this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray at no blinky blinky andy how you doing man i feel weird there's nobody here i know it's just just the two of us just the two of us you and uh it's like the olden days man i know right i don't know if we've ever had an andy and aj show we have we have what do we talk about uh i forget but it was like in the 30s because it was like 30 episodes ago because this is episode 60 of the art of network engineering i cannot believe that's amazing 60 episodes that's really amazing yeah um to answer your question i am good i will give my update um i wrote my first blog post in years uh a week or two ago i saw that and yeah i got a tremendous amount of wonderful feedback from it both on socials and like personal messages people hit me up just saying that you know how much they get out of it and really help them and you know get some insight into what you know other people are dealing with and uh so it was really i've been meeting the blog for a while and i'm never really sure what to write about and i have a bunch of like technical ones i started and didn't finish and i asked i think on the discord i'm like what are you guys how do you pick topics and like just you know whatever you think like don't worry about what people want to read just what do you feel like talking about and yeah it's your blog i've really wanted to put into words you know what the podcast did for me you know during you know the high decoded last year so yeah that's that's what i went for and it was uh it was nice i enjoyed it it felt good to write again i miss writing i used to like i used to write a lot and it's been a while you know i i read that article and i you know first of all it touched me uh because you kind of like spoke directly to me in parts of that um and you know the whole time that we're recording like we talked and you know you you vetted about stuff vented about stuff and it was clear that like you were going through some things at various times but i don't think it at any point in time it came across as clear as it did in that blog article and and you know my wife read it i read it and we were both like whoa like he was really going through some stuff and uh it was just so well written i i mean maybe it's because you and i have the personal connection but like i was reading it and i i just didn't want to stop like you're a good writer like it that was thank you man really good stuff so if you haven't read it yet get over to andy's new website permit ipndandy.com and check it out plus how's the new website doing you know it's good i've never had a website before um so i don't know i'd have to ask mr no blinky blinky like i mean i have i i have analytics that i don't know what to do with yeah you know it came with an app which is pretty sweet i can tell you close to 400 people have read that blog post in the two weeks that's pretty good i don't know if that's good but it's more people than i thought would read it that's awesome yeah it feels it feels nice uh and the main reason i did it was because i have all these different places where there's stuff you know you can go to my youtube you can go to my instagram you go to my twitter i couldn't get permit ipnd on twitter because there's too many characters so i just wanted one front door of like here's all my stuff go there and you can find everything you know including our discord and the podcast and my blog and my resume you know any photography i'm into like just go check me out here so it solved that problem and i really like it um i'm glad that it's up i'm using squarespace and i'm you know they're not a sponsor or anything but it was relatively easy i'm not a web i'm not html guy right yeah i don't know how to do any of that so so yeah blog post was good i like having the website up i went a little vacation which was nice and um i was recently uh selected as a cisco champion for my second year in a row that feels pretty good and to be honest with you i would like to put more into it this year yeah because i feel like it's you know you get out what you put in right abso absolutely yeah in light of that blog article the year i was having i just didn't have a bunch of cycles to jump in and get involved in that community but i'd like to get a little more involved this year and see if you know there's some stuff i can do to to contribute and get a little more involved so yeah it's a great program i was first accepted in 2019 uh and i was like you welcome back this year and that i will say that there was a touch less going on last year because of covid um but during at like a regular cisco live event or anytime there's like a cisco in-person event you know they always make sure to include the the cisco champion so if they're cisco champions attending the event they want to you know highlight the champions that are there we did get a lot more engagement with like the various cisco business units so what's really cool about the champions program is like we are the first line of people that the marketing team wants to engage with right so when there's a new product coming out they want to hit us with it first to see how we react to it and uh sometimes it's just uh you know hey here's what we're thinking what do you guys think and sometimes it's okay here's what we're gonna announce we're gonna share it with you first so that way you guys can create some content around it and it launches the same day that we launched this new product so it's it's a really cool program i enjoy very much being a part of it uh and i'm really glad you you're in there and now tim is in there tim recently announced on twitter and linkedin that he's now part of the cisco champions program and tons of people in our community uh are also cisco champions now so lots of great people have been added to it um i'm i'm very excited for everybody that's that's a part of it and um i think we get some some cool swag out of it somebody just made a a good point in my in the in the in the chat here yes i am a sister patreon chat yeah it's got a juniper jacket on talking to manchester cisco champions but before we think about that you look you look great man but before i ask you about you i just want to circle back real quick to content creation because anybody who's listening so like you know i'm never sure how much of myself to put out there right um there's always a fine line you you know someday maybe interviewing for a job and i don't know if how much of me i want people to know right behind the scenes like i just want you to know i'm good at what i do i'm committed i'm going to get the job done and you can count on me that's the professional me that i want people to know at work and otherwise and you know when you're creating content be it on this podcast or a blog like i mean we did that mental health episode and that got pretty personal and pretty deep and we talked about a lot of stuff and that was scary i remember it was very quiet that day at our chat when it was released because i think we're like oh man how's this gonna go yeah how's this gonna be received but we got here's my point we got so much positive feedback from the mental health episode we did and it helped so many people and it started so many conversations that like mental health is one of those things you don't want to talk about right don't talk about salary don't talk about mental health just so that blog article that i wrote i really was vulnerable and got personal because i thought it was important and same feeling it's like man i don't know how it's going to be received did i did i reveal too much but again the feedback just like our mental health episode i got so much positive feedback my wife even read it and gave me all that she should get she was like it was great i'm like you don't think it was too personal no it's it you know like it was really the same kind of thing like she really enjoyed it but i was nervous so i guess my point is if you're putting yourself out there if you're writing a blog or you got a youtube channel or a podcast or like whatever it seems to me you know the more you put yourself the more authentic you are the more vulnerable you are with your audience yeah really seems to enable you to connect like we're thousands of miles away from each other right right now recording this we're gonna put it out there and somebody's gonna listen on their phone or in their car they're not with us but there's this connection you can make with your audience and it really seems to require some uh you know honesty and so so anyway i just i'm pleasantly surprised that the more i put more of me out there not just this professional guy that i want the world to know about the podcast my own stuff it really seems to land with folks out there and that's just it gives me more motivation to keep doing what i'm doing as opposed to like wow dude that was a little too much we didn't need to know all that thanks for sharing i guess like yeah yeah i've never seen anybody say say anything to that because that yeah but but anyway i really just appreciate the the feedback we've been getting on the podcast and otherwise how you doing what's the aj update oh man um so all settled back