Rostering

Our rosters go in the wrong direction.


Let me explain that.


Those of us who do full-time work are on a rotating roster. We need to cover 12 hours from 0700 to 1900 every weekday, and the roster ensures that we can do that. We each work 7:30 hours, with an hour for lunch.


Mornings and I have never been on particularly good terms - I have a naturally late sleep cycle. Left to my own devices I will tend to wake up at around 0900 - 0930 and go to sleep after midnight. That's the cycle that I will naturally fall towards.


So this week I am on the 0700 - 1530 shift, and it sucks. Since I work in Civic I refuse to pay for parking and so catch the bus of a morning. A bus goes past my stop at 0621, which means that I need to leave the house at 0615 at the latest, which in turn means that I need to set my alarm to have me up and in the shower by 0530.


Next week my shift will start at 0730. The week after that, 0800. Then 0830, then 0900, then 1000. And the week after that I'm back on the 0700 shift.


And this is the bit that I say goes in the wrong direction. It allows my sleep cycle to slip later and later over the course of six weeks, which is something that it will do naturally. Then suddenly it has to jump back three hours. This is incredibly disruptive to my sleep cycle.


It would be far better for me to slowly work back earlier and earlier over the course of week. Then when the three-hour jump occurs, it's in a direction that doesn't matter.

Hot Desking

It's no real secret that I'm not a fan of hot-desking.

For a start, hot-desking is an ergonomic nightmare. Humans need to be able to set up their workstation according to their own bodily dimensions, and no two people are the same. In a hot-desking environment, the best you can get is kind of an average setting that sort of works for most people.

In an ideal world, a hot-desking environment will have equipment that is infinitely adjustable, so that when you move to a desk, it is a matter of seconds to move everything (keyboard, mouse, monitor, desk, chair) to a position that is comfortable and appropriate.

There are no ideal worlds.

Currently I have two monitors sitting on top of cardboard boxes. One of them has a couple of inches of up-and-down adjustability, but it's not a lot. The other isn't height-adjustable at all.

I like to have my monitors really high because of my neck. In some previous jobs where I've had a permanent desk, I've been able to set it all up the way I like it. I can't do that here. We don't have the equipment to do that.

Let me whine a little bit about chairs, too. I spend seven hours a day plonked on my ass in front of a computer. I think that in order to do that, one needs a decent chair. This chair I'm on now is not decent. It's moderately adjustable, I guess, but the seat seems to be sloped, so I always feel like I'm sliding off the chair forwards. Also, this angle changes the way my hips, legs and back relate to each other, which means that I find myself sitting with my hips tilted forward rather than curled up under me. This sways my back and pushes out my belly and chest. It's not really uncomfortable, but it is uncomfortable. If I bring my pelvis back under me the way that feels right, I start sliding off the front of the chair.

There are a few chairs here that are... let's say reasonable, but most are old pieces of shit. We spend seven hours a day on these chairs. Surely we deserve some new ones.

If I had my way, we'd have all new chairs, all new adjustable monitor stands/arms, and no hot-desking.