties remotely. Each month I run a process called the “Page & MCBA Number Update.” To describe it briefly, I load all the items in the month’s PREVIEWS catalog (typically about 3,000, plusContinue reading “An Unexpected (Partial) Work-from-Home Day”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[763],"tags":[4846,5140,4860],"class_list":["post-34204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","tag-diamond-comic-distributors","tag-linux","tag-linux-mint","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Screenshot_20241009_175956-1200x675.jpg\")
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