into the kitchen the kitchen's basically done just have to put up the backsplash which hopefully will be done shortly so that's that's good we can put a cap on that um i'm very excited i threw this in the winds this week i started teaching again back at my alma mater champlain college i'm super excited to be back as an adjunct professor um i'm doing a systems administration course focusing on windows and linux and you know we're deploying vms we're doing some networking we're doing some security we're doing a little bit of everything and i just have a ton of fun working with you know future uh it pros you know and and sharing my experience with them and so it's just a ton of fun to be back on campus and and working with the students again in the lab why did you stop teaching was it cova did they shut it down kind of thing like um so i was teaching when coveted hit and everything kind of shut down and we had to transition you know very quickly from an on-campus class to an online class and and now everything is hybrid like we we teach you know in campus or on campus but everything that we do all the assignments and everything are in an online portal so at any given point we can pivot and go right to online and so it's for for me the workload got to be such that i didn't feel like i could teach and work uh and then last year with kovid um i just felt like you know what like maybe i should just take a step back here and focus on being home you know kind of right okay personal decision yeah yeah yeah and so i basically took a year off i took last fall semester off and i took the spring of this year off and now i'm back this fall and i wish i could take a class that you teach oh boy i don't know if you want to no but you're a good teacher and you know i i love i'll keep saying it that ansible rundown that you showed us just just blew me away and when i found out you were a professor i'm like that that makes sense you're probably really good at it so i'm happy that you're back i'm sure your students are happy you're back yeah i wish i had the same students all the time but i teach different classes i have had like a couple of repeat students um which is fun but um and i keep in touch with quite a few of them that i've had come through my class and and you know professionally we've like had them you know work at the same place or i've referred them to other jobs or done background checks for clearances and stuff like that and i know you said this but what are you teaching is it i.t stuff yeah yeah i teach all i t stuff so right now it's it's uh sis 265 is the class somebody in the in the patreon chat asked if they have systems administration degrees and we do uh so i graduated at champlain college i have a degree in networking and information security i also got my master's from there as well managing managing innovation and information technology which was a kind of fun degree which you think of it as like a masters in business with a tech twist so like an mba with an it twist so if you come from an i.t background you learn the business side and how it supports it and if you come from a um you know uh an i.t background you learn like the business side right or if you come from the business side you learn about i.t and how it can you know help grow the business and stuff like that so it's really close yeah we have a ton of different degree programs you know information security networking systems administration cyber security is the big one right now um so yeah it's a it's a great college so if you're looking for a college free ad i don't get a kickback for this uh definitely check out champlain college here in burlington they have an online program and they have an on-campus program they also have several campuses throughout the world i know we have one in montreal there's one over in ireland uh and then of course here in burlington vermont so if you you come to burlington to check it out let me know and that might be any other updates did you guys get hit with that crazy item we did not think okay not no we've avoided that there's been no you know we thought we might get it and i think parts of vermont got it like southern vermont but not up here it's been i tell you what man like it has been super hot and humid and it finally broke it all finally broke so uh it's been nice and cool 70s in the day 50s at night much easier to sleep it was pretty it was pretty hot here and it cooled off a little bit yeah and our pool has also cooled off oh my god my my four-year-old daughter who i have yet to learn how to say no to because she's just so cute and has my heart she's like daddy i want to go in the pool today it was 82 degrees the water which is oh my gosh pretty brisk yeah yeah yeah we we went in it was i was in the pool today it was chilly oh man did you guys get hit with the storm at all yeah yeah i won't bore you with the details but it was intense i spent like 500 bucks at home depot doing some mitigation stuff and i got some pumps we got a little bit of water in the basement not too bad but yeah i was there we there was tornadoes that ripped through neighborhoods not far from here oh my gosh entire neighborhoods the city of philadelphia they're like center city where all the high rises are i think i saw it on the discord today people were posting pictures of like you know a couple feet of water like in the intersections like data centers underwater and stuff so yeah it was pretty uh it's pretty intense i mean i'm i was out there fixing downspouts and stuff and tornado warnings because i'm nuts and i love storms but we you know a lot of rain crazy i'm glad you guys got spared yeah yeah all right well i think we should jump on here with the show i we got a pretty good winning list here so why don't we jump into the winds thank you andy you're welcome uh winning this week is jay they passed their pcn essay that's the palo alto certified network security administrator uh jay terrest to queue these these damn discord names are going to get me all the time uh they scored their first job in tech part-time maintaining and replacing network components for an ad agency and this is really cool uh they came from the oil industry in texas and now they're working in i.t so that's quite the jump i i feel like i remember talking to them on twitter or in the discord not too long ago they they finally decided like i gotta get out of this they had like sustained some injuries from working in that field and so it's really cool to hear that they they scored their first job and uh i believe they also said that they were going to be taking a plus soon so good luck on that one nice uh our buddy quiet riot just finished two more college classes successfully so two more notches in the belt and getting ever so much closer to that degree so congratulations quiet riot i enjoyed it more when you used to pronounce it quattriot i know i don't like mispronouncing names it's just what i do i know uh i'm not gonna mispronounce this one though so congratulations to adil khan they passed their second number two on the uh the vcp vsphere so that's uh they're dual vcps now so congratulations deal i can see you in the chat i know you're there congratulations awesome deal good job not working engineer pass to ccna should uh probably change that to network engineer we're gonna have to work on your username little manifestation in the universe kind of thing right right uh nittany cli uh they announced that all their tuition is covered for this semester that's huge that's huge i don't care where you go free college is free college and that's awesome student loans suck yes they do yeah uh i started teaching in this week but we already talked that to death and uh congratulations to all the returning and all the new cisco champions out there in the community i know there's orientation going on this week so if you're a cisco champion you have to take a required orientation class and that's sometime in the first couple of weeks after the announcement and it just goes through you know the do's and don'ts of cisco champions so it's a it's a good time plus you get to meet a bunch of the other champions too uh congratulations and thank you and welcome to our new patreons eric chu and brian also known as the traffic network so if you're in the discord community you'll you'll probably have seen the traffic network hanging out there and thank you to all of our uh patreons we certainly appreciate your support of the art of network engineering and special thank you to eric for sending us a copy of his book yes mastering python for networking and is right behind me in my pile of books here i read the forward and i'm really excited um eric did not have to do this and i'm really excited to get into this book because i've been having some challenges learning python and this sounds like i'm the audience i can tell you i've read this book it's a fantastic book it comes with lots of great references to code to help you get started uh we are absolutely going to have eric on the show we will be scheduling him soon i promise you all that i promise you that eric we've been talking about it for a while so i really appreciate the book it's even autographed he put a nice little