Work in the time of Coronavirus

[andrewducker]

Last Thursday (a week ago) Jane emailed her boss to say that she had a fever and so would be taking the day off. "See you tomorrow," she said. "Oh no you won't," he said, and reminded her of the brand new guidelines saying she had to work from home for 7 days if she was sick.

Because the guidelines said nothing about partners, I went in to work.

On Tuesday evening that changed. The advice became "If your partner self-isolates then you have to do so for 14 days". And so I started working from home yesterday.

I have a desk from Ikea (there was one other person on the bus, I sat at the other end. There were 12 people total that I saw in Ikea, staying 2m away from them was trivial). I have a network cable on the way which will get my desktop online, and in the meantime I have a I spent a chunk of today working out how to make Lync (the Microsoft chat application we use in the office) forward calls to my phone. (Thanks to Adam for tons of help there!)

In the day or so since that point large swathes of the company have been switched to working from home. A couple of thousand of us will, by Monday, be working remotely. I still don't like it as much as I do working in the office (you can get problems solved much faster when you can get three people in a room with a whiteboard for ten minutes), but it's definitely bearable. And I can listen to music without headphones while I do it.

As far as I can tell pretty much all of the large companies in Edinburgh are doing likewise. Hopefully they're doing it everywhere.

Even my parents are being somewhat sensible. My father was quite sceptical to begin with. But they have agreed with their regular walking buddies that all (12?) of them will spend the next two weeks self-isolating in their own homes, and then once they are past that point they can meet up as a group, so long as they aren't meeting up with anyone else. Which isn't perfect, but is better than I was expecting of them.

We're supposed to be having a family holiday in late June. I wonder what state the world will be in by then.

Comments

[gingicat]

I hope the fever is wholly unrelated to the Thing, and that all of you stay healthy.

[andrewducker]

In some ways I'd like to have the thing, and get it over with.

But I don't want to burden the health system if I get a nasty case of it.

[channelpenguin]

Exactly how i feel. Then i would know i could not pass it on, so could e.g. go visit my boat which is living with my 65 yr old friend (on blood pressure meds, catches every cough badly, looks after his 84 yr old mother ). But i NEVER get anything normallyn so knowing my luck if i get it I'll never notice.

I wish you all a speedy recovery.

[alithea]

I so get this - I only want to avoid it because if I get sick, Kev has to stay home for 14 days on statutory sick pay only and if he gets it, that would be bad because he has lung damage and gets chest infections all too easily as it is :( (Technically he should be self-isolating as high risk but his work kindly told him that if he doesn't go in when he isn't actually quarantined, he won't get even statutory sick pay!

[snippy]

Plus we don't know whether having it means getting it over with. What if it's like a cold and comes back as often as it pleases?

And there are reports of people who've had it and recovered but now have scarred lungs for the rest of their lives.

[dewline]

Seconding that hope.

[cmcmck]

Look after yourselves.

We're bug free here atm but it won't last.

[alithea]

Hope Jane is okay, take care of each other.

Is the holiday abroad? We have a holiday cottage booked for the start of June in the Dales and when I emailed the chap who owns it, he said he's working on the assumption it'll be fine, but then we were planning on hill walking and holing up in the evenings so if everything is shut, it isn't a huge deal as long as we've taken stuff with us.

[danieldwilliam]

I hope all four of you are okay.

[danieldwilliam]

We've been working from home since Tuesday. 90% of the staff entirely out of the office. The rest doing a day a week watch keeping.

We are fortunate that we are able to do that.

Schools are now closed so the Captain joins us schooling from home on Monday.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. Sophia joins us from Monday.

That's going to be interesting!