You have my permission not to feel bad about any of it.
Your podcast queue is overflowing. Your stack of books is gathering guilt dust. Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and HBO and and and and…
There’s so much content out there. Endless feeds to scroll online. Twitter. Facebook. Mastodon. Instagram. Tiktok. They’re all there with new content engineered to suck you in and keep you there.
There’s email. Both invited and not. Newsletters are stacking up with interesting information.
You have my permission to ignore it all. You have my permission to not feel bad about ignoring, deleting, skipping and moving on with trying to get through your life.
How do you manage through an environment where the business volume doubles within a 30 day period and at the same time you are forced to split the company into multiple teams. One team leaves the office and works from home for an undetermined amount of time, while the other two teams rotate in and out of the office. Then in order to meet the demand we need to hire staff and train them as quickly as we can using a plan and processes that did not exist two weeks ago.
Current State of things
This sums up exactly how things have been for me in the past 30 days until…?
An old golf course that has become a park. It was nice to walk through the rolling hills. Greens have become rough. Sand traps are holes. Only the water and signage remains as remnants of it’s former use.
It was a beautiful, warm spring day today with a light breeze and 70 degree sun high in the sky and kissing our faces.
After the walk, it was time to hold (and troubleshoots) the family video chat. FaceTime apparently didn’t care for our three parties so Zoom it was. The first words I said as I sent the invites out were, “This is entirely too much like work!”
It was very nice catching up with everyone and seeing how our various Easter’s had been.
The day ended with pork chops, asparagus and a fire in the rain.
Considering I’ve been self-isolating a bit earlier than when the quarantine became mandatory in my country (Spain), I’m now on Day 33 of my stay-at-home life. So I’ve started wondering, What would I do if this was 1990 instead of 2020? How would my ‘quarantine lifestyle’ be like?
I really enjoyed this post from Riccardo Mori about what it would be like to quarantine at home in 1990 instead of 2020. Our lives would not have looked much different.
I’d have lots of books to read (or finish reading) at my disposal.
I’d have tools and materials I could use to write my fiction, from an Olivetti electric typewriter, to a old IBM PC AT connected to a printer.
I could keep in touch with friends and relatives via landline telephone.
I could get the news and a bit of entertainment from TV, radio, and papers.
I could listen to vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes on the home Hi-Fi stereo, or in my room with my old Walkman. My parents owned a fair amount of records, there was always music in our home.
In 1990 I was still living with my parents, so if we wanted to spend time playing together, we would take out our boxes of board games and cards.
In 1990, I was 9 years old so my life would look drastically different. I’d be on a farm with dial-up internet. (We had 26400 bps on a good day). I wouldn’t be worrying about how my investments were doing, nor what I’d be making for dinner every night.
I wouldn’t be doing any of the adulting tasks I would now. I would be playing outside in the woods. Riding my bike around the dirt roads. Playing video games and reading books (I was a voracious reader.)
I would not be distant learning through any video chat. I wouldn’t be working on assignments online. There was barely a line then and it had to be turned on with a telephone line. It was still a process to go online.
Instead of trying to think about the obvious differences of being a child instead of an adult, I think about how my life then has prepared me for life now.
I have a lust for learning and reading. That started young and never stopped. I tore through books and read through anything I got assigned or got my hands on from our local library. Rural libraries are a gift and a lifeline.
I always had projects to do. When I was a kid, it was teaming with my brother in NBA Jam to keep track a record book of our accomplishments, or keeping track of where we were in Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana.
I had a steady supply of books and acres of open space to run around in and explore. I grew up on an 82 acre farm, then 40 acres. I could barely see a glimmer of lights at night from the neighbors house in the winter when the leaves were off the trees. It was 60 miles form the capital of our country, but felt an entire world away from everything.
I think about that all the time. Even more now as we’re sitting inside trying to figure out how to make dinner interesting and what pantry items we can use up today.
I think about how well growing up in the country prepared me for having to manage my own entertainment and fill the hours of my days.
The internet has certainly given more opportunities for exploration and communication. But learning to fill the unstructured hours of my youth prepared me well for the modern Quarantimes.
For the past two years I worked from home. I would sometimes go multiple days between leaving the house other than getting the mail or refilling my bird feeders. I was a government contractor support Webex, and a host of other teleconferencing options for a government agency you’ve heard of.
I am particularly well-suited for remote work as I’ve had the time (and money) to setup a space that’s not grandiose by any means but far surpasses anything I’ve ever found at a job site.
I have a hand-crank standing desk from Ikea that I dearly love. Not always because I want to stand, but I’m tall and often times desks aren’t high enough for me. It’s a huge open workspace I can lay out computers and notebooks and whatever I’m tinkering with at the time with room to spare.
I have two monitors setup amongst my small army of computers. I have two windows I can open for cross-breeze. I can control the temperature and amount of light at any given time. Those last two are the biggest benefits of working from home. Light and temperature control are so often overlooked at offices.
I’m also extremely introverted. I’ve got lists of books and projects and things to do miles long. To be inside is to be in my element.
My wife and I do not have any children so we are not trying to figure out how to keep small people entertained and educated all day, while stressing about them, and the coronavirus and the state of the world and… and… and…
It is a great irony not lost on me that on my birthday this year, in Mid-February I resigned from my full-time remote job to take another job in an office. Albeit very nearby which allows me to avoid all of the Interstates and Beltway hellscapes of Washington DC area traffic.
But it means going to work. In an office. Away from my perfect work place. Right at the start of this outbreak.
That lasted a week.
Then I was sent back home since I’m in a position where my job can be done remotely. Which I understand is a completely privileged position. The place where I work relies on people being in the office so many don’t have the same luxury.
Where did I decide to take a job right at the start of a global pandemic where millions of people are being sent home to work or quarantined in their homes?
Why, a company that specializes in remote collaboration of course! My new role is to oversee Webex and Zoom webinars for clients of all sizes including many large companies and government entities you’ve heard of.
I jumped out of the frying pan and directly into a seething volcano! It’s been a breakneck pace for the past week trying to get up to speed and onboarded into a new company, all the while everything is on fire!
This is how my week has been going. And how next week will go. And how the weeks for the foreseeable future will continue.
It’s thrilling being right in the middle or building something and racing to troubleshoot and put out fires with the technology platforms our business relies on. All while trying to learn the business and how it all works internally. I’ve had just as many people ask me this week how my first two weeks have gone as had said how much they appreciated my help with something or expertise I was able to provide. Or even having a warm body to hand a task off to and trust it would get done.
It’s a satisfying feeling knowing I am appreciated and that I can step in and immediately contribute. And those contributions aren’t overlooked. I’m no longer one number on a huge spreadsheet somewhere. A cost for a large government contractor to worry about spending money on. Worried I’ll ask for more or want more out of my position.
As much as it’s nice to know I’m an asset, it’s just as stressful. We use a lot of remote cloud-based applications with work and they’re struggling to keep up at times. Zoom and Webex overall seem to be doing a good job at the basics, but not a day goes by I don’t have a stream of alerts and notifications of various issues with both platforms.
Many of the them are simply limitations of capacity. There are only so many phone lines into a country. There are only so many ports for data and voice to travel across. Just as with cars and trucks sharing a road, the same is true for the internet. And we are going to test that infrastructure like never before.
I’m thankful to still be working. I’m thankful to still be healthy. I’m thankful to have been part of a religion for a time that pushed preparation and saving. It’s serving us well as we have safety nets and savings in place for ourselves.
We are lucky.
And if you made it this far, here’s a silly picture of Zoom multi-platform testing.
