Trying to get some work done
Once in a while this becomes necessary, and then extraordinary measures must be taken:
I have no fixed location; I consistently misinform others about where I expect to be at any specified time. You’d think my management would have learned better by now. They haven’t, which might help to explain why I get paid way more than they do.
This, I haven’t been able to pull off — either the misinformation or the pay disparity. The thing about server farms: sometimes you actually have to work the field.
I refuse to carry a cell phone or a pager. Those things, I have explained repeatedly to my pursuers, would only impede and endanger me on the many occasions when I must go under the raised flooring to check the radiation levels, feed the rats, or perform the sacred rites of my Satanic faith.
We don’t have to worry about finding rats under the floor: they’re happy to operate on the main level.
As it happens, though, getting cell signals into this rudimentary Faraday cage is problematic at best: I might get 0.5 bar if the power fails. (Actually, the last time the power did fail, we shut down the big boxen and I tapped out a tweet, but the tweet wouldn’t transmit until I got outside the building.)
In a burst of extreme defensive creativity, I slipped our campus phone tech a hundred bucks to re-route my voice mail to another company. You’d be amazed at what that does to the zeal of many a supplicant who’s vowed to pursue you to the ends of the Earth.
This one I’ve managed to work, and without parting with a Benjamin yet.
I run my E-mail agent twice per day, at precisely 6:30 AM and 1:00 PM. Between those stops, I regard the work day as … well … a time to get work done.
I don’t get so much email that it’s a problem, though I have killed the auto-notification device: I’ll read it when I get around to it, dammit.
I attend zero meetings. If commanded to attend a meeting by my management, I refuse, with detailed reasons, and CC the refusal E-mail to their management. (I sometimes schedule a meeting with my management for the sheer pleasure of not attending it.)
Meetings being the single most useless (dys)function in any office environment, I have worked diligently to keep myself off the invite list.
Then there is the Timed Absence Maneuver. As it happens, when I’m not around, someone else has to fill in, and the things I find merely irritating, they tend to find absolutely intolerable. And since complaints from others are given much more credence than complaints from me — the price I pay for criticizing everything at a fundamental level, I suppose — more than once I’ve come back from an extended absence to find that some particularly noxious situation has actually been worked on, occasionally even cleared up. Obviously I need to stay gone for about a year or so, but the budget does not permit.
