News: 1584711005

I'm sitting in my basement working on a folding table and chairs, and there are likely many others in the same situation. I bet there's a run on desks and chairs at IKEA as people get tired of working at the kitchen table (while the rest of the family is home too), or worse, and look to set up something in a far corner of the house.

Well, Ikea can't complain about that.

Hopefully the huge spike in demand will even out the drop following it.

Too late here, furniture is not an essential, so they have been closed all week.

Shame - I was looking forward to the launch of their Salf Isóláten range of desks and Sósal Disténs chair selection

'I was looking forward to the launch of their Sälf Isölåten range of desks and Sösal Distäns chair selection.'

FTFY. Swedish doesn't do grave or acute accent marks.

A combination of me just using AltGr and my feeble, ageing eyesight telling me it looked close enough

Is that a reasonably good transliteration? Many of us have seen Swedish, kind-of know what it is about, but haven't a clue how to pronounce it.

See also Škoda and Porsche.

Actually, once you get to know the Scandinavian language pronunciation rules they become easy because they are far more consistent than English is.

Among my favourite Swedish place names are Växjö (Vekshur), Norrköping (Norshurping) and Göteborg (Yurtehbory).

I had just presumed their product names were faux-Swedish. Maybe something run through a Bork Translator

If it's Swedish, would that be a Bjorn Bork Translator?

Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? See the løveli lakes The wøndërful telephøne system.......Ohhhh

We looked at purchasing at the beginning of the week, the supplier had gone from next-day to out of stock on pretty much everything. Only the bottom of the range business laptops were still available - 2 - 3 week delivery.

If we want our normal "mid-range" (Latitude/ThinkPad class) from any of our suppliers, we are looking at May at the earliest.

I needed one laptop for the managing partner this week who had previously said he'd never work from home and changed his mind based on recent events.

Any low and almost all mid grade equipment was sold out as of the start of our telephone call. By the end of it my supplier candidly told me that the last of the mid grade software had just gone to being unavailable, and stock was dropping on the more expensive laptops like a rock.

I ended up with a Lenova laptop which does the job perfectly well, but doesn't match the rest of the company fleet of laptops.

Any factory orders from HP have been taking 2-3 months since the beginning of the year. Stuff ordered in January has been arriving this week. It's all fine grabbing laptops but you have to have IT staff available to provision it.

Something my former employers have probably found out....after the last of us in one location (That used to do all the back orifice stuff & hardware provisioning) were shown the door in February.

Icon - I'll drink to that, payback like vengeance is best served cold like a lager, as it's not bitter.

Domestic flights carried a "belly full" of tech kit when in service

Interesting...does that mean that it's fairly routine to have a plane full of passengers sitting above a cargo containing laptops with Lithium batteries?

The self-loading cargo ain’t what pays the bills. This is true at sea, on rails, and in the air. If the self-loading cargo has a problem with some of the cargo which actually pays the bills, the self-loading cargo can bloody well get out and walk. Doing that while the aircraft is on the ground is a good idea, though some of the self-loading cargo is too stupid to think of that.

I'm sure the airlines are ramping up their efforts to develop cryogenic-suspension capsules, to avoid all the issues with passengers, and to squeeze more in at any time. Then they could just stick with cargo planes for all but the shortest flights (processing time has to be considered).

Shhh, Michael O'Leary reads this sort of stuff. Don't give him any ideas please.

That would actually be a lot more comfortable than flying in coach is these days, so I'm all for it!

During the long journeys sleeping in Low or doped with quick-time in High.

try your local charity shops. Yes they are second hand but they are probably cheaper than IKEA and certainly more comfortable/durable and will stand being washed down with the appropriate bleach/anti-septic/anti-biotic/anti-microbal spray

Jolly good. And where do we go for the bleach/anti-septic/anti-biotic/anti-microbal spray?

Home Depot. Lowes. Ace Hardware. Other locations may be available. I was just in my local Home Depot, they have bleach and cleaning agents stacked up on pallets all over.

Earlier this week, my local Crappy Tire & Dollar stores still had some stock.

