Working from home… again

I actually quite enjoyed the COVID lockdown the first time around.

Before it came into being I was dreading it. How would I react to my routine of the past 30 years being disrupted? How would I feel being away from my office desk and computer for the next few weeks/months? Wouldn’t I miss all my office colleagues, even the ones I frequently found a pain in the butt?

But none of my fears came to pass. I could wake up in my own good time, take a leisurely shower – and an even more leisurely breakfast. Then move upstairs to my home computer and work until I broke off for lunch. Then take a stroll round the block, ostensively to exercise the dog; back to the keyboard for a few more hours, before I decide (Note: I decide… not anybody else) to finish for the day.

In the early evening, having avoided the mega-stressful commute back home from the office, I would take a glass of beer up onto the roof, where I invariably found my neighbour, George doing the same thing on his roof. Chat for 20 minutes or so, casual supper, hour or so of light TV then bed. What’s not to like about that?

I now see that we are being “threatened” – if that’s the right word – with another possible lockdown, in order to counter the second wave of the Coronavirus. That’s fine by me, but not so fine for poor old George. Yesterday evening he told me that Christine, his wife, wanted him out of the house. She claims it is unnatural for the breadwinner to do so from the confines of his own home. George is ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand he doesn’t want to upset Christine, but on the other hand he, like me, rather enjoyed the home-working thing last time it happened.

Christine is something of an enigma. It’s clear that she bullies her husband mercilessly, but to anybody else she comes across as so naïve, she makes Forrest Gump look positively streetwise.

To illustrate this, I was informed by our other next door neighbour – on the other side – Raymond the hairdresser, that he and his er… friend Juan met Christine in the street recently and informed her that he and Juan were going to get married. Apparently Christine beamed at the pair and said: “Ooh lovely, and who are the lucky girls?” To which Raymond and Juan replied in chorus and without missing a beat: “We are.”

But to return to the subject of lockdown, mark two. I actually don’t like the word lockdown at all. It infers authoritarian subjugation, with some petty jobsworth touring the towns and villages of our islands with a heavy bunch of keys, ready and willing to bang-up any curfew breaker in Corradino. No, I much prefer the term Voluntary Mass Quarantine, with the acronym VMQ. It’s not nearly so harsh, nor does it smack of a mediaeval form of imposition, VMQ it will be then.

So when it does get re-imposed, which seems rather likely, as the number of cases of COVID19 shows no sign of falling off, I will cheerfully resume the VMQ. Oh yes: bring it on, I love working from home. In fact why didn’t I – correction – my boss, think of this years ago?