message in the front there this is fantastic and this will have a permanent home on the bookshelf behind me so you will always be able to see it up there thank you you read that whole book already i have well i i had a copy of it before uh digital that i read and so i wasn't going to turn down a physical copy to have yeah in my life so i certainly appreciate it just making sure you weren't a speed reader i'm like oh gosh now did you guys how did you read that thing no way all right uh andy do you enjoy secure communications you know i'm up to some shady stuff so absolutely i need my communications to be very secure i may or may not have thousands of movies on my pecs i'm not sure if i paid for all of them aj right right well uh you know with with work uh with businesses starting to open back up uh i don't have to go to an office i work from home but uh sometimes i work from a coffee shop and when i'm using my work laptop i can use the work vpn all my communications are secured it's uh you know secured from prying eyes at the coffee shop and other public wi-fi places but when i'm not using my work laptop i'm using my personal devices i didn't have a vpn until recently when i signed up for nordvpn services and i really enjoy nordvpn it's super easy to use they have applications for all the different devices that i have so you know smartphone tablet my my laptops and such uh and they have some additional features other than the obvious right like you know they've got vpn uh you can vpn into a number of different countries so if you want to check out content in other countries or you know if there's something on netflix that only plays in other countries or if you're traveling abroad and you're trying to get back to the us and watch your your favorite shows on netflix here in the us you can vpn right back into the us on nord they also have some really cool features one called cybersec that i'm a big fan of because it blocks ads and websites known to host malware and they also have the dark web monitoring tool which it looks at the dark web for credentials that are tied to the email address that you use to sign up for your nordvpn account and it actually found something tied to my account and i was able to go change the password and take care of that and clear that off the notification so very cool stuff uh if you're interested in nordvpn you can go to nordvpn.com forward slash t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and you can sign up and get 73 percent off but 73 off and that is uh two years plus four months uh and it's a pretty awesome discount uh and you can also use the promo code t-a-o-n-e at checkout if you don't use our special link we will drop that into our show notes you can see right here look at that i'm protected i'm using nordvpn now as i'm recording this show and you can't tell the difference right like there's i've never noticed any sort of degradation in my internet usage i have it on all the time on my mobile devices and i've never had any sort of problem using it and i know that i'm protected all the time so i was about to say i have your public address and i'm going to attack it i want to offer one use case so most times when i use um a vpn on my phone and now i'm using nord um it's when i'm on like a public wi-fi right like you might be in a hospital or a coffee shop or and i'm trying to train my wife on this because you know people are out you're in a hospital they have no cell signal right and you're like oh you know then you get a pop-up like look guest wi-fi yay and i'm not a security expert but i know people have told me that if you hop on any of those not secured uh you know ssids like the the wi-fi networks i'm pretty sure it doesn't take that much skill to be able to see everything i'm doing oh yeah get all my information you have my credit cards like so we should ask lily from the last episode i'm sure she could just i know i know so bummed i missed her but such a good episode i listened today um but don't ever join this is this is my security 101 i know nothing right but don't ever join an unsecured wireless network without a vpn because anyone can see everything you're doing and that's not smart no no 100 percent that's so that's when i use vpns typically yep uh so again if you want to take advantage of that deal you can go to nordvpn.com forward slash t-a-o-n-e we will put a link to the show notes as well so you can click on that there and we thank nordvpn for their support of the art of network engineering podcast yes thank you thank you all right so uh this week we're talking about the return to the office so you're a remote employee as as am i uh i haven't worked in an office since 2018. uh i think literally that was this last time that i had to show up and report to an office on a regular basis was the end of 2018 and ever since i started my current role in early very early 2018 i i do have to occasionally go to the office for a meeting i have to go on site to uh you know customer locations for meetings of various kinds but you know with kova that that changed everything and so you know for the most part code is winding down it's spiking here and there and in other places uh what's what's been the story for you and uh where you work uh yeah i mean i like you i've been home for years they made me remote uh there there was some kind of hr rule like corporate real estate where you had to be in an office three days a week for them to well the minimum of three days a week this is yours so i started as a contractor right and i was in there all the time and but you have a badge that you swipe and you had to be in an office three days a week minimum to have a seat basically there okay to have a desk right gotcha um and at one point so what would happen for me is because i worked so many maintenance windows and this was back when i worked like 23 sundays like i was just working maintenance windows all the time so like if i worked a maintenance window sunday night i had an agreement with my boss that i'm gonna work from home monday right like i was up late on sunday or if i'm you know doing a 5 am maintenance on a tuesday morning well you know work from home so i was doing so many maintenances i was going in less and less and that was cool with my manager um and then one day i got an email from hr saying you know hey we're changing something in real estate and we notice that you're not there three days a week and we're you know we're making it remote as of this date and i was just like sweet because the the only reason i go in is because my boss was telling me you know i had to sure and you know i guess we'll go down this rabbit hole i don't know if now's a good time but personally and i'm not i'm really gonna try not to be the grumbly you know guy here right because that's not who i want to be and i'm still a little bit zandy from vacation and that's goods and andy but i don't you're good at this so you can explain this to me so what are the advantages of making knowledge workers come in to an office because it's a thing right like yeah there are a lot of companies who are forcing their people back in even with everything going on with variants and transmissions and blah blah blah and um so i just i want to throw a definition out there you've probably heard the term knowledge workers right the first time i heard it i think was this guy cal newport he was talking about knowledge workers i think i know what he's talking about but you know we think for a living that's what we're paid to do right we're not digging ditches we're not you know serving coffee like we think for a living and for me i see no reason i've always said this since i've been a knowledge worker i could work from the surface of the moon as long as i have the internet so why does it matter where i am because as a contractor i commuted three hours a day every day for years to go to an office that somebody said i had to be at and the cynical me is like well they paid for the real estate they want to get the return on that lease and they're going to make us come in i also thought that there was a certain level of management there that just wanted to come in and see their plebes and their cubes you know ah look at my domain you know um so maybe there's a little bit of that maybe a little like culture too what i've been hearing recently is you know now they're using collaboration well we need everybody to come in to collaborate right and all that means is people working together right and i again knowledge worker i can work from anywhere i don't need to be in a physical look proximity to you to be able to collaborate look at everything that our team has collaborated with the past 14 15 months just on the show look at all the collaboration on the discord look at everything we collaborate on you know at work and kovid showed us we it doesn't matter where we are so i personally am not a fan of return to office all the studies show that productivity went up for workers work-life balance improved your you know instead of spending hours commuting you can now spend that exercising or meditating or feeding your kids or talking to your wife or having a cup of coffee with your wife or husband or like so i