Pivot yourself for new cliches

Iwish people would stop saying, ‘‘If you think things are bad now, they’re going to get a lot worse.’’ Talk about stating the obvious. For all our worldly exposure and participation in globalisation, we Kiwis were in a bubble living as blandly as a Val Doonican cardigan down at the quiet end of the world, basking in the tyranny of distance.

But in the last few years we have lost our herd immunity to disasters with earthquakes, mosque attacks, and now a pandemic. Living in uncertain times, when no-one knows what’s going to happen next, can make you vulnerable to soothsayers.

Fortunately, we were blessed with a captain who told the troops where we were going, didn’t waiver, and went with us over the top. The prime minister aced the first levels of Covid-19 and has been careful not to throw caution to the winds.

We bought her message of staying the course, with the payoff that Team New Zealand is seen as a collective country of compliant heroes, who boarded the yacht and won the equivalent of the America’s Cup.

Some groundhog days might have been better than others, as we forgot what day it was, and had to listen to an antsy Opposition party tool urging the country to get back on its tools.

Working from home became habit-forming as companies estimated money saved from closing down offices. If you’ve been told this is your new norm, don’t forget to claim work square-metreage for office space, heating, stationery, office furniture, and loo paper when you do your next tax return.

For all those Zoom calls when you have to lock your wandering toddlers or gimps in the broom cupboard lest they slither into shot, think about your background – and I don’t mean how you were brought up or the state of your CV.

So many have let their side down with background displays. It’s time to purchase literature, which on closer inspection will give you cred and make your audience think you a person of eclectic tastes and sound sensibilities.

If bookshelves take up too much space in your crowded home office, glue book spines on to a blind and pull it down to use as a backdrop during ADZCs (All Day Zoom Calls). Keep crime thriller genre to minimum, cull the chick lit, especially Ayn Rand, paste in a Photo-Shopped snap of yourself with a world leader, and scatter easy-tomove props such as a house plant, or an exotic musical instrument, eg a lute. (Please note, these guidelines have been brought to you by the director-general of arts and cul-chur.)

Get up to speed with the new jargon. At the beginning of this journey we embraced the term ‘‘practising social distance’’, a phrase that sounded like an orthodox rule, something a cult might adhere to.

The hackneyed term ‘‘community spread’’ brought back disturbing memories of fish paste, that noxious caviar of the working class that used to glue many a sandwich together. If we do return to work, we may have to keep SST (staggered start times) and prepare ourselves to be commandeered for a ‘‘shovel-ready project’’, unless you are movie director Taika Waititi, who is ‘‘red carpet ready’’ for a star war.

Remember to enter back into the workforce knowing that your circumstances have been through a process of careful ‘‘mitigation’’ (pronounced mudigation in NuZild speak).

Get a job working on the assembly line at a quantitative easing money-printing factory and ‘‘pivot’’ the new economy into deep secret pockets, justifying it because we live in ‘‘unprecedented times’’.