If you haven’t seen it yet go check your inbox for an email from Nina McQueen, Subject: “Important coronavirus update on working from home in the Bay Area” (don’t worry, I’ll wait). I suspect a lot of folks might have an initial reaction of “Woohoo! No more commute, and I don’t even have to put on pants if I don’t wanna!” Some may even be thinking along the lines of today’s well-timed xkcd. (I also suspect some folks are wondering “The fuck am I supposed to eat for breakfast/lunch?”)

A little over three years ago I packed up my family, moved ~2500 miles across the country, and went full-time remote. In the months before the move I spent a lot of time talking with other folks who were remote and thinking through the implications - what my home office might look like, how I would prevent myself from just working all the time, how to maintain relationships without being physically present, the 3-hour time difference (I am now in the Eastern time zone), etc. These investments paid off; I was fairly well-prepared for all of these aspects of being remote.

What I was absolutely not prepared for: just how godawful fucking lonely being remote can be.

We moved back home to be closer to family - birthdays and barbecues and Friday night Family Night - and all of that was great, but I hadn’t considered just how much I would miss going into the office. The water cooler conversations, grabbing lunch with a colleague, bumping into someone in the hallway and having a laugh at how awful the Warriors are…all of these things were now closed off to me.

_Loren Carvalho gave me a bit of a hard time about it - “Day 2: Loneliness sets in…” - which I had a good laugh about (much love, Lo-Lho!) …but it really _ was an interesting exercise in learning just how much of an extrovert I apparently am.

So I adapted.

One thing I do is to try to maximize the amount of face time I get with people when I travel to the Mothership once a month. My calendar is typically littered with meetings and 1:1s when I’m in the Bay Area, to the extent that I’ll even cancel/reschedule/skip some of my “normal” recurring meetings. After the first few months of being remote I learned to balance this against leaving “space for serendipity”; too many meetings and I’d find myself having to rush off to get to the next building instead of being able to stick around and catch up with someone I’d run into. I’ve also tried to maintain perspective on other peoples’ personal lives; just because I’m Mr. Lonely doesn’t mean they can drop whatever they’ve got going on in the evening to go get a beer with me. (…although

some folks do, and for that I’m enormously grateful. You know who you are. )

Another adaptation I’ve made is not being “shy” about leveraging Bluejeans for impromptu chats. I’m very much a face-to-face guy, and once I had some decent gear (a nice mic is a must) Bluejeans became a pretty reasonable facsimile for (physical) in-person conversation. One inDay I even sent out an invite to a group of folks - “let’s all get into a room on Bluejeans and hack on some shit together.”

I’ve also ultimately had to adjust to Slack as a primary social space. This wasn’t exactly “new” - text chat has been around for decades now (anyone remember AIM?) - this was more of a change in volume. A hallway conversation might be replaced with a Slack DM “hey, how are the kids? :-)”

Anyhow. For all you folks who are finding yourselves newly-remote, the Remote SRE community has put together this document with some helpful information about how to go about doing it effectively. At time of writing (2020-03-05) it’s still a little bit rough around the edges - the document was just started yesterday afternoon - but there is already quite a bit of useful advice in there, and a whole pile of links to additional resources. (Thanks, Remote SREs!)

…and if you need to chat? HMU on Slack…maybe we can set up a Bluejeans.