Some sunny day, we’ll meet again by the water cooler

WHEN last we spoke on this page, I sat in an office in the centre of Glasgow sipping takeaway coffee, for which I had queued cheek by jowl with people whose state of health was none of my business.

A hand sanitiser unit had just been installed in our workplace – fancy! – and some of the more excitable among us had started to wonder about the wisdom of the large revolving door at the front entrance to our building.

In my corner of the office we dubbed it the Corona Tombola. Ah, innocent times. I wrote about the prospect of office life one day becoming proscribed and of the jolt to our institutionalised systems which home working might bring.

How long, I wondered, before our discipline dissipated as, freed from the gaze of organ grinders, we reverted to lazy weekend mode?

Pyjamas

And, if the office swivel chair were to yield to the living room sofa, how long before we turned up for duty in our pyjamas and remained in them all day?

Released from the strictures of office routines, I predicted that our weekdays would be thrown off-kilter, working hours would become fluid – perhaps even unmeasurable – and the dividing lines between work and home life fuzzy at best.

Well here we are – and there I was at the top of this column in my dressing gown. After a sentence or two I gave myself 15 minutes off to shower and to clothe myself in day-off clobber.

In an hour or so, when the dishwasher has done its thing, I will probably award myself more time away from the job to empty it – and to chuckle at the notion of the office worker excusing him or herself mid-morning to nip home and attend to kitchen chores.

That such minutiae even form part of the day-to-day in the context of the bewildering pace of the coronavirus news agenda feels bizarre.

Critical events, surely, find journalists at the scene or, second best, in the newsroom gathered round the TVs.

I was, I confess, on another wee break – soaking in the bath doing the crossword, to be precise – when the news broke on my phone in another room that the heir to the throne had tested positive for coronavirus.

‘Finger on the pulse …’ my co-workers might have remarked acerbically at my obliviousness to news which was ten minutes old before I was alive to it.

I wonder how they are doing. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen or spoken to many of them in weeks.

More flexible routines afford exiled office workers like me the chance to steal away to supermarkets at times of the day more conducive to success in finding upwards of 25 per cent of the items on your shopping list.

I downed tools for what was supposed to be 20 minutes one morning this week for an incursion to Morrisons and returned 40 minutes later in a state of some despondency.

You try finding a witty birthday card in a mobbed supermarket aisle one foot wider than the 6ft social distancing minimum. Try scanning the headlines on the news-stand as a queue forms behind you, waiting for you to remove your potentially contagious chassis from the scene so they can pick up a paper.

Try scanning the packs of frozen hash browns for glutenfree assurances when there’s a mum and two kids at the ice cream and moving towards oven chips which fall well within your exclusion zone.

Have a crack at locating eggs when you don’t know where they’re supposed to be in the first place, can’t stop to read the labels on empty shelves because there’s a slow-moving cougher in the vicinity and looking for assistance will only prolong your stay, thus increasing your chances of becoming a carrier.

And give all this a go while nursing a mild, common or garden cold, the like of which I have tholed for a day or two almost every winter of adult life, and know what it is to be a social abomination.

I half expected to hear a police helicopter circling above as I got out of the car in Morrisons car park.

It’s been months since I coughed, years since I ran a high temperature – yet blowing my nose could clear a fruit and veg area in a heartbeat.

Back in the room which, for the foreseeable future, is designated ‘office space’, it is one of life’s little cosmic jokes that this is the place where wifi sputters out at the door. Thus the little dance as, taking the laptop in my arms, we waltz into the hallway in search of internet juice to send my emails on their way.

And yet, for all the distractions and maddening details of decamping for who knows how long to chez nous for work purposes, it is with considerable pause that I take stock of my almost ridiculous good fortune in this global emergency.

Demanding

Mine is a job which remains viable and can readily be accomplished at home. I dare say efficiency levels will improve in time.

But this morning as I stood in my dressing gown preparing to convey toast and jam to my work station, I was regaled by my co-social distancee with tales of Glasgow GPs conducting telephone surgeries with anxious patients over the sound of fractious infants demanding attention, of dogs barking and nerves in confined spaces unspooling.

She narrated vignettes from social media of the call centre workers evacuated from their natural habitats and now forced to be at home while they lock horns with grumblers.

Their homes, you would imagine, were the sanctuaries to which they’d retire to decompress from the day’s bickering. No longer.

‘This is unacceptable,’ one such worker was told this week. ‘Now will you please let me speak to your manager.’

‘Naw,’ she replied. ‘But I can put my da’ on if you want.’

In fortuitous contrast, my work comes to you from a peaceful household where five magpies gather for socials on the lawn and squirrels queue on the garden wall for handouts from the kitchen.

In a minute I’m going to award myself some more time off to administer monkey nuts.

Mothballs

A little later, perhaps, I will email a few colleagues, see how they are doing. In days gone by – until about three weeks ago, actually – we’d email each other all the time though we sat feet apart.

We exchanged the tittletattle we preferred not to say aloud and reacted to it with barely perceptible facial gestures which, in the office environs, formed almost a patois of its own.

Now we are scattered to the four winds, holed up in back bedrooms, at dining tables or in attics and our private sign language is in mothballs.

And, though our predicament may bear no sensible comparison, there is something of the trenches in our collective endeavour. Indeed, from the evidence I have gleaned, this is true of working-from-homers across the board and across the country.

We are, by nature, copers on these islands. We excel in extremis.

Armed with communication devices of an order of sophistication to make yesterday’s sci-fi writers wince, we march onward, even if it is only to the laptop on the breakfast bar.

We will endure, even if the thing to be ridden out is our own children’s racket.

And, though stationed in separate bunkers, we will be brought closer by this challenge.

Some sunny day, when we meet again at the water cooler, you will see it’s true.