Well, my office is barren as well. I'm sitting at my desk right now with no pants on.

Of course, if you've been following along, you already know I got laid off last week, and thus, my desk is actually in my apartment.

It's really slow here too, but the normal amount of people are in for a Monday. One of the dudes is leaving tonight to go out of town, so we'll be down a person for the next two weeks. (Of course, most of our researchers have already bailed out and so we are just waiting around for the Office 2007 implementation.)

Completely dead here. I came in to find an email saying I may be "loaned" to another department this week or next if they're short-handed... oh, fucking yay. Yes, I'd LOVE to go work in a stressful newsroom on equipment I've never been trained on. What a treat that'll be.

BoringPostcards, now is a time to come up with a case of the shits!

we are just waiting around for the Office 2007 implementation.

That's one "ribbon" you'll wish hadn't been placed under your tree.

I'm here (spiritually) with loiseau. No office to go to, I'm sitting here at the dining room table and it's just me and the cats.

I have one teeny tiny project to finish and then I am DONE until 2009. Hip hip hooray!

I don't work in an office, but rather am a knuckledragger at a factory. I do have a workbench though. I'm not scheduled for work today, but am the next 4 days. I'll find out tomorrow if I'm working the middle two. And, yeah, it'll be pretty quiet. Working the holidays is actually nice since I can get work done without being bothered by head honchos, or have to go to any bullshit meetings.

Strangely lots of people in today, the ghosting will start tomorrow and progress the next day. I have Big Plans and Deadlines Looming all over the place, but when I sat down this morning I had forgotten everything about how our projects are organized. Sheesh. Send me an email or I'm toast. I'm back on track now. Go home people, let me work! I enjoy the quiet aspect of working in a support division, but it rankles when people think that just because THEY fininsh a year end thing and hand it to us, it's done. It's not done. We asked to have stuff in September. . .drifted into October (fine). . .November. . .December. . .and very few of us are taking much if any extra vacation time over the holidays.

loiseau, I know. Unfortunately, I was named the point person in my department of 4 to deal with it. And of course, Outlook doesn't work for me, which is a bit of a problem considering that's how we correspond with all of our patrons. It's going to be completely awesome. And by awesome, I mean soul-sucking. I've got a phone meeting with the head IT dude later today to find out what is going on with it so that maybe it won't be a complete trainwreck when it finally launches system-wide.

Same here- everyone is stuck in their driveways. There was enough snow to make 3" walls when the plows came through.

The funnest thing about Office 2007 is that the file formats are not backwards compatible so unless you roll out to everyone at once, you're going have half the company sending out documents that the other half can't open.

About 2/3 of the normal people are here, I'd say. But as the week progresses it will be ghost city.
I gave my boss and 2 coworkers in my group some cashmere socks today as a gift and I think they went over well!

Is that really the funnest thing about Office 2007, octothorpe? Or is it when Office 2007 get drunked up at the Christmas party, gropes everyone, and then throws up in the supply room?

Pretty dead here, but we all have cleanup after last night, which was our last night of a 3-week-long holiday program. We had a blizzard - 2+ FEET of snow - and had just a skeleton crew on last night while we got buried in white stuff. a lot of people are probably still digging out and taking it easy.

Wish I could leave, but my to-do list is too long. Better to get it done so I can enjoy the holiday with nothing hanging over my head.

My bosses encouraged us to take unpaid days off in December -- clients are having trouble paying their bills -- so I'm taking a few mental health days, including today. And the office is closed between Christmas and New Year's (though they are paying us for that time), so I don't actually go back until January 5.

I am going into ikkyu's office in a bit, though, to help him get some of his paperwork finished up before Christmas.

I actually got some student employees in. I think we have more students than staff, and I have to leave at noon to get the kidlets. (I'm splitting daycare duties with the Ex). People are either out of town or out of the country.

There's a compatibility pack for opening 2007 documents. We rolled that out before the Office 2007 rollout.

We're bustling along, but tomorrow the place'll be deserted. It sucks being here today. I have nothing to do. In 20 minutes I'm going to go to a meeting in which nothing of substance will be discussed.

I plan on doing a backup of all our department important specific files just in case this whole thing dies, which is looking fairly likely because they're only rolling it out to the library departments and not the whole university, which is going to lead to some interesting chats, let me tell you.

Our lab is pretty busy, but then, most of the people I work with are Jewish. Boss leaves on Wednesday, and I have one experiment to finish by tomorrow evening.

OK, I found out my being "loaned" situation isn't as onerous as I thought... and probably won't happen anyway. I'm glad I didn't fire back a snippy email. :)

I'm surprised actually, that all staff who would normally be here are here. That's right. Nobody is on vacation yet. Tomorrow may be different.

Somehow we also had a free catered lunch, too. It was very noodle-based, and as such I am suffering food coma something fierce. I may close my door and nap. Everyone else is still in the conference room socializing. I'm not feeling particularly social.

