After 15 months of work from home I am hearing that we are being ordered back to a shared office, with shared desks, and shared keyboards, starting at 40% capacity in the very near future.
I just can't do it. I can't go back to a loud open office, where I'm packed into a small footprint with a workstation crammed into a corner as leadership sits behind me watching everyone. I can't go back to commuting an hour plus, fighting 130ish people for 1 of 3 microwaves, and using bathrooms that frequently have excrement on the floor/seats/walls.
I've been in the same job for 15 years clearing international freight through customs - basically classifying goods in the harmonized tariff schedule and entering info into an AS400 terminal. I have a GED, I have zero computer science experience.
How do I, living a half hour west of Indianapolis, find remote work that at least replaces my current income and benefits, while living in a town of 200 something people? ASAP.
I welcome any and all advice!
Here's another 'import specialist' type remote job https://workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/default/mdf/recruitment/... notice the preference for bachelor degree, you should go back to school. However also notice 'equivalent business experience' so apply anyway. If you're wondering how I find these, a simple bot that scrapes "careers" pages into a sqlite dbms I query for select remote and various freight forwarding keywords. I made it when I needed a new developer job and turned out to be useless as some recruiter found me anyway.
However since this pandemic is ending surely there is some kind of student loans or business startup funds being floated around, if there are take them and go to school so you have a skill. If you can create a business think about your own job what the pain points are and how you can be a contractor. There was a woman running her own business when I worked there in highschool driving around the intl airport just collecting documents and standing in line at customs offices because some clearences required it. Brokers didn't want to do it so paid her, she in turned hired a bunch of other people to do the work, just managed everything with a cellphone and got paid.