Montreal City Weblog

Kate 14:15 on 2020-04-05 Permalink Reply  

• Chris 14:38 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  A lot of “not essential” work is only “not essential” in the short/medium term.

• Kevin 14:59 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  The Star Wars geeks are gonna be unbearable.

• Meezly 16:28 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  Folks with non-essential work and can stay home should consider themselves fortunate. I’ve been seeing memes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/fu4b0z/found_on_rdominos/ If you don’t want to click, it’s basically: They’re calling us ‘essential’ because ‘sacrificial’ would just be too honest.

• Uatu 17:06 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  I hope garages will be considered essential because I got to get my tires changed

• Dhomas 18:42 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  Most cars come with jacks for flat tire repair. Even using one of those, it’s not too difficult to change your own tires, if you want to avoid the garage. YouTube has plenty of videos, too.

• Blork 19:02 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  Depends on if the tires are on rims or not. Not everybody has spare rims; some people use the same set of rims year round, swapping the different tires onto the rims each season.

  I don’t do that, so technically it’s an easy job for me. Unfortunately the last two times I did it myself I threw my back out both times. On the plus side, we’re driving about 4 km a week these days so there’s no hurry.

• Ian 19:39 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  I can work remotely – I like it better than driving to a faraway campus and teaching in person; to be honest my discipline can be taught remotely very effectively, including one-on-one feedback as well as regular classes – but I recognize that of course not all classes are suited to distance learning, and that many students benefit from on-campus face-to-face experience.

  Currently I am only using my car once a week just to make sure the battery doesn’t die. If I could teach remotely all the time I would be happy to sell my car for scrap and never have to deal with commuting again.

  This has got me thinking, though – how many jobs that we think MUST be on site don’t actually have to be on-site at all? I wonder how many commuters would stop driving, taking the STM, etc… I wonder how many millions of dollars the city could save each year if everyone that could work from home was simply allowed to… Because now we are seeing that many, many white collar jobs can be performed from home just as effectively as in person.

  Imagine if most of the office towers sat empty, imagine if the streets had a fraction of the drivers, imagine if we could focus on neighbourhoods instead of the empty culture of office districts…

• Dhomas 21:04 on 2020-04-05 Permalink

  @Blork: yes, I kinda assumed two sets of rims, which I acknowledge not everyone has. But if you do, it’s definitely doable.

• Raymond Lutz 08:09 on 2020-04-06 Permalink

  “I recognize that (…) many students benefit from on-campus face-to-face experience.” Many? Most of them: learning is a social experience, anchored in orality and immediacy (except for nerds like me).

• Ephraim 08:10 on 2020-04-06 Permalink

  @Ian – It’s a question a lot of people have asked. People are often more effective at home anyway, even with all the distractions, because they track their time away from distractions or may work when they can’t sleep, etc.

  I will say that there is likely the same satellite office problem with WFH. I mean, they set up satellite offices of major companies in suburbs and yet, people don’t want to work in them, they want to work downtown at the head office. Why? A perception that you get promoted faster. And I suspect that there is something in that perception that in some cases ruins WFH for a lot of people.

  Still others, don’t care and aren’t looking for advancement, especially consultants. And the more people we could get on WFH the better,even in the long term for our economy. It saves the company money on offices but at the same time saves commute, travel and created better work/home balance. (But then again, I’ve worked from home for well over a decade… and now ironically I’m actually forbidden from working in my WFH job.)

• Ian Rogers 09:45 on 2020-04-06 Permalink

  @Raymond L –

  Orality and immediacy, you say? Like MS Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Discord? I’m on video chat with screensharing every day…

  But for my subject area it makes sense. Acting or Painting or Chemistry maybe not so much 😀

• DeWolf 11:37 on 2020-04-06 Permalink

  I normally work from home and these days are much less productive than normal for me. The difference is I can’t break up the day by going out to work in a café or bar. I’m used to working at home in the morning and then ducking out for lunch, followed by a nice walk and a couple hours of working in a café (or maybe with a cheeky pint of beer if it’s late in the afternoon). That café time is often when I’m most focused and I manage to have a nice flow of work. Now that I’m basically at home for 24 hours a day, I find myself getting distracted and procrastinating much more than before.

  I think that Ian is right that more and more people are going to be working at home after this. But paradoxically I think this crisis will also underline exactly when and how in-person contact is important. I’m a journalist, and it was a bit of a culture shock coming back to Montreal because if I ask to interview someone here, they often prefer doing a phone call rather than having a face-to-face meeting. In Hong Kong it was the opposite: face-to-face meetings are highly valued and because public transit is so efficient, it’s possible to have several of them in a day if necessary.

  Not all of those meetings were useful and some definitely would have been more efficient on the phone, but I have to say, meeting someone face-to-face leaves a much more lasting impression than if you only talk to them virtually. After awhile, all these disembodied email words and Zoom faces and phone voices start to become interchangeable. I hope more companies begin to understand that what’s important is flexibility. Being stuck in an office sucks away your energy, but so does being stuck at home.

• Roman 01:20 on 2020-04-07 Permalink

  Tire change should be able to be open. Don’t see a reason not to. There’s not much personal contact. Arrange by phone, drop off car with keys inside, pay by leaving cash inside the car with keys.

  At the same time you can drive on winter tires all year long. It’s not that big of a deal. Just a bit more wear.

  FYI VIP government vehicles drive on winter tires all year round.