Somebody nailed it:

http://valleywag.com/351618/an-ex+yahoos-instructions-for-microsoft

If I ever find this person, I owe them a beer.

They actually listened!  They actually heard the complaints and changed their minds!  My commute gets to stay the same, instead of turning into the issues I was looking at.  I'm quite pleased!

So work just let us know that it's about 99% guaranteed that we're moving from our location in Rancho Bernardo to Carlsbad sometime around March.  That's not good, as it transforms my commute dramatically, increasing it an estimated 55% in distance and 150% in time.  Needless to say, I am unpleased, and, being an engineer, I started to put more numbers to my displeasure.

If you figure that there's 40 hours in a work week, and 52 weeks in a year, that works out to 2080 working hours a year.  But lets round it down to 2000 just to make the math a little easier.  If you then divide your anual salary into that number, you get an estimated value of your time.  Using that per-hour cost, we can determine the value of the time that will no longer be available to me.

So, if my current round trip commute were an hour (and actually it is a little less), and the new commute is 150% more than that, or two and a half hours, then the value of my time that is getting taken away from me works out to:

( Salary / 2000 ) * ( 2.5 - 1 )

At my salary, that works out to a very nice restaurant dinner that I can no longer afford, every night.  Multiply that by 5, and you've easily got a car payment every week.  Multiply that by 4 and you've got the better part of a house payment every month.  Multiply that by 12 and you get a blue collar salary wasted every year commuting to the new office.

Of course this value does not take into account the extra mileage, and thus fuel and maintainence costs, of the car I'd be driving to and from the office.  That's because I'm computing the value of my time that my employer and I have already agreed on, we hadn't agreed previously on reimbursing any costs to get to and from my main office.  But just because they don't pay for the extra amount, that doesn't mean I shouldn't forget that I'm going to be paying it.  Of course, that number is easy to calculate, it's my current costs plus 55%, because that's how much further my drive will be.  Of course that assumes that I get equal fuel economy and the maintainence on the vehicle is the same, which I'm doubting, but can't verify until I actually do the commute.

So what if I try and take public transport?  Well, we all know that public transport is rarely faster than driving and parking there yourself.  However, it does have the advantage that I could conceivably get some work done on a laptop while someone else does the driving.  Plugging in my projected commute to the local bus routes , I get a round trip commute that is around five times my current commute, Yikes!  It would be really hard to make up for that lost time without cutting my time in the office short.  That possiblitly is going to require more research and negotiations.

OK, what if I try a split schedule, some days I'm in the office, and some days I telecommute?  That might work, but how do I balance that and how do I work out when I should be in which place?

Does anyone else have any good ideas?

Mike and Elena had a wonderful wedding on Sunday evening.  Beauty surrounded the entire event, as it started out with a wonderful backdrop of San Diego, proceeded into a pleasant party of wine and light appetizers over looking San Diego Bay, and then transitioned into the reception inside.  That is of course when the party really started.  Unfortunately most of the reception was in Russian, which meant that our table, for the most part, was not able to understand it (we did have a translator at our table for a while, but he was a bit rusty).  Despite the language barrier, a lot could be inferred from crowd reactions, emphatic gesturing, and plain old guesswork.  We would have liked to stay to the end and enjoy every happy moment with everyone, but we didn't.