With the world shutting down, telecommuting gets its first global enforced use
Telecommuting has long been a thing, but for many reasons it’s never really taken hold in the world. Cue one virus to kickstart telecommuting, destroy anything involving more than a couple hundred people, and get people to actually wash their hands in a fashion that gets fecal bacteria off.
TL;DR – Paul attempts to work from home with kid out of school. Article doesn’t really have a point. Just some things he thought about while trying to fend off child.
As far as I can tell, all colleges and schools in Nashville have shut down in an attempt to flatten the virus curve. It might conceivably work, but who knows. We’ve tested abysmally few people in the US and kits are just starting to get places. Far as we know everyone’s infected at this point.
Colleges are kicking students off campus, classes have moved to online only. Meetings that don’t require people actually in the room are going online. And at least for the moment, it’s holding.
We’ll see pretty soon how the backbone of the internet handles a few hundred thousand video streaming conferences, and I guess whether management will discover that without donuts or catering the employees will revolt in useless meetings.
I’d written off video calls a long time ago. The half second delays, varying bandwidth, everything that was 2012 internet made them useless to me. They appear to have gotten significantly better lately, or perhaps my standard have dropped. Or it’s just that I’m no longer on a varying speed Comcast Business account with absurdly high pings.
With a large chunk of the population left out of the high speed revolution they’re literally going to be invisible in these group video meetings.
I hope people will be ok giving people an average of 10 seconds more per conversation to respond… considering they probably saved 30 minutes+ on getting to and back from work.
What’ll people do when they don’t have to wear pants all day? Guess we’re about to find out.