think that the world got the taste at least for knowledge workers got a taste of you know of working from home and all the benefits that that brings to your life and now people are getting forced back in and it just rubs me the wrong way because all the data showed and even the company like it's all about money right look at all the money they save i remember reading something i don't know if it's like a thousand dollars a year just to put a butt in the seat for electricity and hvac and plumbing and you know phone so the company saves money the productivity productivity goes up and your people are happier and yet more often than not all these you know brilliant people running these companies are like we're going back in so you you triggered me bro you triggered me i i don't get it i i really don't get it especially and i'll shut up especially in light of the physical uh what's the right word you know the added risk yes i guess is how i would put it of putting us in close proximity to each other again this isn't a political show we're not doctors but sure i believe in science and i don't think i need to be inside a building with people so i can collaborate with them because i don't know about you but the network engineering i've been doing for the past eight or nine years i you know we're not we're not creating routing protocols or creating ieee stuff for like you know i'm on a project i have a thing to do give me the gear i'll configure it like i don't know what this collaboration is for technical network engineer people right like what is it we're collaborating oh we can whiteboard right like i i've probably whiteboarded twice in my life like i don't maybe architects and design people they need that stuff and maybe being in a room you know i i get i mean if i could be in a room with you and the rest of the you know art of network engineering team yeah it'd be great i'd love to hang with you guys if we all live near each other like sure but you guys are my bros like my coworkers aren't necessarily my bros you know these are this is a job this is how i pay my mortgage like i don't know and they're great people don't get me wrong but i don't know why we all got to be in the same room so right that's you look what you did there you just you got me going i didn't mean to do that well it's time to wrap this shit no i'm just kidding there's only two of us we got to fill time here andy i think he hit on like a lot of solid points here and i'm going to try to remember them in the in the particular way you dropped them so um people returning to work the the um the the brick and mortar aspect of it you're right there there's a lot of investment in you know a place to work and by not putting people there that that money can be seen it's like kind of going to waste and maybe it's leased maybe they're locked in maybe they can't sell it i don't know what the case is but yeah i think to a degree they want to see their investment get used again and they want people back in the office um i do agree with what you're saying on you know the the manager the owner coming in and looking over the the uh the cubicle farm at the plebes and and uh you know that that's definitely a culture thing like i i literally have worked for a person that said no work gets done unless it's between these four walls and then they were referencing the office that we were standing in i was just like you've got to be kidding me it was in like 2018 and and that was like my old boss that i had to leave like there that was just such a terrible way to look at things like most of the work for that company could have been done remotely the only work that couldn't have been done remotely was for the folks that were working in our machine shop it could have been done remotely if they invested in newer machines that we could load cad drawings into and the only thing a person would have to do is walk in there load the machine with raw material and then let it go you know like and you know having somebody walk around uh and monitor to make sure machines aren't you know getting stuck on on builds or whatever um but that's not the way they operated they they ran these machines that were old as heck and uh you know you can do that kind of stuff with it so they had to like manually translate cad drawings into you know the the math that the machine needed to cut the part um so so you're right it is crazy to me i have seen and heard of instances where some offices are incentivizing people to come back so so for so long managers told people like you know that's not a job you can do remotely well it turns out it was right like we found out with covet it turns out that you actually could do that job remotely and companies did really well with the workforce yeah yeah they sent everybody home they set everybody up with laptops docking stations monitors i mean i don't think all companies did that but i'm sure a lot of companies did and so now to draw people back in you're gonna have to incentivize them like or you're gonna have to make them come back or fire them you know kind of thing like and unfortunately i think that's what we're seeing happening there there's just been a mass exodus of of employees that you know hey i'm working from home now i have this better work life balance uh i'm not gonna go back into the office and if you're going to make me go back into the office well i'm going to go find another job yeah and we i think i've seen a lot of that too the the other thing that i've heard is that the work life balance wasn't all it was cracked up to be because when you're working from home they're there there's that blend of like working and living and when are you working and when are you not like that like that there is a work life balance but it can very quickly become out of balance where like all you're doing is working because you're at home and you work from home and so what when do you draw the line when you're not working versus when when you are and i think that some some people struggled with that and now they they might prefer to be back in the office um i personally perfectly fine working from home yeah you know if you can't trying to be nice so you know if you can't draw boundaries around what is work and what is not just because you're working from home right well i'm bored i need to well i mean right so there's people who like to go into an office to avoid their family right like oh i leave my wife has to deal with the kids or my wife's not particularly nice or maybe i'm not nice to her so she's not nice back but i know people who have been avoiding their family their entire careers because that's you know what it's easier for them i disappear i don't deal with the kids i come home there's dinner for me so like there's those folks but yeah what what i'll tell you so when i first got sent home pre cove and all that as a remote employee um there was an adjustment right i i i remember like huh it was just weird there was something about being in an office with people watching me i felt that like oh i need to at least appear to be working right like i at least need to be on my computer working on something um but at home right it's like okay nobody's watching but what what turned what turned the corner for me was that i was so busy and had such a heavy workload i don't know if it took a week or two for me to be like oh hell i need to get crack in here you know i mean like i got deadlines coming up and but there's endless data out there you just google it like how to have you know how to work from home effectively like right you have a separate room again like i'm saying half jokingly but like call me like well i need to go into the office because i'm working all the time when i'm at home well stop at five right like you know what i mean turn off your work phone stop at five and go be with your friend it's not hard sure but there there is that draw i get it like but i'm so busy and if i just catch up on email now i don't have to do it tomorrow and but you know it's boundaries it's discipline it's you know it can be done for me i gain so much time in my life to do what i want like i exercise every day at lunch because lunch is my time i'm at home i used to walk around a parking lot how sad is that right like i used to just walk for an hour to get some exercise well now i get on my bike i go to a beautiful park with a lake and i get an hour of cardio in that's that makes me a better employee i'm more healthy i'm going to cost less on your health insurance as i get older like i can't do that in an office right right like what you know what am i going to do so i but yeah it's it i love do you like working from home do you like being remote i do i do very much it there was definitely like you said an adjustment period when i first started working from home because it was weird because like in an office you're always working around other people there's like that social aspect and then when i started working from home it was like all chats and it was kind of strange like i almost felt like i was on an island and you know all the other engineers were busy and i was like hey you know what can i do and it was just at this weird point because i started a few