Home working!
Corona was just a light Mexican beer, best served with Lime. Wuhan was still the largest city in the world that no one had heard of (I still can’t believe it has a bigger population than London!) and social distancing was just something Sally made me do after I’d had a curry and was made to sleep in the lounge.
Lockdown has created a new phraseology. Unprecedented started the new wave. It was unprecedented the amount of times people were saying the word unprecedented. It also still amazes me that I still can’t spell it and need autocorrect, every time! This has been followed by social distancing, Covidiots, ‘new normal’ and my personal worst ‘side hustle’ Which makes people knocking out some jam or selling arts and crafts through Facebook sound like some black market, underground mafia run organisation. Anyone who invested in Zoom in 2019 doesn’t care if they’re on mute or whether they’re breaking up or if someone needs ‘a hard stop at two o clock’ The last is the new touch base, surely.
But one of the new phrases closer to my heart was WFH (working from home) A new phenomenon for most of the working world but something I had started to get used to for the previous 2 years. I’d worked out when I could sneak in a few episodes of Parks and Recreation or the Crown. I’d stopped feeling guilty if I went to the toilet and got lost in a rabbit warren of Facebook videos and returned to my desk 40 minutes later. I'm able to do this and not have to pretend that I didn’t feel very well as I sat back down and make the upset tummy action to my nearby colleague who was looking at their watch and rolling their eyes.
But then lockdown happened and my peaceful days of managing my workload had the hand grenade thrown in of children no longer at school and Sally joining the working from home team. It was fine in March and April as I was so busy sorting out all my clients that had been affected, be it rebooking, cancellation or refunds. But as the months crept on I had to balance the prospect of not giving too much away about my normal working day. I had to remain chained to my desk to present this elusion to ensure my days weren’t ruined when we returned to the way it was! You want to keep your spare hours free so you can catch up on the series you’ve missed, do valuable research watching travel programmes and read the odd book. Try doing any of those when your partner is trying to Zoom and your kids are trying to print anything off is tricky! Printers have managed to unite the country, unlike any politician or online movement, in the countries utter contempt for these machines. The cries of ‘just work’ have been a rallying call for home schooling parents up and down the land.
We need to protect ourselves from this so that when our partners return to work, and children are back to being educated by professionals and not stressed, clueless parents that are brandishing an HP 8250 inkjet and threatening to throw it into the street as it ‘just doesn’t work, it just needs to work, why can’t it just work’ can return to normal. This will mean not giving anything away so when they call during the day and ask what you’re doing they don’t lead with ‘how many digestives have you had’ or ‘what episode of … are you up to now’ This may give the impression that I sit at home watching Netflix, consuming snacks and generally not doing much. You would off course be incorrect. I work diligently and when required. However, I don’t get to have the half hour chats with Sandra about Robert in accounts by the printer. Printers that always work in the office, by the way, but never at home.
There are other problems with everyone being at home. I’ve had to start wearing a mask. Not to protect my family from me spilling my viral load but to stop me from eating. No wonder there were miles of queues outside TK Maxx and Primark after each lockdown, everyone had gone up a size.
We’ve also had to deal with the feelings of guilt. How can certain friends on social media’s 4-year-old perfectly bake a banana bread and my kids are running feral and have barely mastered opening yoghurts. I get the feeling of dread when someone drops in their Facebook feed that they’re now fluent in Spanish after an intensive 2-week course and then there’s the Instagram posts of inspirational memes accompanied by their recent jog statistics, highlighting the fact that you’ve barely mustered three figures in your daily step count.
But for those that have always been working from home we have a different perspective. There’s no novelty factor and when this finally becomes a distant memory we will still be at our desks fighting the urge to get another custard cream from the kitchen. When I do the big shop, I have to be really strict and not let any of these food types enter the building. We will no longer have to balance our busy working days without the need to factor in the prescribed daily amount of exercise, whilst calculating just how long the neighbours have been out and that they’ve got more bubbles than the Aero I haven’t just eaten!
Working from home may become part of the new normal, just saying that phrase makes me squirm, but I hope that I can return to my peaceful days work. Putting together dream itineraries and trips of a lifetime requires a sense of calm and not having to worry that the rest of my family think I’m sat about watching YouTube videos, it’s research of course but try convincing the kids this when you’re limiting their screen time.
So I hope you’ve all appreciated being let into the secret club. I bet your bosses are all regretting that fact that they didn’t do it earlier because they didn’t trust you! But guess what when you’ve not got Sandra chatting to you about inane rubbish for half of the day you can get on with the job in hand. Some of you may remain but for those that return to the commute and the office politics I wish you luck and all the best. I’m off to put together a beautiful tailormade trip for a client, but not before I sneak in a quick video of a cat sneezing.