Things I’ve Noticed Working from Home.

In the first few days since the “Safer at Home” order was issued in my state there were a number of news articles on the radio about what people would do with the free time they’d have.  There were observations that there would be a baby boom nine months from now.  Or that publishing houses would be flooded with novels that people had written about being quarantined, or at least while being quarantined.  One of my colleagues at work asked me, as we were finishing up our efforts to get our teams able to log into the system on Monday and continue working, “What language are you going to learn now?”  

I didn’t have any plans to learn a new one, I told him.  I’ll probably just practice the ones I’m already trying to learn.  

“Which ones are those?” 

Japanese, I replied.  And Spanish.  And Korean.  In that order, by which I meant the ordering in which I was comfortable in trying to use.  

He laughed.  “Well, now you can try add another one.”  

One of the news articles I heard was with a woman, a writer I think, maybe a historian, who was discussing the idea of people writing journals while being quarantined.  She said something which I found interesting, which was that when people write journals they often think that they have to be profound.  That they have to write something important.  That they forget that the most important, well regarded journals were those where the writers detailed their daily lives.  She lamented that often in the past journals were often destroyed at a person’s desk, particularly with women’s journals, because it was assumed that they didn’t have any such important thing to write about.  

So, with this point of view in mind, I’m not going to try to write about anything important.  I’m not going to make an effort to be profound.  Or at least not too profound.  I am going to log what I’ve been seeing and feeling around me that has struck me as odd and interesting and hope you find it so as well.  

So…  Here we go.  

It’s harder to see on my walks these days

I’ve taken a morning walk of 20 to 30 minutes from years now.  Either around my neighborhood or around the campus where my office is located.  But it’s harder to see what’s around me these days.  

Because of the mask I now wear.  

I started wearing it more because my face was cold on my early morning walks.  More than because I was afraid of catching the virus from someone else.  I walk earlier than I did before, around 6:30 in the morning rather than around 8 AM when I was going to the office.  The cold was irritating my lips and nose.  

I had some surgical style masked I’d purchased for a trip to Japan a couple of years ago, when I had a cold at the time of departure.  So I grabbed one figuring it would do the trick in keeping my face warm.  And it worked.  My breath did a wonderful job of keeping my nose and mouth nice and toasty.  

But it also caused my glasses to fog up.  So much so that I was afraid of tripping over a crack in the pavement or stepping off a curb unexpectedly.  With my glasses off, though, it’s only marginally better.  With my eyes I have difficulty making out details beyond the reach of my hand extended forward.  But I can at least tell if cars are coming toward me before I cross the street.  

So I walk in something of a haze.  Something like the information haze that has grown over us regarding what is going on with the virus.  I know things are out there.  I just can’t tell what exactly they are until they’re right on top of me.  

Toilet Paper but why not Soap?

I’ve looked in askance at the online videos of people tearing into a palette of toilet paper, making it disappear in but a few moments along with the rest of you.  But I’ve noticed other shortages, and some lack of shortages, that have had me scratching my head.  

Like soap.  The first time I went into the store after the County of Los Angeles, along with the Cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and my hometown of Pasadena, announced their “Safer at Home” order, which was followed by a state wide quarantine a couple hours later, I saw the denuded shelves where the toilet paper was usually kept.  I wasn’t worried.  I had five rolls at home at the time, which at my rate of usage, would last me 8 to 10 weeks.  I should, I told myself, be able to buy more at least once in that time, I told myself.  

What I really wanted, though, was soap.  I had one bar left and while I washed my hands frequently before, the encouragement to do so by all the health advisors that could be stood before a microphone made me worry that I would use it up before I had a chance to get more.  So I hustled past the empty toilet paper shelves to where the soap was kept. 

There was plenty.  The shelf was nearly full.  Including several packs of my favorite variety.  Not wanting to be a hoarder, I took one pack, then went to see if I buy some chips to snack on. 

I couldn’t.  Those shelves were also completely empty.  Why?  Not just, “Why would there be a run on any kind of chip or cracker?”  That fell in the same category of question as, “Why would there be a run on toilet paper?”  

It was, “Why would there be a run on toilet paper, but NOT one on hand soap?”  Hadn’t all the health experts been repeating again and again that the best defense against catching the virus was frequent hand washing?  With the two bars of soap I had in my shopping bag, I had armed myself more effectively against getting sick than if I had bough a family size bag of tortilla chips, or one of those twelve roll packs of toilet paper.  

And dry roasted peanuts.  Gone.  Every time I go.  At least in my store.  Today was the first time I saw a jar on the shelf in two weeks.  A generic brand of the store I go to.  I bought it.  

