We’ve got an Infrastructure Architect who is passionate about scheduling 4pm Friday meetings. Fucking muppet-taint. shake fists
I’m sort of in this boat. I’m usually up by 6 even on the weekends unless helped by drugs (better living through chemistry, that’s what I always say). Gratch is usually up earlier than me during the week so she sticks to the 9pm-4am sleep schedule most of the days. I tend to go to bed with her at 9 but I don’t always sleep. Last night I was up till midnight for some reason. On the weekends, I’m finding the schedule has changed too. I tend not to stay up gaming past 11 or so and I’m still up by 7am. Much different when I could easily go a couple days without sleep or pull all nighters on a regular basis.
Are the 4pm Friday meetings scheduled at the local bar? That’s the only way they’d work at my current gig. The Big Boss had to have a team meeting Friday for something important and apologized for doing something like a 2 o’clock meeting.
My office becomes a ghost town at 3:45 PM on Friday.
I should probably follow suit but I get so much work done in that final hour of the day.
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I haven’t spent a Friday afternoon outside of a strip club in the last 4 years.
We can schedule a video conference from there if you want.
At EMC we used to call the Yard House the “west conference room.”
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I’m regularly gone by noon on Friday. I figure, by then I’m 50-58 hours deep for the week anyway. I go get my hair cut, go home and take a nap, etc. I’ve set my calendar up to auto-decline anything after 1pm on Fridays 
I knew we were about the same age, but I didn’t realise you were a Feb/March birthday as well 
(I’m the 27th)
It’s funny, I found exactly the same thing. When I lived 5 minutes away from work I would start anywhere from 9am to 10am, and I’d work through until 6pm or 7pm.
Now I live an hour away I start at 8am pretty much on the dot and leave at 4:30
Meetings at 5am are completely unreasonable regardless. I’m never going to make that meeting.
If you have to have a meeting with people in different time zones then you pick the time that is least bad for everyone. Given that it would have to be an electronic meeting anyway there’s no reason I couldn’t attend it from home so 6am is achievable.
If you are all in the same time zone (or reasonably close) then there’s no reason why a mutually acceptable time can’t be achieved. You schedule a meeting for 4pm, fine, I’ll attend the first half hour then I’m off home. You want me to attend longer then schedule the meeting earlier. You schedule a meeting at 5pm then I’ll be declining thanks. Compulsory? Too bad. You want me to attend then make it a time when I’m not going to be already on the train.
Of course we have labour laws in New Zealand that mean employers won’t fire you (or if they do they are going to be stung badly) for you refusing unreasonable demands so it’s a lot easier to refuse them.
I know. Since I’m currently a Contractor I skip a lot of stuff like that (and am supposed to leave at 40 hours anyway if possible) but it gets quiet here. The holidays were so boring: I work near a major airport and can hear planes go over inside the building when it’s quiet.
…and the interwebs said let there be awesome.
Haywire appeared and it was so! Hey all long time.
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I’m on the 24th. 
The 27th is my mother’s death anniversary, though, so it’s always a weird time of year for me.
Wait, you guys leave work at 4 on Fridays?? I’m usually heading to lunch around then… Ten hours without eating is normal and healthy right? And then I go home, eat late, and of course stay up late. Just to get up at 5a and do it all over again. I’m getting to old for this…
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I get up at 6 AM during the week and sleep till maybe 7 on the weekends. It’s always been better for me to get up early. I try to make it into bed by 10:00 and head down by 11:00.
Thankfully my wife is about the same.
lol If I’m here until 4, something has gone horribly wrong. I like to be napping around that time 
I know how you feel. On workdays, it’s up at 6.00, out the door by 6.45, lunch is usually around 14.00-15.00, and then I get home between 20.30 and 21.00.
Because nine hours between getting home and getting ready to leave again is apparently perfectly reasonable.
In most ways, working from home is awesome. The major way that it’s not awesome is that it enables (and, frankly, encourages) 16-hour workdays. Work and play all happen on the same computer, so it’s often very difficult to keep them separated.
Thankfully when I was working from home, as opposed to working at home, I had two machines and two rooms for it. But yeah, I’d often just get up and “check email” before showering or breakfast and not move again till lunch. Then it’s like “Who wants to shower for lunch” and the next thing I’d know it’s 6 and why the hell am I still working.
My current assignment encourages some weirdness.
Monday and Friday are normal-ish. Friday tends to be weird as I’m currently hourly, so it’s often a half day. I usually drive in to the office so they don’t try to give my desk away.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are days when i’m supervising remote field techs replacing equipment. Did 18 months of deploying the equipment with a senior engineer: Now we’re replacing it all due to a manufacturing defect. Thanks Intel and Cisco!
Tuesday and Thursday both have a mandatory-ish meeting which screws up the morning, but I’ve got some flexible start time. Drop-dead start is around 5:00, but I usually start around 1:00 to deal with whatever odd questions were asked since the previous and do some prep-work. Maybe find out that one of that night’s sites got canceled because the assigned tech lsot his keys or something.
Work for the night goes as long as needed. On a good night, we’re done by 9 or so. Bad night… 3:00 AM is the worst recent example, but in one case for the previous roll-out (when I almost always worked from the office to more easily communicate with the Senior Engineer), I got home around 5:45 AM when $Wife was walking $Dog and wondering where I was all night. This is how my hours get weird, like a recent example where I hit 40 on Friday morning and was thus in overtime for the couple hours I was in.
My work-at-home setup isn’t perfect, and I might change it if I ever move. My office is a corner of our basement, so shared with laundry and my wife’s stuff: I had to tell her sewing while I worked was a no-go, as the machine is noisy. We’ve talked about maybe splitting up stuff so I have a small ‘office’ and keeping my hobby-type-stuff separate if the house layout permits.
Focus when working remote is a concern. I have a KVM with my personal machine on it, the Mac Plus (when it’s running: Need to get time to cut acrylic!), and a cable harness I use for Work Laptop. I can switch back and forth as needed but try to stick on the work machine. It’s better than a single machine for everything, but only slightly.
This triggered the thought, “I wish I had a basement.” When I was a kid, we had a basement in Atlanta, and most of my family back east had basements. Generally, there are very few basements in the Texas coastal region. So much space. I miss them.
Well sadly, I don’t get to pick when the Sickies come in, so I have to sneak out when I can. Today’s not looking great either…