weeks before company all hands and so everybody was working to get stuff done so we could all go attend the company all hands so it just didn't make sense at that point to like pull me into something because we were trying to wrap it up right so it was just like this strange period um i i got some really good advice and i actually did a lot of research on like working from home and i read stuff like you know you start your day with a commute and the the commute is this regular thing that you do that you're you're prepping yourself like hey i'm going into work and when i get to where i'm going it's time to work and so even though i was working from home they still want you to have this commute style like routine like go for a walk walk the dog go for a drive get a cup of coffee and come back and now like that's your commute into work per se even though you work from home but that's that signal to your body like you're about to start work now right like they'll tell you like get dressed right don't work in your pajamas i mean simple stuff you know get up take a shower put on some clothes go to a separate room sure you know there's there's easy things to do and again for me where the rubber meets the road i really really value my time right like time is the greatest asset you have yeah create it we're all going to be dead soon hypothetical like philosophically right like you better make use of your damn time and when you look at when i looked at three hours a day five days a week you know 15 hours of my life every week sitting in my car and on trains three hours but even i feel like an hour when you talk to people it's like 45 minutes to an hour to get to where they're going yeah you know on average so okay that's two hours a day it's 10 hours a week i mean unless you don't like the people you live with why in god's green earth would you choose to oh i got a great car and a great sound system bro you know not a reason 10 hours of commute every week sitting in your car like come on like sit your car in your driveway and be home like i i don't know so i just i i really i honestly think and maybe i'm a cynic i think it's economics i think that the companies that are pushing their people back in have signed leases and built i can tell you and i won't throw them under the bus but one of my previous employers spent billions of dollars subsidized by the city of philadelphia to build their two twin tower corporate centers in the city and then covet hit i know people that work down at those ivory towers that are being forced in against their will they're nervous they're afraid they don't you know beyond all the work-life balance stuff yeah yeah now they have to go into a situation they don't feel is particularly safe based on science the smartest people on the planet saying stuff and they're being forced to go in because this company spent billions of dollars including subsidized tax dollars to build this look at us look where we live where you know and it's not a bad thing right they build a technology hub in philly it was going to help the city great job like i get it it's good but they're forcing people back in because they spent all this money and they got to get their return on it right that's a that's a shitty reason to put people put their health at risk right right in my opinion you could argue that you know we're not going to go down to crazy town but putting a bunch of people in a room together you know right now doesn't seem like a safe thing right and yet right so that that's what really gets me to me it's like money over other stuff right and but beyond that to me what always comes up when i have this conversation is just the word trust right like if you trust your people to do their job and they do their job no matter where they are like you and i what do you care leave them alone they'll do what you're paying them to do they'll do it well you'll be happy with them and why do you care you know where they are but if if you're in a culture where you don't trust your people or maybe these p you know these these vps and their ivory towers right maybe they were raised and they were watched their whole careers and it's just how they were brought up and that's their school way of thinking yeah and then they finally climbed up the light well now i get to watch people like really it means you don't trust your people yeah i feel that they're hiding behind words like collaboration yeah and i defy these people to explain to me what network engineers need to collaborate on unless it's a room full of architects that are planning out the next five to ten years of technology stacks that this company is going to jump on like how are we going to get in the cloud how are we going to all you know what whatever the new ulala stuff is sure maybe being in a room would be helpful i don't see how being on a zoom call would be any less helpful but you know people in the trenches like you and i building stuff i i don't see collaboration i'm not buying it i think it's a term they just heard in a meeting and somebody said let's tell everybody collaboration to get them in like you know what i mean we can work together just fine without it i really feel like it's economics because of real estate and they just don't trust their people they feel like they have to watch them right you know you know when i think back before i started working remotely uh there was this like bs factor right like you go into an office and you hang out with the people that you work with and you shoot the shit and you talk about like what you did that weekend what you cooked on the grill the night before and you would spend like a decent amount of time doing that and maybe a couple times a day with various co-workers like how much of your day was this rag chewing versus like actually working social yeah you know i get in there as a contractor my gig i have now and there was these two guys as i was walking at an eight in the morning they'd be walking out and they would spend an hour walking to go get coffee getting their coffee coming back with their coffee so from eight a.m to nine a.m every morning was just burnt because they had to go get coffee we had free coffee in the office but they had to go you know get coffee and then you had the guys who smoked right they were outside every 20 minutes because they got to get nicotine or they're going to keel over so they're you know and then you have the cubicles that there's always two people just you know because that's what they do like they're best friends and they want to talk and as an engineer sitting around a bunch of not engineers i used to just think there's nothing getting done here people are just you know this is a social engagement like yeah you know maybe an hour a day was like this focused intense work being done and the rest just seemed to be this big social thing did you see that game can you believe this how's your husband blah blah blah like i got christmas cookies you want to go get coffee like like a degree of bsing is nice and depending on like some of the co-workers like it's cool to grow some relationships and whatnot but i think a lot of it was like very pandering too like like oh the weather like it's like how many times can you talk about the weather with somebody right like it was just bs conversations to seem nice to be cordial with co-workers and i'm sure a fraction of those were like actual friendships that you could like count on those people right i'm such a cynic as you're talking i'm thinking you know what there's probably been studies done oh yeah when people are in the office and they develop friendships there's a stickiness to that they're less likely to leave this job to start interviewing externally oh sure going to hang out with their friends right right i mean that that's how cynical and insidious i think these kind of decisions are being made like well we gotta have them in the office so they can become friends so they'll never leave because it's hard to get talent you know like that's the crazy voice in my head like but you know what i think that there's something to be sent to that because i stayed at a job a year longer than i wanted to because i worked with some friends and i was like the manager and i felt guilty leaving them and uh because of the relationships that we had for them so i absolutely feel like there's something to be said in that um and it's tougher to build those relationships remotely on the internet with cameras i mean unless they're like already established i think it's harder to grow although i i will say that your and my relationship is purely internet based right like i only know you through the lens i've i have never met you in person uh but i enjoy your company i look forward to hanging out with you and i really look forward to the day that i get to meet you i hope i don't disappoint you there's a lot of pressure here you and dan were just such best instant friends and i think you're gonna get to see tim relatively soon i you know i i hope i can i hope i can deliver on all this hype i'm sure you can i'm not worried about it um a deal in the chat said that they were uh he worked on a project where he works and they literally moved to data