But honey roasted peanuts?  Plenty.  Dozens of jars.  Did I miss a news article that dry roasted peanuts lower your rate of viral transmission by twenty percent or something?  

And California Mix vegetables.  The frozen vegetable combination of cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots.  One of my favorites.  And a favorite of people staying at home to avoid catching the corona virus, too.  I can buy brussel sprouts if I wanted (I don’t).  And I can still get peas and carrots (which I do like).  But not the white, green, and orange combination of vegetables that I like.  At least not with the same frequency as before.  

And I don’t know why.  All I can do is check the frozen food aisle whenever I go to the store and snag the errant overlooked bag that might be there on occasion.  

Work Belongs in the Office

In the past, I used to have a bit of envy for those people that could work from home.  The advantages were obvious.  No traffic.  No dress code to worry about.  Lunch and snacks were a few steps away in the kitchen.  The time and money saved and the conveniences made it look like an ideal situation that I was unfortunately not going to experience.  

The Corona virus changed that.  We were warned to create a plan to have our departments able to get our work done from home.  We were given two weeks to have something ready.  

Four days later, the state issued its stay at home order.  

My department was fortunately ahead of the game.  We had already started implementing a paperless system, which was necessary to work away from the office.  Half the department was already using it.  But it was still a wild ride those last two days in the office.  Trying to do a week and a half of planning and training and set up in two days.  We got it done.  And the following Monday people started reaching out to our network from home to do their jobs.  

Two weeks later of overseeing this effort I am firmly convinced of one thing: work belongs in the office.  

The last two weeks have been the most stressful I can remember in my working life.  I start my day at 8:30 AM while working from home.  From the moment I log into the system it’s going from one email, text message, system alert, phone call, to the other.  Working in the office on a daily basis was something of a marathon.  You had the goal of getting the work out for the day and eight hours to get there.  

Now, it’s a sprint.  It’s the same distance, the same goal, and the same amount of time to get it done.  But now I’m going hard and fast the entire time.  It would be like running a real marathon in 100 meter sprints.  

I’ve heard via the internet of something called the “quarantine 15.”  A reference to the fifteen or so pounds people are expected to gain due to staying at home all the time with nothing to do but eat.  

Me?  As of last Friday, the end of my second full week of working remotely, I’d lost a little over three pounds.  Mainly due to forgetting to eat until after I log off for the day.

Part of this is due to pushing our remote way of working into the system sideways all in one day.  Since then each week has been dominated by the disaster of discovering some error or miscalculation that now has to be fixed on the fly.  And they are getting fixed.  But only to find another one just behind the one you’re working on now.  

I still have the hope that we’ll work it out and come up to something like normal.  Something tells me that everything will get smoothed away the day before they announce the quarantine is lifted and we can all go back to work the way we were doing before.

But beyond the stress of essentially doing the equivalent of changing the tire of a moving car, there has been a mental adjustment I’ve been trying to make.  Or series of them.

For example, the first few days, when I stopped to take a breath, I noticed that I was antsy.  A nervous sort of sense that something wasn’t right.  That something was…  Not there.

It finally hit me when I left the radio going as I was setting up my company laptop.  There was no sound.  No voices.  It was too quiet.  In the office there are all sorts of noises.  Printers humming to life, people talking to each other, on work matters or just catching up after the weekend, phones ringing.  The sounds of people.

Now, there was just me, the sound of my keyboard, and the occasional curse as a fresh disaster came my way via some text or email.  

I thought to just keep the radio on as I worked.  But this had the effect of making me depressed as one story after another about the impact of the virus came over the news program.  Corona virus this, Corona virus that.  These many people died today.  It may be extended to this month.  This is the damage the isolation is doing to our psyche. 

I tried switching to music, but it was too distracting.  After a few days of searching, I finally hit upon the solution: I started streaming Japanese morning talk radio.  It was perfect.  Their tone was cheerful and friendly, a feature of broadcast morning shows around the world I guess.  I could understand enough to understand some stories (Yokohama was hit with an unexpected cold snap, with snow falling a few days last week).  But when I focused on my job, it became background noise.  Friendly, human sounding background noise.  

But mainly, it’s the sense of invasion.  Encroachment.  The virus has not only forced me to stay at home.  But it has pushed my job, which was kept safely at a distance at a place designated for it, into my home as well.  The place I went to relax and refresh after working.  

I know I’m lucky to have a job right now.  I just want to go to the place where it belongs.  And have everyone else do the same.  

Once its safe to do so.