Why Remote Work Just Works (for Me)

When I started working as a programmer, my days began with a ritual that felt entirely normal at the time: over an hour of inbound commuting into the city, and then another long outbound journey home. Time, energy, money — all drained in the process. It was the cost of doing business, or so I thought.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. Practically overnight, that daily routine vanished. The entire company transitioned to remote work in just a few days. Luckily, we had already laid some of the groundwork — tools, systems, and workflows that supported remote access. All we had to do was scale up.

And it worked. Customers experienced very little disruption, and internally, we barely missed a beat.

Now, years later, we’re still working remotely. And — here’s the thing — it still works.

Not just for the company, but for me. Personally. Deeply. In ways I didn’t expect.

  

More Time, More Focus, Less Waste

The first and most obvious benefit? I got my time back. No more two-hour round trips, no more standing on packed trains or sitting in traffic. That reclaimed time went straight back into my life — and into my work.

I’m more productive now. I’m more focused. I’m in control of my time, my energy, my attention. Sure, life shows up — a doorbell, a neighbour, or an unexpected distraction — but the tradeoff is still massively in my favour. I’ve spent time building out a dedicated workspace at home, optimized for deep concentration and comfort. It’s not a makeshift setup at the kitchen table. It’s mine, and it’s built for what I do.

With that setup, and without the daily grind of commuting, I find I spend more time at my desk, more time on task, and the quality of that time is better. It's not just about more hours; it's about more effective hours. My brain arrives to work fresh instead of depleted.

 

The Return-to-Office Push: A Puzzle

Despite all of this, there’s a message echoing out there in the corporate world: return to the office. The tone ranges from gentle encouragement to stern mandates. But I keep asking myself — why?

Why bring people back into expensive office buildings? Why shoulder the cost of maintaining spaces built for humans — with their endless needs for coffee, heating, lighting, safety drills, and ergonomic chairs — when the alternative is already working?

If a company needs physical infrastructure, great. Build a tech hub. Keep your servers somewhere secure, your dev environments humming. Machines don’t need water coolers or office parties. But humans — we’ve figured out how to work remotely, and for many of us, it’s been a genuine upgrade.

The Uncomfortable Truths?

Maybe not everyone shares this experience. Maybe not every job translates well to remote work. Maybe some people don’t have a dedicated space at home, or they’re working at the kitchen counter while the family or flatmates buzz around. Maybe their productivity really has dropped.

And maybe, just maybe, some of the voices calling us back to the office are those for whom remote work didn’t feel good — or didn’t look productive from their side of the camera. Managers who are used to seeing bums on seats might feel unease when they can’t “see” work happening.

I get it. It’s hard to manage outcomes instead of hours. It’s hard to trust that people are working when you can’t walk by their desk. But is that really a reason to ignore all the gains?

  

What Does the Data Say?

I’d love to dive into studies on this — real data about productivity in remote vs. office environments. But I want more than just headline numbers. I want to know:

• What kind of work were people doing?

• Did they have a dedicated workspace at home?

• Were they experienced at remote work, or thrust into it overnight?

Because I believe my personal productivity boost comes not just from being home, but from investing in a space that lets me focus, and in habits that support remote productivity. Without that, maybe the experience would be different.

 

It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

This isn’t a blanket statement that everyone should work remotely, or that every company should shut its offices. But it is a reminder that — for many of us — the shift to remote wasn’t a compromise. It was an evolution.

We cut out inefficiencies, reduced stress, and created more sustainable workdays. And that’s not nothing.

So, when I hear the call to return to the office, I pause. Not out of resistance, but out of honest curiosity: What are we returning for? Is it about culture? Control? Collaboration?

Because if it’s about productivity — well, for some of us, remote work already won that argument.

 

My Conclusion

Remote work isn’t perfect. But it’s real, and it’s working. At least for me — and I suspect for many others too.

Maybe it’s time to stop viewing remote work as a temporary measure or a compromise, and start treating it as what it has proven to be: a legitimate, powerful, and in many cases superior way to work.

Let’s be thoughtful. Let’s look at the data. Let’s listen to the wide variety of experiences out there.

But let’s not forget: commuting two hours a day wasn’t normal. It was just what we got used to.

 

The Worst (or maybe second worst) Source Control Ever

I've not made a bit deal out of this, but I like source control systems, I like git, I even like subversion, I like when folks even take the time to zip up the whole project tree and stick it on a whole other machine.  All are different source control strategies, each have their place.