centers while working remotely uh and so you know he agrees that collaboration as we've said is a poor excuse to push people back into the office and i i don't disagree with that with a lot of the collaborative tools that are around if you really do need to collaborate and in my position i collaborate quite a bit with my customers because i have to learn about their environment i have to learn about how they want to use a particular solution so we do whiteboarding sessions we do get on you know some we don't always do video chat thank god um some of some of the customers do want to do video chat and when i jump in the call i always like have my video off and then when i see that they have their video and i'm like all right i guess i'll turn my video on uh kind of thing so um yeah yeah i think that there is a degree of collaboration depending on the position um you know you're right when it comes time to configure stuff like unless i'm training another engineer i don't need to collaborate while i'm you know building configurations that i'm going to slam right which which is a good point that i saw in the patreon chat here i don't know if it was a deal i can't find them but they said you know counterpoint would be yeah it was eric uh eric he's gonna have to tell me if it's chow or chew i'm sorry eric um he's saying one counterpoint mentoring a junior engineer is easier and that's definitely true we we hired a junior guy when i was going into the office and i spent hours with him every day he sat next to me and i pulled him into every single thing i did hey this is what i'm doing it you know come yeah come sit with me and watch because i that's how i learned and it was really helpful and that's it's pretty hard remote like i mean i could put a computer on me and show you my terminal screen but having a guy sitting in my cube with the gear that i'm working on that i'm gonna ship i feel was pretty helpful because then you have those organic conversations and then you go down the lunch and he can ask you questions like hey you know i saw you did this and that and triple a like why did you do that and so you know i mean i get that there's advantages to being together and in a world where breathing on each other can't make us violently ill i think that that makes a lot of sense sure the the rush to go back um just you know feels just feels weird to me and and i'm i'm fortunate that i don't have to right i'm remote they said they're not gonna they're not gonna mess with me and and that's nice um yeah i feel like it's a hot topic right like return to office so how would you feel you know i feel like the cranky guy here and you're just not so how would you feel if they forced you like aj you gotta come into the office five days a week from now on how would that settle with you in my current role based on where the office is i would quit because the office is two hours away and i would i refuse to drive two hours one way right to just show up and do my job that i've been doing here for you know the last two and a half three years so as i'm putting my manager shoes on which i've never been a manager but you know could they negotiate and be like well how about three days you know we'll do a hybrid model you know you can collaborate three days a week right i think the most i've ever gone to the closest office is maybe quarterly and that that was just enough you know like right like the office is beautiful i i do enjoy going there it's in like an old mill and they did a really great job with it if i lived closer it would be appetizing to work there but yeah to take my position that i've been doing for almost the last three years and and require me to go into an office that's two hours away like uh no not happy and i felt to say i thought the same thing if i could drive 15 minutes and be somewhere sure i'd probably be fine with it it's not like i never want to go to an office and be around people again but we know where i live i'm an hour from from the city on a good day without accidents and traffic and rain and all that stuff so the thought of me investing two hours of my life every day to get somewhere knowing i can do my job just as well if not better here because there isn't all the distractions and talking like when i was in the office i used to have to wear headphones oh yeah you know music just to drown out you know i'm trying to work on configs here and there's giggling and laughing and and you know there's noise everywhere i'm like i'm a knowledge worker like would you people be quiet it's perfectly quiet where i work here and you know but i would i'd be fine going if it was close to me i just think it comes down to time and how much time are you willing to give up time you'll never get back of your life you know for a job and yeah it seems like there's a hell of a lot of remote jobs out there i mean you know we're all in linkedin right we're always getting hit up by recruiters and seems like there's you know there's a lot of remote stuff out there i i think i'd be in the same boat as you if they told me i had to start commuting and it was a long commute for no reason at all yeah that'd be it all right yeah i'm i'm looking man like i'm looking hard i value my time yeah oh yeah you know i don't care how nice and fancy my car is like i don't want to spend all that time i know people who love driving and that's cool for them right but i you know i i don't get it man i'm yeah it's but i wouldn't want to do it on a daily basis not like that i mean right the last time i worked in an office i it was like a 25 minute drive into the office and that was that was too much it was too much running around um and like i always had to like go rush and get the children from daycare and it was always like oh if i take this way i'm gonna get stuck in traffic and if i take this way it might take too long and if i leave five minutes late i'm really gonna get screwed because of traffic and and now like my my son's daycare uh is is like literally five minutes down the road if that you know like it's a very short drive from the house and now that he's in in public school like i can have him like hop on the bus and drop the have the bus drop them off right here like i don't have to leave the house man manny's got a good question yeah i i i saw that i and i see we're starting to get a couple of questions here so let's bump up to to manny's question he asked us uh if we've heard anything to the effect of um you know people feeling like an in-office employee has an advantage over say a remote employee when it comes to promotions and stuff um and i would say that that could easily be a thing um but i i would say that that's just poor management right like if you give somebody a promotion or consider them for a promotion just because you see them every day i i would be looking at raw output you know that i've had people that i've worked with that i saw every day and based on like you know a number of metrics that we had like their output was nowhere near what the output was of some other people on the team that i didn't see every day uh and you know some of the metrics were pretty like cut and dry like not open to interpretation you you just reminded me of something i mean we there was a guy we hired that you had to babysit oh yeah to me yeah you send this dude home he's never gonna do another damn thing and that's a problem with your hiring process i don't think that you need to torture the responsible adults who will do their job no matter where they are because you know you hired some some sandbagger but um and and a deal a deal you know so you know hey if that happens it's probably a toxic culture like if you have to be in there kissing the ring of of whoever you know kiss and butt cheeks so to speak um that might not be the best place you know to be i think your work should speak for itself right absolutely you're you're good at what you do and another point i wanted to make is you know i started working when i was in seventh grade and i've been working ever since and it's been decades and every job i've ever had until becoming a network engineer i had to drive somewhere i had to be in person and i had to do a thing and i don't know if this sounds strange to say but i feel like i have earned the right as an adult with a specialized skill set that can do a job from anywhere that has the internet connection you know i am dependable you can rely on me and i don't need to be driving to a place interacting with a person to do a job anymore i mean that's why i busted my butt as long as i did and got my ccna and got that guy you know all the decisions i've made is to get to a point of responsibility in adulthood where like i don't need to do all that yeah yeah you know and i'm also thinking i'm also thinking i don't know if there's a generational thing but i can tell you that auto macho has been chopping at the bit to get into an office oh interesting yeah so i and he's a younger cat right so do you think it's like just like an experienced thing like he's a relatively new engineer so maybe he just hasn't had the experience of working in a corporate office and just wants the taste of corporate america or i feel funny speaking for him but