Share your Lockdown Stories

[Sajit Nair _Trundl_]

What’s your story during this lockdown?
As remote work becomes the new norm, Lets talk about how teams have adjusted to keep productivity up.
Post your story here in reply, use a tag LockdownStories and nominate some of your online community members.

Here is mine - 

My story started even before we had a state-mandated lockdown! 'coz since I work offsite, I was already collaborating with my team remotely.
Using JIRA + confluence for planning work and Zoom + MS Teams for calls along with OneDrive for sharing data files, we are heavily reliant on technology to drive productivity. Amidst all this, we still find time to connect and have 'strictly' non-work related conversations with teammates.
One big change for me is going virtual for Atlassian Community events. I used to love to connect with my local peers and learn from them while unwinding on a weekend but covid-19 has forced us to stay indoors and conduct the meetups online.

It's tough, but we are getting used to it with each passing day and are holding on strong. Pretty sure that we will ride this out and come out as stronger. :)

I nominate @Darline Auguste , @cassieACE @Ashish @Pushpkant Garg @Deepanshu Natani @Andy - PTC Redundant , @Jodi LeBlanc  and @Celina Zamora to share their story.

Thank you @Tamanna Godara for giving me the idea to post here.

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Thanks @Sajit Nair _Trundl_ - great post! I have been working from home for 5 years so it wasn't new to me, however I helped many of my colleagues get on board and sharing tips and tricks with them. We use MSTeams, WebEx, Zoom to connect daily/weekly.

[Ashish]

@Sajit Nair _Trundl_ Thank you so much for nominating me to write my own lockdown story. 

I have posted it yesterday here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Teamwork-articles/Sharing-my-lockdown-Story/ba-p/1400884

[Deepanshu Natani]

Here is mine: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Teamwork-articles/Here-is-my-lockdon-story/ba-p/1417017#M153

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Great post @Sajit Nair _Trundl_ !! 🌟👍

I hate working from home; i don't have a good set-up, I need that firewall between home life and work life, so even if I didn't go to the office I would always try and disappear off to a local satellite office or public work space (even a cafe would do!!

A small sub-story which is a bit embarrassing is that it took me 8 weeks of lockdown before I managed to actually get a proper work space sorted out for myself. Yikes!

But the real fun lockdown story (no about team collaborations, apologies!) is:

The biggest phone bill ever!
I spent 12 weeks with really poor Wi-Fi because my extender was just not reaching my laptop properly.... but I finally had to go invest in some proper kit and drill an ethernet cable through the floor (in Holland, many buildings have 20cm thick concrete floors) when the following happened...

One day I am busy working at home when all of a sudden I get an SMS message from Vodafone: "Your data has been switched off due to extreme usage"
I thought that was odd, because I never use my phone and pretty much all work calls are over WiFi these days.
As I have a separate private phone for streaming, WhatsApp fun, etc. I was confused as to what ate up all the data.
Suddenly I realised that a few days before I got frustrated with my shitty home WiFi and had switched on my hotspot on my work phone to make sure I could attend an important call.
Sadly, I didn't switch it off. 
For the two work days following that, I had to do an important data migration from our old SharePoint to the new one, and transferred about 80GB of project data.

The phone bill for two days of data migration was a staggering eur 1,600 ! ! ! 🤯

I am still waiting to hear back from our Office and IT Managers if I have to pay for my clumsy mishap!! EEK!

Leassons learned:
1) When WFH always make sure there is a proper work place set-up... even if nothing more than a small table... even if it is amongst the storage boxes!
2) Make sure there is proper proper proper internet  network for said work place!

The eur1,6000 lesson that I wish I had sorted out in week one of lock down. Whoops!! But atleast it looks hot damn good now!!