What doesn't have a place in my opinion is poor implementations of this... such as... When there is no source control, that folks "remember" how the code was and can work back to where it was when things go wry.

Because inevitably they can't remember.  Solutions, subtly and satisfaction with what was present can easily be lost.  And in such situations you can only blame yourself for not having a back up of the original or yesterdays or whatever.

So it was as part of the tyrannical "lead" of one developer I came to meet the worst source control system ever, it was based on floppy disks, had no back up and was a manual process.

And it starts with an initial checkout, to a CD-R.

The CD-R was known as the "master" disc, and it contained a set of the SQL scripts to build an instance of the database, a series of sequential updates which each quarter were compacted down and made into one new "CREATE DATABASE/TABLE" thing.

Then there was an auxiliary folder with a bunch of tools which you copied to your hard drive and used.

And finally there was the source tree, you installed Microsoft Visual C++ 6 and opened the project and built the code.

You then ran a tool and put a floppy disk in, this disk was used as a swap between you and the lead developer at the end of the day, so a nightly build could be carried out (or a morning build on a Monday after a weekend) on a slightly more powerful machine.

As a developer then you had you IDE, this background tool running and you worked as you normally would.

Every time you would save in the IDE the tool saw the change in date of the source code file blatting that file onto the floppy.  The whole file, overwriting the old, not a delta, not a diffable solution, it just progressed forwards only.

You could not revert, not compare, not really do anything we take for granted in modern development.

This was a bad system.

The bad became worse when there was a delay between the save & the tool picking up, and then a floppy disk took time to write ( a lot of time ) and it was soon realized whilst it was writing the file from the HDD to the floppy it locked the file, so you couldn't write another copy of the file whilst this slow write was in progress.

As such lots of developers didn't run the tool, they would run it once at the end of the day, or just copy all the files listed as date/time changed to the floppy manually.

This floppy was then the feedback of all changes to the lead, in charge of merging the changes... Well I say merge, what happened was the mainline version was simply over written with whatever the developer handed over.  They were meant to qualify their code was coo, they were meant to run the tool which performed the copy.

So all the pieces were on the board and check-mate was one move away.

For the worst moment came on one particular Friday, a developer was toiling on tidy up duties, those little tasks you put off until the end of a day to fill time until you can go home, his task this day at 5:03pm was to correct two typo's in a file, one higher up and one lower down.

Just spelling mistakes, no need to recompile that, taking an hour, on a Friday with the pub and a takeaway calling.

So the chap performed his save, saw the light come on the disk and then did the second correction, hit save, the floppy light went off... and he turned his machine off... just dead off... pulled the floppy and dropping it into the "merge tray" on the leads desk started his weekend.

I walked into this on the Monday morning at 8am, as a very junior developer, the managers were all present, the lead was present, two senior devs were pawing over floppy disks in no discernible order.

For it turned out that the tool had started to overwrite the second save of the file, it had gotten so far through the write when the power had been pulled.  The original was lost on the developers machine for he had pulled the power... rather than shutting down.

And this source control system only went forwards, you could never ever regress.

The seniors were trying to build a delta list of each change for the last month, back to the start of the last CD-R... From floppies which had been used and reused, they had to manually inspect the changes between the file in question in the floppies.

If the copy they had was deemed to be older the disk was put aside.

If younger the file was copied into a directory to slowly try and catch the code up.

Around 10am the developer responsible wondered in, listened to the complaints, listened to everyone being exacerbated and then without a blink of irony said "Told you this wasn't source control".

Fabulous...

The worse Source Control ever?... Perforce... Hands down, Perforce.

Development : Python, MySQL and Protocol Buffers Build

Today I've come to a totally virgin installation upon a server, this was for a work group I've got to head up whom are looking at pushing MySQL with Python.  And things initially went wrong...

I stipulated they had to use Python3 and thought everything else would be fine for them to install with Pip3, so...

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install python3

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Everything looked fine, their user could install packages through Pip3 and they had Flask and a few other things and were flying.  I used the mysql client on the command like to test I could add a few items and also ran...

sudo mysql_secure_installation

To do the basic hardening of the database, so everything was fine... Right?....RIGHT?!?!

No, not exactly.... "I can't get mysql.connector".... Came the cry.

And they were right, it reported a myriad of build issues and could not install.  I took a look... NIGHTMARE!

It appears the installation of mysql.connector via Pip3 depends upon Protocol Buffers from google for the latest version of mysql.connector... Which the Pip install didn't sort out, at least not easily... Luckily I run a whole gaggle of virtualized machines, so I could quickly spool up a new instance and try a few things out...

