Life is a laugh when you’ve got the joke;
Get yourself together, get on with the show.
Onwards we go, onto new adventures-
The best ones I’ve known I can barely remember!
COVID-19 diary – WFH day 3 of whatever.
Monday
Worked from home; so far so unusual, other than I usually choose to WFH later in the week. Suspecting isolation was only a matter of time, dig my bike out of the garage and clean it up. Need some way of getting minimum exercise over the next few weeks. And not running. I hate running.
Also ordered ingredients for about 160 pints of beer. Who knows when or even if they’ll turn up (edit: Thursday, apparently) but if I’m going to be stuck at home I might as well work on increasing my stock levels. Besides, the small businesses like the brewing suppliers I use need all the support they can get.
At 10pm an email comes in saying all staff who could must stay away from the office and WFH, and that anyone who couldn’t needed approval from top-level management to come in.
Tuesday
Get up, drop kids off at nursery and school. Changed into my cycling kit and headed out on an 8-mile bike ride before work. Helped clear my head a bit; will try to do that as often as possible.
First day of everyone WFH and things don’t go horribly badly; a few teething issues around access for some people to resources due to AWS security group constraints no-one had even thought of, let alone expected to be a problem. Video calls are horrible; too many people using consumer-grade internet connections at once with high contention ratios. I’m getting used to talking to fuzzy clouds of pixels.
Emails come in from Sleeper Jr’s school; as of now all extra-curricular clubs are cancelled, along with all school trips and the school disco that was going to take place on Thursday. It’s closely followed by an email saying that all Scout meetings are suspended indefinitely. Later on the news reaches me that my brother and his wife are now self-isolating after he’s come down with a cough. Stay healthy, both!
Emails also from some of the small companies I’ve invested in through crowdfunding. They make for very sober reading. One expects a drop in orders of 80% as a result of the combination of social distancing and supermarkets prioritising essential staples. Ouch. Wouldn’t be surprised if all of those small investments (all centred around the hospitality industry) are wiped out. My pension pot and a larger shareholding in my previous employer have taken a massive battering already, the latter having lost 60% of its value since I got the shares last summer, almost all of that in the last couple of weeks.
Wednesday
We’re running low on Weetabix. We’ve not been excessively stockpiling, but it seems like we’re the only ones. There’s a queue on the Ocado website of 2 hours just to make a change to a basket. As I’m walking Sleeper Jr. to school, another email; the kids’ swimming classes are cancelled indefinitely too. Yet another small business who are going to struggle; they’re taught by couple of swimming instructors who hire a local school pool at weekends.
As the day goes on we think of more things that we need to add to the shopping. There’s a queue of 15,000 people waiting to get into the Ocado website, 2 hours long, and I keep getting to the front while I’m working only to lose my spot because I didn’t notice quickly enough. Frustrating. Even more frustrating is when the queue is replaced with a “We’re closing the site until Saturday” message.
5pm: Notice is given that schools are going to close. That’s going to burn through the savings pretty quickly if we have to pay for childcare we can’t use and take time off to look after the little darlings. Hopefully we both have understanding bosses.
Work is blending into life too much. Admittedly there’s a massive deadline at the end of this week but I really, really hope I can maintain a better separation than I have so far; I can’t resist the temptation to poke the code i’m working on and get it that little bit more functional. I rather suspect from next week onwards all the days will be like this.
Tune in in a few days more to see if I’ve gone postal yet…
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