he's not here right yeah that's i mean that i would guess it's part of it right yeah um another part of it could be you know maybe he's you know living in a place that isn't huge doesn't have a dedicated workspace and he's like sitting in a bedroom i'm i happen to live in a side you know a house that's big enough that like i have a dedicated area nobody bothers me and i'm good if if i was stuck yeah in a living room table being bothered all the time the kitchen table because my office used to be downstairs and when my son was home my youngest son i couldn't leave him like not with an eye shot or whatever so i had to work at the kitchen table and because of the pandemic my office is now you know where it is which is upstairs i've i finally upgraded to a window i was promoted to a window office in my own house congratulations eric in the patreon chat has another good question he says question for aj do you think college learning is easier in person you know what i'm going to say yes absolutely it is um i was a horrible online student because sometimes i would forget to show up to the online uh portal and and you know participate in the interactive chats um well they weren't even so much inner it was just like a posting board right like it's not like you were live chatting with other people uh like like we are now with the patreons um so yeah i mean i think there's definitely an element of like because i don't have to show up somewhere sometimes i would forget to show up digitally and that's not super helpful as a teacher um the other thing is is when when i'm teaching on uh on campus i have a set time block every monday night from 5 30 until 8 15 that i show up with a group of students and we work together through a series of labs to teach them how to do something if they have questions they can ask me they can ask somebody else in the classroom partner or whatever and that kind of collaboration you know can take place real time i think in a learning environment collaboration is very key when we did the remote thing it was much harder to get all the students online at a single time so we could do that piece and and when questions came up it was very like one off like oh i have a question about this like okay let's schedule a meeting let's jump on the google me and let's go ahead and you know figure out what's going on and so what could have been done in the course of a single class period took place throughout the entire course of a week and it was a little bit harder to keep track of so i personally find it a lot easier to do the in-person you know teacher thing and i prefer to learn in person i much prefer i don't want it to sound like an excuse and it probably is and tanaya would probably smack me in the face for saying this but right rightfully so just get stuff done right but when i was in cisco's netacad going to you know every friday was a four-hour class every saturday was a four-hour class i learned a lot and i was in it and like i had a lot of help and self-studying for me has been a hell of a lot harder i i don't know if i'd have my ccmp by now or a lot you know long time ago if i was going to a classroom being held accountable and working in a group and it's it's a lot harder for me learning self-learning i definitely you know prefer a classroom yeah i i think when you're doing the mentorship thing when you're when you're training a new co-worker whether whether they're seasoned or not junior or not like you there's a degree of like here here's the rules of the house kind of thing that you're you have to train a new employee and that's probably easier to do uh in person and it probably feels better to a new hire too when that stuff is done in person because you're always interacting with them whereas like you know when somebody starts remotely they're like okay it's it's my first day and they're just kind of waiting for the zoom to start so they can meet with the hr people to go through this stuff and then that meeting's over and then they're like okay now what do i do you know like go feed the cat or like go for a walk wait wait until the next zoom to start and i probably should have started with this i i don't want it to sound if you want to go into the office and you love going to the office and you need to be around people you know i apologize for framing this whole conversation it's like this is bullcrap because that's just how i feel right but sure you know if people want to go in an office you know rock on have at it i mean it's it's your life right like whatever's going to make you happy um you know i probably should have started that ahead of time because i've just been beating up on it the whole time and and it's only because it bothers me like everything we talked about i see the landscape i see what's going on and i wouldn't feel all that great about it even though it was only a 15-minute drive for me why the hell do i have to sit in a room with these people that may or may not be vaccinated may or may not be smart may or may not be doing things that leading scientists on the planet say to like it's it's a lot of trust for virtual strangers like going in and just hoping that they're doing the thing knowing that i could bring something home and get somebody critically ill like just the stakes are so damn high yeah at this particular point in history that's what feels so strange to me which i think is why i get fired up about it yeah because the health of me and my family right now are more more important than anything else i can think of and for an employer to force your hand yeah because they have a lease rubs me the wrong way and that's where i'm coming from you want to go in the office have at it knock yourself out but yeah i don't like that forced hand right it's it's one thing to make it optional you know and i i'm very thankful you know one that i don't have a job that requires me to go to the office and two the company that i work for it's completely optional if you want to go into the office you can go into the office the offices are open if you happen to go into the office uh right now the company is offering breakfast and lunch you you can go in and get free breakfast and free lunch it's it's just a thing that's available to to people that are working in the office is that new it is it is new well it is and it isn't um because as long as i've known the company and as long as i've worked there there was always some food snack you know the m ms are very much a thing at this company and so like you can walk around the office and there's these huge buckets of m ms all over the place you will never not be able to snack on stuff like oh my god you know m m's oh yeah they got them all oh that would be that would be trouble yeah yeah it is um and then like there's sports drinks in the fridges and the kitchens like that there's always stuff right that's always been a thing um but i guess now like they're actually offering a meal at breakfast and lunch i have not and you mentioned it earlier they're like incentivizing people to come in i mean if that doesn't speak to the conversation we're having like if you have to bribe your folks to come into the office there might be some i don't wanna say something wrong but they're you know that may illuminate something underlying about this whole conversation why do you have to bribe your people i think that's what it's going to come down to like short of requiring people to come into the office i think you're going to have to give them a reason to come in like what the last 18 months has shown us is that most people's jobs can in fact be done from home and to to now you know say it's okay it's time to go back to the office i mean give me a reason like i've done my job here from home for the last i don't know how many months like why do i have to why do i have to come in you know so this is the last real talk thing i'll throw out there because i know we're probably getting close to the hour if we're not over already but do you think that remote work is threatening to middle management whose whole existence is predicated on keeping an eye on their people and making sure they're doing their job and and i'm asking you specifically because you've been in management i have not yeah and i'm not trying to beat up and i'm not saying that managers are all micromanaging people who don't trust their people sure but you and i are employees and we we get you know we're going to do our job we're adults it's fine yep but i can see if you're in management and i guess it depends on the culture too but i can see the whole remote thing being a little more threatening like did the higher ups eventually realize well do we need all these managers at the middle level like everything's working fine i i don't know i i don't know anything about management i just wonder if there's any feeling of like you know the security of their job being threatened because like do you really need has working remotely caused management to become you know more valued or less valued like has there been any like oh everything's working pretty good and you're not staring at people and looking over their shoulder like well i i think you definitely still need management because employees