This is the script I came up with....

cd ~

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip git autoconf automake libtool curl make g++ unzip

sudo pip3 install flask

hostname -f > hostname.txt

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server

sudo mysql_secure_installation

sudo ldconfig

cd ~

git clone http://github.com/google/protobuf.git

cd protobuf/

./autogen.sh

./configure

make

make check

sudo make install

sudo ldconfig

cd python

sudo python ./setup.py install

cd ~

sudo ldconfig

sudo pip3 install mysql-connector --install-option='--with-protobuf-include-dir=/usr/local/include/google/protobuf' --install-option='--with-protobuf-lib-dir=/usr/local/lib' --install-option='--with-protoc=protoc'

Lets go through this step by step...

cd ~

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip git autoconf automake libtool curl make g++ unzip

This is just the basics, so our installation will now depend upon git, autoconf, automake, libtool, curl, make, g++ and unzip, most all your standard distributions will contain packages for these, we use -y just to skip any permission requests.

sudo pip3 install flask

hostname -f > hostname.txt

The next step is simply a couple of items for our project, we're going to use Flask to provide a restful interface, and the "hostname.txt" is simply to remove our need to call "hostname" again later.

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Our next step is to install and secure the MySQL service.

sudo ldconfig

cd ~

Generic code now, to simply reload the library list and change to the home directory.

git clone http://github.com/google/protobuf.git

cd protobuf/

./autogen.sh

./configure

make

make check

sudo make install

This is the build of protocol buffers from google, so we pull it from their github repo, we move into that folder, prepare and configure the build, then make the whole build.  By far this is the LOOOONGEST instruction, on a single core 1GB equipped virtual instance this took around 45 minutes.

Once complete we simply need to reload the libraries again...

sudo ldconfig

However, protocol buffers are still not installed within Python, so we are still in the "~/protobuf" folder, we now need to go deeper, into the python folder and perform the setup installation under python...

cd python

sudo python ./setup.py install

When complete we again need to reload the libraries...

sudo ldconfig

And the final, secret sauce, is to actually install mysql connector through pip3 with protocol buffers...

sudo pip3 install mysql-connector --install-option='--with-protobuf-include-dir=/usr/local/include/google/protobuf' --install-option='--with-protobuf-lib-dir=/usr/local/lib' --install-option='--with-protoc=protoc'

This is a single command, spanning one single line.

And voila, once complete you get to use mysql.connector in your python code...

import mysql.connector

import gc

con = mysql.connector.connect (user='whatever', password='something', host='localhost', database='yeahyeah')

con.close()

con = None

gc.collect()

You can find out more about why I nullify and garbage collect a connection in my previous post.

Office Best Practices - Expenses & Purchasing System

After taking a stroll through these pages, you may tell that I once commanded quite a large IT budget, in quite a large company.  I worked throughout the UK, into North Africa and out across Eastern Europe with them... There were Four levels of expenses in that organisation:

1. Capitol Expenses (> £10,000)
2. Red Band Expenses (<£10,000)
3. Blue Band Expenses (< £1,000)
4. Green Band Expenses (< £50)

Each department had a cost code, and various levels of staff were able to order on various levels of expense.  This worked brilliantly, lets go through a couple of examples:

Billy in stores needs a new roll of tape for boxing up equipment, he gets out his Green Band expenses sheet, fills it out, hands it to accounts payable, whom check Billy can use Green Band, which he can, he is listed.  They pass the purchase order to purchasing, and the item arrives at Goods In, and is taken to Billy.

Perfect for small items, it lets routine business be carried out, without fuss, you have accountability, and you don't need a senior; highly paid; person taking time out of their day to check and sign every little order, there is a cap limit on an order, and only certain people are assigned the location, and there are two points at which these orders are checked & summed, accounts payable and purchasing.  If there is any "fiddling" going on, both those points can independently check the other, and both check poor old Billy is not getting a kick back on the company.

Purchasing can also try to seek the best price, and accounts payable can handle taxes and other considerations.  At any point these orders could be sent back, for example, one system I personally worked to implement was a link between accounts & purchasing to the stores database (a FoxPro database at the time - yeah, you remember that!!) and it let them query if anything they were about to order was in stock!  Simple, and for my time it saved the company about £8,500 a year in sundry purchases as we stopped being up to the ears in paper clips, biro's and printer paper!

