Man, the pandemic. That was *NUTS*, huh? We had a whiteboard and we had guesses for various things involved with how bad it was going to get. Every single one of our guesses, in all categories, was low. Even the guy who was really, really pessimistic. Well, for months we did things at work that involved going in masked, only working in rooms where you were alone… I did a bunch of work in a bay that had its garage doors open and I was the only guy in a room the size of a basketball court and I still felt paranoid about it.
Remember that sort of thing? I went home, I threw my clothes down the stairs before my decontamination shower… we put our groceries in the sun room except for the frozen stuff that just got wiped down… panicking about running out of toilet paper, running out of paper towels, running out of Kleenex…
Work shifted around us. The early months of “safe at home” had my meetings *EXPLODE*. Seriously, there were days that I had five meetings and each one lasted an hour. I realize now that that’s because there was very little we could do but a *MEETING* was *SOMETHING*. The sysadmins worked with the network guys and made a bunch of previously air-gapped lab servers into servers you could get into from home (only through the VPN, of course). Work evolved and stuff that used to require being physically there for a particular event became stuff you could do from your laptop. People only had to go in maybe three days a week for the really big stuff and that turned into two days a week and that turned into one.
My job *FINALLY* got transformed into one that I could work 80% from home in July or August of this year.
So, of course, management sent out the email that said “We’re going back to the office. November will be 100% office again.”
As such, Friday will be spent packing up all of my WFH stuff and loading it into the car and taking it into the cubicle where I will be doing work that we all worked very hard to turn into stuff that I could do from my basement.
Fair enough. I like my coworkers and it will be good to spend all day with them. I just, you know, really like having a commute of 2 minutes. And kitty breaks.
I hope that I will have fewer meetings.
So this will be the last weekend of the old world. We prepare for 2019 come Monday. Oh, and it’s my Nephew’s birthday. We’ll be going to Fargo’s. I got him a gift card to that place he likes, a smallish Lego set, and a “YOU’RE TURNING 1!” Elmo birthday card. I’ll tell him that we found the card in a drawer and we bought it two decades ago for his older brother. Maybe it’ll be funny.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “The Fly”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
Last Saturday I was supposed to go to a board game meetup. I had missed the last couple for assorted reasons, so I was looking forward to it. I woke up that morning feeling crappy. I thought it might have been a migraine or sinus headache, so I took some medicine. A few hours later, I was feeling worse, not better, so I decided to bail on the meetup. Almost a week later, I still feel bad. I think it’s RSV. I stayed home from work Mon and Tue, but I didn’t want to burn up a week of PTO, so I went back to the office. Hopefully I don’t get my co-workers sick.
My plans for this weekend involve not doing much at all. Just resting, unless I start to feel better.
Maybe next weekend I will be able to play board games again.Report
The memory care facility where my wife lives is part of a larger assisted living complex that has had a Covid outbreak. The two parts share quite a number of staff, which has been the majority of the cases. I haven’t visited for two weeks now. I realized abruptly that if my wife gets Covid, she still has staff to handle cooking, cleaning, laundry, and purchasing the things those activities require. If I get Covid, well, we abandoned our support structure when we decided to move three-and-a-half years ago. In-home support services are a modest add-on to my Medicare Advantage plan. Guess I’d better do that.Report
Take the chairs out of the meeting rooms. From experience, having to stand drastically shortens the meetings.Report
I have a commute of five minutes (I live about a mile and a half from campus). That’s great, though the drawback is the town I live in is really, really small, and it feels smaller now after the pandemic – in the before-times, it felt like nothing to drive to the next biggest town (~25 miles) for grocery shopping and stuff. The pandemic and extended road construction (especially on a bridge over a river, where for a time there was barely any railing between YOU and a 30 foot drop onto a sandbar) broke me of it; now going south to shop feels like an Expedition.
I didn’t like wfh though, but I suspect that’s (a) because I teach and (b) we weren’t given a lot of logistical support – like, I needed a whiteboard for one of my classes, I didn’t have a good set up in zoom to draw/write what I needed (my laptop had a tiny trackpad that wasn’t good and I couldn’t afford to buy one of the accessory drawing pads) and it also got extremely lonesome. (Happily partnered people/familes that are close to each other, they don’t know how good they had it then)
I went back to teaching in person as soon as we were allowed (fall 2020, though one of my classes had to be over zoom – too large for distancing in the rooms). This semester is the first one that’s felt at least semi-normal since Spring 2019. (Fall 2019 was not normal for me; my father had died in July of that year)
***
there’s a potluck at church (another return-to-normalcy I had missed) on Sunday; theme is “Tex-Mex” and I have a pretty good casserole with beef and salsa and corn and beans and tortillas and cheese I can make. That’s probably the main effort of the weekend.
I’ve managed to get the covid booster and the annual flu shot, sometime I have to game out getting the shingles series, while doing it at a time when I will have a couple days recovery time because everyone tells me that’s a rough vaccine. I had almost no reaction to the flu shot, and this covid booster gave me a brief fever (100 F for a couple hours) and a mild headache, a lot less than with previous boosters.Report
One small change in the site software, so… testing.Report