Working From Home: A Tour

I don’t normally blog on Fridays, but lately it’s been all COVID all the time, so I thought it might be nice to do something a little lighter for a change and, well, Friday feels like the right day to do it. Since we are all working from home, I thought you might be interested in a virtual tour of my workspace.

I’ve worked from home full time since I joined the NASPP staff in 2004. My original home office was a cramped corner in a 10 x 10 office that I shared with my husband (who is a remarkably loud typist). In 2011, we moved to a new house with a much bigger office. Here’s a pic of the corner of it where I spend most of my days:

 Here are ten fun facts about my home workspace:

1. Fashion: I’m wearing my typical work-at-home winter uniform: hoodie, thermal (because no matter how high we set the thermostat, it’s always cold), sweatpants.
2. Did I Comb My Hair? Probably not. I can’t be bothered with hair and make-up if I’m not leaving the house.
3. Ergonomics: I bought this awesome desk when we moved to this house. I especially love the keyboard tray. My original desk did not have one because it was made before personal computers existed.
4. Laptop Screens Don’t Cut It: I also love my monitor. It’s huge. But it doesn’t have a webcam, so I can’t video conference. Darn.
5. Tidy but Dusty: I tidied up my desktop for this picture but if you look closely, you’ll notice that I couldn’t be bothered to dust.
6. Reference Tools: All my NCEO/CEP books are on the shelf above my head, for easy reference (including my own, which also sometimes comes in handy).
7. A Memento: The coaster next to my mousepad is an Equity Edge 4.1 installation CD; it’s a relic from my pre-NASPP days. My husband turned it into a coaster for me.
8. Art: On the wall above my desk (just out of frame) are three vintage framed Bloom County comics. They’re from a calendar that I still have around here somewhere and were also a gift from my husband.
9. Press 8: The note taped to my phone says “press 8 to fast forward through message heading” because I hate having to listen to the message heading enough to randomly press numbers on my phone until one forwards through the heading.

10. Selfie with Cat. My office is also a playroom for our cats, as you can tell from the 6-foot cat tower behind my chair. You can't see her, but a cat is sleeping in the house on top of the cat tower (the same cat that is shown on my monitor in the pic above). The cats never cooperate when I want to take a photo with them. There is another cat tower in the window and an absurd number of cat beds on the floor. There are three cat towers in total in our office plus another one downstairs—that's a 2:1 ratio of towers to cats, yet they still manage to fight about them.

I hope you enjoyed my little tour and have settled nicely into your own working-from-home routine!

- Barbara