The other various levels of expenses in this system did need other security measures, so on Blue band, which is where I started as a member of staff, you needed to get a managers signature.  There being three levels of managerial staffing:

1. Managing Director/CEO
2. Director
3. Manager

Each manager had between six and thirty people working for them, each director had between two and five managers, and there was one guy at the top... Well one woman at times, to be honest, and she was better... Any how...

So, a blue band raised by me, went to my manager, then was ordered....

A, Red band, raised by me went to my manager or he raised it, went to a director and was  triple checked.  Very rare were these, so people often knew they were coming, and they were planned for and adhered to the strict budgets in the accounts department.  Us lowly minions ordering the stuff, we put out business case on the form, people knew what was being talked about, and so we knew what was happening, we knew whether someone was just lining their nest with kit, or whether there was a genuine business need.

And when this very business was in trouble and being bought out by a rival in the US, we saw these requests drop and drop, the budget fall and fall, it was easy to understand where the company stood, where everyone stood.  It aided transparency, which made the staff; even in the face of the company being taken over; feel assured there was a plan, and someone was in control.

Finally, a Capitol Expense, I only saw these twice, when I had to buy a company car contract for myself... I loved that Audi... And then when we actually purchased a building, yes a whole building.

They went to the top, were discussed a lot, and got the job done.

This layering, might today seem strange, but I bring it all up, as a history lesson.  This system worked, it wasn't perfect, but it was regulated, it was transparent, it was not based on whom liked whom, or who knew who, it was based on a form, going through a process and getting a result.

Exactly the sort of thing a computer is very good at, and all this today could forego the forms and be an online purchase request system for a company, you log on, you put green's straight through, you put blues to an assigned manager... etc.

So, why the history lesson?  Because today, I've sat for four hours, with not one but two broken HDMI to DVI leads, both my main lead and the spare were broken, and broken in the same way.  I suspect the spare had actually been taken by someone else and their faulty one left in it's place in my cabinet.  But whatever the reason, I had two faults, and two machines down and sat struggling without the target platforms I'm deploying to.

No-one else in the company had any cables of this type, they all generally just use VGA, I'm the exotic one with DVI and HDMI.

So I go to find my boss to ask for cables, I work directly for the Director of Technology, he's a busy man, he's an expensive man to employ I'm sure, so why should he take time out of his day not only to listen to my needing cables, but to carry out the ordering himself?

It beggars belief, he has to find the item he wants me to have, not the item I prefer or have identified, he picks what he wants me to have, he raises the purchase order and he places the order, letting accounts know later.  Then the item may, or may not, come straight to me, it may sit in goods in until I gee them along and ask where the cables are.  Or it may just get sent straight to the very busy Director himself and it'll sit until he has time in his very busy day to open it.

The net result?... Delays and confusion.  The system is a black box.  I believe the idea behind this is that ordering things is seen as an expense, and the ability to order something within the company is seen as a traditional expensive thing.  This maybe because this is a nearly 55 year old company, and they're stuck in very old fashioned attitudes.

There is no need for this cloak and dagger approach, security through obscurity may leave those at the top of the chain feeling secure, but it leaves those of us trying to get the job done stuff waiting.  During the time we sit waiting, I've pondered the risk to reward for the company...

Now, not wanting to let out how much I earn, but lets just say the costs of the items I've needed over the last fortnight would total about two hours of my paid working hours.  How many hours have I spent waiting, stuck, not able to work whilst the kit was ordered by one busy person?... Five.

This is not the "how long to wait for the delivery", this is not "how long to get purchasing to order them", this was just how many hours from my raising the request with the busy Director and his actioning looking for the items and then letting me know they'd been purchased; he in fact didn't let me know, so I just take the difference in time between the end of the first day and the next when I had the mail confirming the order CC'd to me.

Five hours, versus two hours, meaning, if the company accepted, developed or adopted a Green Band expenses policy like the one above, almost tantamount to what might have once been called "petty cash" then they'd save money.

But of course no-one is looking at this holistically, they look at the price of the item, the amount of cash you could be spending on ordering items, and they see a LARGE chunk of money.  The company credit could rack up a lot of items on an order, and they'd be accepted by the suppliers because we're in good standing; and I understand this, I understand the need to secure that process or ordering.  That security should be the responsibility of accounts and purchasing, not the Director of Technology, and not me.

For you see, as much as the cost of ordering items tallies up for the company, and the accounts show that easily, less easily expressed is the cost of an hours time on a salaried worker.  We are a fixed cost, and probably less than the total purchasing power of the whole company.  So it gets ignored as a non-cost.  To leave me sat here waiting costs nothing extra.

