Office Fatigue

 

So for the first time in 58 months – something like 1,700 days – for the first time in nearly five years I worked “in office” for three days in a row.

I believe it was around the third week of March of 2020, during the Wu Flu thing, we received orders to work from home. As a payroll manager, this was something I could do after my company provided me with a laptop and a scanner.

After a couple of weeks we were allowed to come in on a two-day-a-week schedule. I can’t remember when this exactly happened but I believe it was around the end of April. We had to mask up unless we were in our offices / cubicles by ourselves. This charade played out for the remainder of my time in New Jersey.

When I arrived in Texas in July of 2021 I obtained a corporate job which was completely remote. I did all my interviewing via Teams and they shipped out a laptop to me a day before my start. In late January of 2022 we went to a two-day-a-week schedule, and they were generous in giving us remote time (for example, if a holiday fell on that Monday, we could spend the rest of the week working from home). Our department’s schedule was staggered, and my normal days in were Tuesday and Wednesday.

This continued for two years.

Now, at the start of 2025, we received the command to come in three days a week. This week was the first week for this (last week was shortened due to the Snowmaggedon), and man did it take a lot out of me. I wake up earlier than most farmers – it’s pitch black out and freezing (for Texas, but still, it’s been around 32 degrees every morning down here). The entire house is slumbering as I’m showering. I have to warm up the car for 10 minutes. And since I’m a night owl, the constant early waking has taken its toll, and I’ve been dragging buttock all week long.

Now, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, and I don’t mean to sound like a wimp. For 32 years I worked Monday through Friday, sometimes Saturdays, sometimes Sundays (with H&R Block) and sometimes late into the evening (again with H&R Block and regularly with the dealerships). I did it, and I reserve scorn for those techie company employees who fight their overlords against coming in a full week. 

But … man … did this remote job spoil me. I can do this job from Antarctica if I had to, as long as I had an internet connection. For me it boils down to another day of fighting traffic (north Dallas seems to have as many cars – and traffic lights – as Manhattan) – drivers riding my bumper, drivers zipping in and out of lanes, the cost of additional gas and tolls, and, most importantly, additional time I’m not paid for. All because I’m needed to sit at a cubicle in an office because “we work best when we collaborate face to face.”

Yesterday before heading out for the day one of my pals at work came up to me and said, in mock seriousness, “We did it. We did it.” And I had to laugh, knowing these same thoughts had been going through his head as well …

Snowmaggedon 2025

 

Well, an apocalyptic event happened down here in Texas yesterday: Snow.

We’ve been down here for 3½ years, and normally we receive but a dusting of snow once or twice a winter. The temps plummet below freezing for a week or two every January and we’re forced to let the faucets drip to avoid burst pipes. Our first winter saw a mini-freeze where icy rain coated the streets for two or three days and schools were closed and everyone worked from home. Other than that, we really don’t have harsh winters down here, for obvious reasons. The severe weather comes in the form of 90 days of summer heat over 100 degrees (the record for my experience has been 108 degrees) and harsh hail storms every couple of months.

Rumors of snow circulated Monday night. In the grocery store with Patch I overheard a couple catastrophizing about 9 inches of the white stuff. I inwardly laughed. Back in NJ we’d get one or two of those sized storms a winter and drive to work the next day. But at my job Tuesday word spread we’d be remote on Thursday and Friday. By Wednesday it was official. And yesterday morning, Snowmaggedon 2025 began.

 The view outside my front door at 8:15 am.

 

1 pm.

 

2:48 pm.

 

Around 3 o’clock the snow stopped falling at around 3 inches accumulation. After a brief reprieve it started up again, this time as sleet. Icy rain. Much more dangerous to these southerners. The sleet continued throughout the evening and overnight and as I write this at 11 am on Friday, it is still going.

Since we hardly ever get snow down here, the towns do not stock up on salt or invest in snowplows. They do have some, a fraction of what we had up in Jersey, but that’s reserved for the tollways. The side streets are on their own. I expect to be “snowed in” until late Saturday afternoon. Today’s high will be 37, but Saturday will go up to 46. It’s supposed to be sunny, too. Most’ll melt by dinner time. I expect to be driving to pick up some takeout Saturday night, and attend mass with the family Sunday morning.