need a point of contact somebody to go to i think that remote work is probably threatening to bad managers because bad managers or people that don't know how to manage can't manage people they can't see or at least they don't feel like they can uh in you know it it's also i think whether or not they have good employees right like if if they have bad employees people that don't have good integrity that don't work just because they're not being looked upon um i i think i think there's like two sides to that to that piece right yeah i i keep going back to like you might have a hiring problem if you have people that you can't trust enough to let them work remotely and you're going to force them in that's definitely trusting possible unhealthy situation yep you know if you don't trust your people you might want to look at your hiring process your screening any more questions yeah any more questions in the patreon here how are we doing on time i know you got a clock running there so uh we're a little bit over the hour and i you know i don't think there's there's there's any there wasn't anything that i felt like we had to to chop out of this one so i think we're going to be just fine deal's talking about quiet bunnies i don't know why you're talking about a deal yeah eric said at the end of the day remote work uh just kind of amplifies everything yeah and i think he's right i think he's right for sure i think if if as a manager you have some good metrics that you can use to gauge whether or not your employees are are being uh effective um i don't think there's any reason why you can't manage them and for me in my role like everybody has customers and if i hear from a project manager that you know my engineers aren't meeting their deadlines uh then that's concerning to me you know i see their time cards um a big thing that that goes on with the time cards is your utilization are you putting your time to where you should be putting it to and and that's very easy for for me to see as a manager you know like is is somebody working on the projects that are assigned to them or are they put in their time and other buckets that you know like they probably don't need to be putting it in right now like right now there's so much going on nobody should be putting time in a training bucket and it's that's i hate to say that because i would love to be doing some training but we just have so much work going on at this particular time um you know it's if you're putting it in a training bucket like are you really are you really training right now like really really uh so you know being able to to use some key metrics to to get the feedback that hey my people are working you know or um you know wait a minute they were they missed this big deliverable that really should have been done last week uh you know and those are some really good kpis to tell me whether or not my people are doing their jobs you're talking about it right the kpi is the productivity like if if your business was kicking button taking names before the remote workforce kicked in and then when the remote workforce happened productivity went in the toilet i get it and i'm not you know a social scientist but everything i've read in the past year and a half i thought indicated that productivity went up right when everybody was home with kids and craziness so if i were running a company i would think as long as my productivity is intact i don't care where they're at right and if you come back to me and the data says productivity went up well we better bring them in the office because i want productivity to go back down i mean is that right we're doing through the logic train we're following here it's a flowchart okay yeah guys you're too productive we we we need to get you back so but i'll be real curious when this episode gets released i'd really like to hear from listeners and from because i know that there's a lot of different opinions on this and oh yeah i would like to hear from people who want a need to be in the office and why because i want to know that side of the table i want you know i want to hear from them and like you know let me know we should we should have probably had somebody on here who's like vehemently for going back in so that we could have you know we don't know who they are so if they let us know on twitter at art of neteng uh well right i'd really like to hear from listeners on on their take on it you know if if you're with me and you're like i'm not going back in you know don't sweat it but if you disagree with me i'd really love to hear from those folks to get a balanced view of this conversation absolutely i would agree with that would be great i could just give my opinion and that's what i got i'm not going anywhere aj got a comfy seat right here bro right right well don't get too comfy because next time we record i'm going to require everyone to show up on site and we're going to do this in a studio because that's the only way i can trust we're going to get an episode recorded on time gosh dang it there better be maple syrup if that's what i have to do to convince you to get into a studio with me then i'll i'll bring it is there maple syrup flavored ice cream oh yes okay well we don't have that here i might come into a studio for that okay all right i haven't i have an ice cream problem i think maple syrup ice cream will get me in we can we can definitely hook that up we got maple everything up in here you can ask dan because the morning that he left i went there's a donut shop down the road and uh i walked in there and i said give me everything maple you got and i got the maple frosted donut i got the maple cream stuffed donuts i got oh my god and it was just like maple um yep yep so i i have to tell you just because you reminded me but we went to the outer banks in may my family for the first time and they have this place there's a town called duck like quack quack dog oh yeah and they have this place called duck doughnuts oh that's the most amazing whole handmade and they come out warm and it's just everything wonderful about life but the the my favorite donut they have it's it's a maple syrup icing with um chopped up bacon on it dude maple bacon yep i'm a sucker for maple bake anything bacon really that's got my name yeah excellent all right brother all right another great episode in the bag thank you so much for joining this week special thank you to all of our patreons for chiming in on the chat and hanging with us tonight if you're interested in being a patreon you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge to sign up we thank you so much for your support the art of network engineering uh anything else you want to add to kind of button this one up not necessarily i'd like to just frame this whole conversation that i'm very grateful that i have a job and was able to keep it during you know the crazy economic side effects of covet and i never want to you know i have a lot of family who has to go out every day on the front line and do stuff so like you know it's it's easy for me to sit here and start espousing about how i think things should be but i i don't want to lose you know i'm very grateful for our frontline workers and for all the medical folks and people delivering the groceries and like it's you know thank you frontline workers yes and you know don't let it be i'll never let it be lost that i am in a privileged position where i get to sit here and work from my desk and you know i don't have to go out uh you know and and get exposed to things that i wouldn't want to but um it's been a good career man network engineering it's awesome i love it it's given me a lot of freedom i get to meet you guys and um yeah i'm just i'm really grateful for for my career and thank you for those folks that i mean i have data center folks right dc ops folks that i rely on all the time i have a maintenance tonight in in 30 minutes and i have folks at multiple sites that are going to help me do stuff and yeah i need them and they're important and i'm very grateful so please don't take my girl i'm not leaving my seat the wrong way i i really appreciate everybody out there doing the thing and yeah you know yeah i i agree i i mean my wife works at a credit union she had to show up every single day for work throughout the entire pandemic my mother works in manufacturing she has to show up every single day for work to put parts together for airplanes i know lots of people that work in the healthcare industry one of our our dearest friends is the assistant nurse manager for the intensive care unit here in burlington at the major hospital so she exclusively sees the uh the the cover 19 patients and so yeah i have lots of people in my circle that um i certainly have a lot of respect for and like you i am very thankful that i get to work from home and will always value that uh but as a result i will always look for opportunities that let me let me do that because because i can sir excellent well thank you andy this has been fun i love hanging out with you uh and we will do it again soon i'm sure so join us next week for another episode of the art of network engineering awesome hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you