Of course however, it does, it leaves me wondering about topics like this, about how the process works, about why I'm locked out of this trivial ordering task; when I used to command huge budgets, why am I not trusted to order a cable now (and I've worked here for a very long time); and if I'm not trusted, am I considered expendable, am I considered a joke.

It's the simple self-analysis of Office Paranoia, and it all begins because of a lack of transparency in ordering, and a lack of forethought as to how much it costs to "risk" letting people order trivial, petty, items as opposed to having an expensively paid Director be comptroller of order slips.

Software Engineering : Building Cryptozoidberg (Boolberry)

I recently received a request via YouTube to help a fellow programmer out, they were having issues building this library against the boost libraries... https://github.com/cryptozoidberg/boolberry

The problem essentially is the lack of transparency in CMake when it looks for boost with it's "FindBoost" functionality, because neither he, nor I build boost with CMake.  I personally don't use or like CMake, I do use make however, and am happy to look around in the make files.

So, I did... And there's nothing specifically wrong with this makefile, but it is insisting on looking for boost within the system, not the version built by yourself.

My Solution therefore has been:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

sudo apt-get install git

sudo apt-get install cmake

cd ~

mkdir c++

cd c++

git clone //https://github.com/cryptozoidberg/boolberry.git

cd boolberry

make -j4

(Note, replace 4 here with as many cores as your PC has available!  More cores will speed this build up, and it will take a long while)

And this works fine:

As you can see.  However, I did this from my main build machine, which has a whole bunch of additional and historic settings.  Which is the most common pitfall for others coming to build your software later, they lack these customisation's.

My build environment: Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop, with the i3 Window Manager (just open a terminal), and I have installed gcc (sudo apt-get install gcc).  These are the only steps before running the above script in a terminal window.

I therefore decided to perform a full clean setup of this system in a new Ubuntu 16.04 (64bit) VMware Virtual machine.

From this, I realise I needed to explain how to install the boost libraries, how to set up cmake and how to get git working before the build would work....

You can see this whole process below, please accept my apologies that this was recorded on an extremely slow internet connection, it got smushed during recording over the mobile link, and I've not had chance to re-shoot or edit the video.

As you can see however, the build worked perfectly.

To Muhmad whom asked for this, you'll find the Donate page at the top right!

Dell 2950 Server - Fan Modification - Part 3

This is the software side of modifying my Dell Poweredge 2950 (Model II) servers to be much quieter.

It WORKS!  But please beware, THERE ARE POTENTIAL RISKS IN ALTERING YOUR BMS FIRMWARE, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, IT IS ADVICE ONLY, ALL AND ANY ACTIONS YOU PERFORM ARE AT YOUR OWN RISK!  Just because it worked for me, doesn't mean you will be successful.

Part 1, shows how I added 47ohm 0.5watt resistors to the power (red cables) on each of the four internal fans.  I'm yet to modify the power supply fans, but I will.

Part 2, is my success video recorded at 3am last night when I was very tired, and had everything working.

And this, Part 3 is to cover my complete solution in how to do the software (BMC) firmware flashing.

The Centos Linux OS was used for the change, specifically the older version 6.4, downloaded from Oxford University here http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/mirror.centos.org/6.7/isos/i386/CentOS-6.7-i386-LiveCD.iso.

This was burned to a DVD ROM, and as you can see in the image, I had to re-fit a DVD into the server as I have three servers, but only one DVD drive... DOH!

Next, I booted into Text Mode, so when the boot menu appeared from the DVD, I pressed Escape before the auto boot timed out, and selected to boot in Text mode.  Once booted, the login is "root", with no password.

My first command is to ensure the ipmi tools are installed, python, wget and rpm are on that image, but for completeness to the source material I include them in the installation:

sudo yum install freeipmi freeipmi-tools openipmi ipmitools python wget rpm

Once complete you can check the ipmi sensors are working with:

ipmi-sensors

You will get a huge list of all the sensors on the board.