I also considered (but didn't need to try my local Peaveys).

Any store that stocks it normally that nobody shops at.

Around out area that's B&M, which has like most other supermarkets parked entire pallet loads of stuff anywhere it will fit. Unlike other supermarkets, they don't have any serious numbers of visitors because (almost) nobody habitually shops there.

I'm a trustee of a charity that runs two shops. Nobody is coming in, no volunteers to help run the shop, might be closing on Monday. Everyone is panic buying elsewhere!

My gaffer told me that by the end of last week, the only reasonably priced laptops were Macbooks. All the other midrange business ones had been bought up. Ourselves we ended up with 9 Dell Vostro's.

My laptop though, a Latitude I think, has been on order since mid-February and hasn't turned up. And it'll go to the office, where I won't be. So that'll be fun.

With the use of some half inch marine ply, some flexible hoses and five 360 degree casters I now no longer need to worry about the dreaded loo roll shortage! I can now sit "on the throne" all day at my workstation and can move about my office / work-space with relative ease, I can even reach hot coffee and snacks. I just need to have a quick shower at the end of the day and Bob is your mother's brother, no need for any bloomin' loo rolls anymore! I have even incorporated a small water heater so the ceramics involved are at just the right comfy temps for my bum!

(mines the one with the patent application in the pocket)

That's a really shit idea!

As we invested some years ago in a Japanese toilet, I expect our 18 rolls to last about as many weeks. Of course it's after that it's going to be recourse to the chainsaw, liquidiser, and home made sieve tray to make our own.

That all sounds a bit painful. Have you considered tabloid newspapers, dock leaves or even three sea-shells instead?

That all sounds a bit painful.

It is ... to the tree that is converted into loo paper.

Despite stockpiling bog roll, half a year ago in error & the use of the bidet hoses preferred by Mme L, we still have plenty to hand, though I did "panic buy" one single pack that was on special pricing (Not extortionate), in a store that had plenty on the shelves.

Finally people realize that tablets and phones are not actually very useful for productivity ;)

Doing a survey of our staff, I was surprised to see how few people said that they had a laptop/PC at home.

Unpleasantly surprised, since some of them had work issued laptops. I just passed that to our HR with a few terse comments and a copy of the asset register and that appears to have been sorted out by HR.

But i'm still not sure if these people are actually without equipment or if they expect that they are going to get new laptops issued if they claim that they don't have anything.

We had a field tech, that was actually in possession of two work owned vehicles.

I just rushed out to the garden centre and bought a ride-on petrol lawn mower - I live in a flat!

Since so many employers are investing in enabling staff to work from home as much as possible, I wonder how this will end up.

Will employers suddenly think I they should get rid of all that office infrastructure and find efficient ways of supervising remote office workers?

Or will everyone be delighted to get back to their cubicles and bosses will be delighted to have them back where they can keep an eye on them?

There seems to be the potential here for a shift in how people work and are employed never mind the possible social consequences.

Since so many employers are investing in enabling staff to work from home as much as possible, I wonder how this will end up.

Honest Hans will give you odds of 2-1 that the government will say that home-working has been proven to work and will mandate it in order to get commuters off the roads and so get us closer to carbon neutrality.

IBM will be able to tear down more of it's office buildings (they'll be sorely inadequate to work as data centres).

this applies across the board. Even if you don't know how long this shitstorm is going to last, you will preserve, if not positively hoard capital. And, guess what best preserves capital when you have a workforce that does no work? Offload the "issue" asap to the state, and real quick, before the state wakes up and re-offloads its responsibilities to private sector. Either way, it's gonna be a lose-lose for the employees in the end, methinks.

This is not AI. We are dealing with real, low down, bottom-of-the-line genuine human stupidity at it's very worst (or best, depending upon your view). I have seen people filling baskets with 20+ large bottles of olive oil "cos its Italian innit, you never know". Never mind that they probably exist on a diet of baked beans on toast and JustEat.

In the UK we are panic buying loo rolls while in the USA and South Africa they are panic buying automatic weapons. Says it all really.

I prefer potatoes myself.