And Texans will speak of Snowmaggedon 2025 in hushed tones for years to come …

 

The current view from my north Dallas home office window.

Geddy Lee and Rush

 

For Christmas, my wife bought me this book:

 

 

It’s My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee, the bassist and vocalist for the Canadian progressive rock band Rush. The band was a trio of three virtuosi musicians (including Alex Lifeson on guitar and Neal Peart on drums) active since 1974, though it first formed in the late ’60s when Geddy and Alex were high school classmates. They’ve released 19 studio albums and a whole bunch of live albums and have sold 42 million of them worldwide. In 2013 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They played their last concert on August 1, 2015, after Peart announced his retirement. In January of 2020 the legendary drummer died of glioblastoma at age 67.

 

As I’ve written about numerous times in these here electronic pages, I’ve been a lifelong fan of Rush. I still remember the first time I heard them: Spring of 1982, the song “Tom Sawyer” piped into my ear drums through my brother’s Walkman. To say I was instantaneously transfixed would be an understatement. Somehow I got the cassette tape of Moving Pictures, which contained “Tom Sawyer,” and I listened to that all summer. I bought a songbook of the album a little bit later, but that defeated my inexperienced fingers at the time. Soon more Rush purchases followed, classic Rush, their earlier 70s masterpieces. “Subdivisions” dominated the FM radio play at this time.

 

43 years later I am still a fan, though to be honest it’s been a while since I’ve listened to them. Once every few months I’d ask Alexa to shuffle Rush songs as I did the dishes. I think I mentioned Lee’s autobiography to my wife when it came out around a year ago, then it slipped my mind. So I was pleasantly surprised when I unwrapped it at Christmas. I set aside my current reading and delved into it. I am almost 200 pages deep (the autobiography clocks in at 507 pages) and to supplement my reading I am doing something like I did when I read the Mozart biography back in May: I am (re)immersing myself in Rush’s music.

 

I am listening to their albums in chronological order. On deck for today is 1978’s Hemispheres, one of the first “albums” I bought on CD around 1989 and listened to about a thousand times before 1990. I’ve re-listened to seven so far: Rush, Fly By Night, Caress of Steel, 2112, All The World’s a Stage (live), A Farewell to Kings, and Exit … Stage Left (live). Some I’ve listened to while walking around the ponds near my house, some while nestled in my reading nook, some at work with the headphones on cranking out spreadsheets. I have seventeen more studio albums and one more live album to get thought, so this will take me to the end of the month.

 

Combining My Effin’ Life with these re-listens has been a hugely pleasant experience. A lot of nostalgia’s been flowing through my mind: voracious listening as a kid, trying to figure out songs on guitar, me and my band mates playing tons of their stuff at rehearsals (particularly Cygnus X-1), even the one time I saw them live in April of 1990. I am now trying to convert my wife and children into Rush fans. Not gonna happen for the little ones (though Patch likes “Xanadu”), but the Mrs. seems open, at least for their music. Rush fans are something like 90 percent male, and it has something to do with the science fiction and philosophic lyrics combined with the progressive rock (unusual time signatures and weird chord progressions) and mostly with Geddy’s, er, unique singing voice. I have but one Rush t-shirt, but this may have to be corrected, and I think the Mrs. will help out more with this end of the Rush experience.

 

Anyway, that’s one of the many things I’ve been up to lately. Perhaps when I finish I’ll write up a post of Rush trivia for any fan who may blunder upon this blog. I dunno. After 1982’s Signals album Rush’s overall sound changed to one more heavily dominated by synthesizers, and as this was when I started playing in bands, I was more interested in guitar-driven music and am not familiar with their mid- and late-80s work. So I am looking forward to listening to that with a new ear, and hopefully finding something to enjoy that I didn’t thirty years ago. I did have a t-shirt I purchased at the concert for 1989’s Presto tour, but I decidedly did not like the album. 1991’s Roll the Bones I bought on CD, and though that was a more return-to-earlier-form kinda thing, only gave it a few listens. Not up to those 70s masterpieces. Same with their final five albums, all borrowed from the library here and there. With a newfound and nostalgic re-appreciation of the band, I am hoping to uncover a lot of hidden gems, and hoping that one turns out to be 2025’s Song of the Year here at the Hopper.

 

An ancient 2011 post by me on Rush, here.