QOTW Guest Blog

Hello, Bloglodytes*!

Gaea's unavailable this week, but it made her sad to think of you all out there, anticipating your quota of QOTW, so here I am.

One of the perrenial questions we get asked is what it's like to work in the Three Rings office. It is Teh Awesome place after all. The sad fact, for a lot of us OMs, though, is that we don't work there! As some of you may know, a lot of the Ocean Masters work from home, and there's a very good reason for this. YPP is a worldwide enterprise, and if someone's spamming the inns, griefing your playstyle at 12pm Central European time, you don't want to wait five hours for those Californian types to wake up, eat their granola, and get on their surfboards over to the Three Rings office to sort it out for you. You guys never sleep, so neither can we.

This means, sadly, that many of us rarely see the hallowed halls of the office, except on occasional pilgrimages to the mothership. So the question, I suppose, becomes what's it like to work outside the Three Rings office.

My day starts much like most peoples' - I get up, get dressed, eat my breakfast, and take my dog for a walk. Some would say, working from home, that the getting dressed part is optional, but I always do it, for two reasons. First, I feel it's difficult to summon the correct gravitas to adjudicate on serious issues in one's pyjamas. Second, the other people who walk their dogs on the field I go to sort of demand it. The walk serves me as a sort of replacement for the daily commute that most people experience, though unlike the bus, my dog is rarely late.

Then I settle down at my desk, fire up the forums and staff chatroom, and see what's caught fire while I've been asleep.

Myself, I am based in Merrie Olde Englande. We're eight hours ahead of game time here, so as my day starts, the office staff have long since gone to bed. Hence, this phase of the day is usually characterised by my reading the conversations that have gone on, and realising that they happened five hours ago, and all the witty replies I'm coming up with are a bit late.

As my shift starts, I log on to the oceans I'm covering. Depending on the time of day, and how busy it is, I'll be on between two and six oceans at the same time. How can I keep any eye on this many oceans? This is my desk:

(Click for a better look)
All four screens work off the one mouse too. Groovy huh?

I'll be fielding your petitions and complaints all morning. Sometimes you'll get a quick response, but sometimes you'll have to wait a while; if something complex or time consuming turns up, like a theft from a crew's ships, working on that can create quite a backlog. Once it's done, it's a matter of working through that backlog. So if you've ever had to wait a while for a rename, that's why!

Once my early shift is over, it's lunchtime. Due to the way my shifts work out, I won't be on again until the evening, leaving me with a six hour lunch break to play with. If I had to pick one thing I love about being an OM, it'd be that I get my time off in the afternoon, not the evening. Later, in the evening, I'll be back on, and by that time, it's office hours back at the office. This is essentially when I get to check in with the guys in the office, unless of course it's the weekend, which with me, it usually is

So, that's my take on working out of the office. Part foreign correspondent, part night watchman.

* literally, "blog goers". Clever huh? No? Oh well, please yourselves.
PS. This entry got lost in the space/time continuum when the blog was relocated. Fortunately, I was able to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, and divert it through the flux capacitor, allowing me to go back and retrieve it.