Seeing as I took this week off to pack, yeah... it's pretty quiet around here. ^_^

My office is pretty dead, but mostly because we fired 1/2 the people. The rest of us leave for the holiday tomorrow or Wednesday. Though today the boss the four of us to Houston's for lunch. Yay.

Our office of four has one person on vacation and the other two just left to go visit an elderly VIP donor. My mad math skillz, which completely failed me on a stupid spreadsheet that I just had to redo and now have to remail, tell me that means I'm the only one here. We're open today for some insane reason (usually closed Mondays) so I'm at the front desk waiting to see if anyone braves the temperatures (it was EIGHT degrees this morning. EIGHT! That's just wrong.) to look at rocks today.

On the bright side there's a chocolate cake in the kitchen.

Ours was busy today, with just one person not in, but next week there's just four of us in from my team, two of whom aren't speaking to one another in a demonstrably sulky fashion (both middle-aged men). And they sit in adjacent desks. 'Tis the season, yadda, yadda, yadda ...

I visited my office to drop off some cookies and cards. The place was open, and there were a few people exercising, but the employees were nowhere to be found. I waited for five or so minutes and they came walking in from somewhere. I'll be back at work on New Year's Day.

I don't know what it's like. I miss that madhouse.

*sniff*

Yeah, it's pretty quiet overall. What's even quieter is the train I'm currently sitting on, which is generally known as the "Bombay Express" because by now it would be chock full of people standing, sitting all over the floor etc, but half the seats are still empty.

The office (which I'm on the way to, natch) was pretty quiet yesterday, except that everyone who went on leave last week has managed to dump all their reports on me for sign-off. It amazes me that people who can't normally get one report a week finished manage to get through 5 or 6 on their last work day of the year, then dump them on me on the way out :-| Tomorrow will be a challenging and unproductive day, Christmas eve being a traditional day of drinking and socialising - someone booked a whole bunch of people into a meeting at 9am titled "Responsible Service of Alcohol" and suggested that people should bring a glass with them. As usual, there's a wrinkle to complicate the year-end - we have been sent an edict forbidding any staff appointments without prior approval from on high, leaving some of my staff with an uncertain future because they were about to be appointed to new positions. One of today's tasks for me is to tell two of them that they will not be able to continue in the job they are currently doing when they return after Christmas :-( Until I managed to clarify the situation, it looked like I might be telling about 30% of our staff that they wouldn't have a job to come back to, so at least I'm spared that (more importantly, they are spared and don't even know they were at risk).

Office 2007 can be set to save with earlier file formats by default, I believe.

I'm sure that the compatibility pack for Office 2007 is great if your IT group bothers to install it, which ours didn't. And yea, you can save in earlier file formats but explain that to a pointy haired boss who keeps sending you same .docx file when you keep trying to tell him that you have no way to open it.

We are still running Internet Explorer 6 in our office. Seriously.

Yeah, we are still on IE6 and just upgraded to Office 2003 a few months ago. Our department is slow to move to new versions because the support cost is so high - every time the most minor change is made, you have to consider the impact on supporting 70k users, many of whom can't even cope if their desktop gets changed.

Can't you tell the install package to set .doc as the default file format?

Oh hey! You just reminded me to install Office 2007. Look at me being productive!

Ours probably won't install the compatibility pack either. I wrote my capstone project for Trinity in Word 2007 and almost shot myself because I was attempting to learn how to format it and deal with the goddamn ribbon shit at the same time as writing this epic pile of crap.
I had a lovely conversation with the head IT dude this morning when he was trying to fix my Outlook (I could see the messages, I just couldn't OPEN AND READ THEM) and he was all 'oh that was so much easier than fixing it on everyone else's system' and it still took about an hour. ARGH.
(I wrote down the instructions because he was proxied in while I was sitting here watching so hopefully I can maybe fix it on my own if our real work email craps out during the changeover. Note: I know dickall about systems and computers and IMAP and SMTP and all that shit. I think my boss picked me because I can bullshit my way around Excel.)

My office is devoid of all life and joy because I'm not scheduled to work today. Or tomorrow. But I'll be back on Wednesday and through next week, because we don't close and I got Thanksgiving off this year instead. Holidays at work are exciting. Yes. That's the word exactly.

My office is somewhat quiet but not as quiet as I'd like. People are on a very loud conference call in the office next to me. However, I've managed to while away most of the day doing a large bulk mailing/envelope stuffing and a department cookie exchange. Tomorrow's my last day in the office until Jan 2. Yay!

I'm one of those weirdos that likes Office 2007 (after I adjusted to it, anyway). I still have moments where I can't find some menu item that I know was in the old Office, but it's not inherently worse than previous versions.

Do not use the new file formats. Set your preferences so that the default is .doc, not .docx. Please.

I like the new Office 2007 interface for the most part.

I don't know what the office is like; I took this week off. =)

i was the only one in at work today - it meant that i canceled surgeries, topped off a LN2 tank, sorted some wee ones out and hightailed it to some retail therapy.

and i get tomorrow off.

Uh, my workplace was a ZOO. *pouts*