Behind the Scenes: Working from home

Almost.

Anyway, I am doing my part to flatten the curve. And I am fortunate that my writing can be done just as easily on the front porch — or my living room, or my tiny home office — as it can at my workplace desk. What makes that possible is both management that allows us to work from home and a laptop app Eagle Tech installed that allows me to see my desktop from said porch.

This whole saga began for me on March 11. Company President Joe Petshow had called us together for a staff meeting and, during his talk, said that those of us who wished to start working from home during the pandemic were welcome to do so and we should begin making the necessary arrangements. He also wanted us to start thinking about department hubs — if the office had to close suddenly, who would be the point people?

Well, I love a Plan B. Actually, I love plans of all sorts. So that afternoon, I began downloading the various programs I knew I would need to work at home: Creative Cloud, InCopy, Blox, Teams. This is how we write and save our stories so our counterparts in Salem can put them on the final pages, how we load stories onto our website, and how we communicate between departments in-house.

By Thursday evening, March 12, I felt ready for a test run. Friday was to be my first day working from home — knowing that if this grand experiment failed, no big deal, I could just run into the office.

Chelsea Marr, our publisher, made my life a whole lot easier on Friday morning, however, even if she did call before 8 a.m. (Eh, it was fine, I was up as usual. Routine, I’m a fan of that too.) She told me that there was a program tech could load on my computer that would allow my desktop to be accessed from my laptop!

What is this, the future?

In less than 20 minutes, I could see my work desktop right there on my laptop screen, thanks to a little program called VNC Viewer. Having access to all of my folders and drives made my Friday working from home experiment a hundred times easier than it would have been otherwise — it went just as well as I could have hoped. So well, in fact, that I’ve been at home ever since.

Well — I did go in briefly on March 18 to get archive books so I could continue to work on Yesteryears from home. Chelsea watched my daughter, Johanna, and I take them out of the office and load them into the back of my car, which I interpreted as permission. It was nice to be able to talk to my coworkers face to face, with proper distancing, of course.

Deadline days aren’t much different at home than at the office, with the exception of the ease in which we can communicate when we’re all in the same room together, i.e. just look up and start talking, rather than typing everything in Teams. And it can be a bit lonely.

But aside from that, it’s business as usual, despite the fact that the majority of the News’ staff is now working from home. All of us are working reduced hours — not surprising as revenue is down, a consequence many of us face regardless of where we work.