Next you need to download the BMC firmware, to anywhere on the machine, you don't need any storage, the Live CD boot you're using will work fine just with RAM in the server!.. So no worry about overwriting any disks or data!

wget http://downloads.dell.com/esm/BMC_FRMW_LX_R202152.BIN

Once this has downloaded, you need to make it executable

sudo chmod +x ./BMC_FRMW_LX_R202152.BIN

Now make a directory as root:

sudo mkdir bmc

And extract this firmware you've downloaded into that path:

sudo ./BMC_FRMW_LX_R202152.BIN --extract bmc

And change into that directory:

cd bmc

Now we need the path script, but as we're in a directory created with sudo, we need to also run wget with sudo:

sudo wget http://projects.nuschkys.net/downloads/dell-adjust-fan-thresholds.py

And make this executable:

chmod +x dell-adjust-fan-threaholds.py

To then extract the values from the firmware and edit them, we run the script against the payload dat file:

./dell-adjust-fan-thresholds.py payload/bmcflsh.dat

This will extract a load of information, then ask you how many fans, or what model to edit, for the 2950, with four system fans and two power supply fans, I selected option 3.  To give me six fans to modify.

It lists each fan and their threshold value, so now select the fan by entering it's number, so try 1 first.  Then enter a number, now if I recall the default 2250 threshold is a value of 25.  I tried various values, but the best I found to modify for the resistors I'm using was 22, this gives a new minimum RPM of 1650 for the fans.  And I never saw any fan drop below 1800 RPM.

23 is 1750 RPM as a threshold, but I thought that too close to the lowest RPM I'd observed before starting this software mod.

So, 1 through 6 all selected and 22 entered for each, you then write this file back with the 'w' command.  This will repack the payload/bmcflsh.dat file with your new values.

Armed with this modified dat file you therefore need to flash the firmware, THIS IS THE STEP WHICH CAN BRICK YOUR MACHINE, PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

We're still in the bmc folder created before, so change nothing after altering the payload with the script, and you type:

sudo LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./hapi/opt/dell/dup/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./bmcfl32l

 -i=payload/bmcflsh.dat -f

And as you can see in my full video coverage, this worked for me.

I hope this helps, below are the references I went to, but I must have read about 15 different posts, dozens (if not hundreds) of the comments to piece this together.  The biggest problems I had from other posts was understanding the problems using Ubuntu and other distros, they don't work.  There are problems with the libstdc++ libraries, and then the i686 installation and all manner of hoops and tricks I tried.

Centos 6.4 i386, is the only live DVD image I've been able to use... and this all work easily.

The main instructions I followed were from Martin Denizet, however, even his post has issues and it not clear how to get the right distribution.

I also tried to follow RatzBlog, but was thwarted at every step by the OS's I was using, even trying to use Centos 6 didn't work with his instructions.

21 Degrees: The Office Nirvana

There's drama in the office... And to be honest, I'm on the loosing end of it...

We've recently had lots of work done in our office, we've had new double glazed windows, which no longer allow fresh air, so then they added a new air system, which supposedly brings in ten cubic meters of fresh filtered outside air per person, but it's never on, you can really tell when it is, and it's great, but it's never on.  Then they added a very expensive set of air conditioners.

Now, I know, and you all probably know and office is not meant to be warm and cozy, if you want a place to sit and read or code which is very warm and comforting, try the local library; if it's not already shut through budget cuts.

No, your office is meant to be slightly cool to the feel, around 21 degree's I've always been lead to believe.  High ceilings are best, and if not, air condition to that temperature.

How do I know this?... Well, I used to be an office manager, and I managed the air conditioning, and I managed the people, all shapes, sizes, ages and sexes... The consensus was too warm and most people drop off late afternoon.

So, what's my problem here?  Well, I'm the latest arriving person on the flex, I always arrive around 9:30-10:00, which means I'm always the latest to leave, around 18:30-19:00.  The problem?  Everyone else in this area want the air conditioning warmer, the reason is they're all cold in the morning, they all wonder in around 7am, and disappear, leaving their phones ringing and desks empty around 15:30... This is a problem.

It's a dichotomy, because right now they're all moaning it's too cold, according to my desk thermometer (a hang over from being an office manager and worker for many years) says 21 (this is centigrade before anyone complains), and it's perfect.

The other folks around me are complaining they're cold, they're wearing jumpers, and cardigans and one chap has the biggest fleece on... They're all a lot older than me, yes at nearing forty I'm the young one, and I can't help but believe it's their age.

And, don't get me wrong, I understand they're cold, but they might need to get up and get moving, have a warm porridge breakfast, something, other than disturb the cool air situation.

Because when they've all gone home, and the sun is around this side of the building, through the un-opening double glazing, it's boiling at my desk, literally boiling.  And in this ridiculous circus I end up needing a desk fan on, because the temperature goes way up to 26+.

21 Degrees people, please, and you deal with it, I'm not the only one to know this.