Forget toilet rolls – buy coffee
This is it. Coronavirus is changing everything for people in New Zealand, including how they work.
For many this means having to work from home. Fortunately I’ve been doing this for Stuff over the past six months and I’m still completely normal.
Leaving the work community behind doesn’t need to be isolating, but there are a few rules you should follow.
Rule one: Personal grooming. Try to keep your top 25 per cent clean and tidy. And keep an appropriate shirt handy. Successfully working from home is measured by how much of our home-comfy body we can reasonably crop out on video calls.
One time I was caught – ungroomed, unkempt – by a lastminute switch to video from telephone conferencing. I was forced to hold my laptop so close to my face that I was essentially just trying to broadcast my eyes.
I looked like an enormous, floating head. A shabby Wizard of Oz after a week-long bender, pleading for deadline extensions.
Rule two: Forget stockpiling toilet paper. (You can always convert your shower into a gravity-fed bidet if you’re really desperate.)
The important thing to stockpile is coffee. There is no office supply to rely on any more – you’re on your own.
(These days the first thing I do if I go to the office is grab a coffee from the machine. I stand there, jaw dropped, like a country boy marvelling at some awesome urban tech: ‘‘You mean you gets your eats by the Uber??’’)
Oh, and rule three: Remember to eat. Days lose shape when you work from home. There is no herd to follow, no workmates heading out to grab a bite. You get caught up in something then realise it’s 4pm and you haven’t had lunch or breakfast.
The same goes for rule four: Getting out of the house.
This is a trap – if you aren’t already booked to go out, you end up staying indoors for the entire day. The sun rises, sails across the sky, sets, but you haven’t budged from the sofa and your laptop and those papers strewn across your coffee table. Eventually you creep out like a ghoul into the dusk, looking for a wine to match with your Uncle Ben’s pilau rice sachet from the pantry.
Also, rule five: Remember the concept of shame. For some of us, the only thing that keeps us washing is the embarrassment of smelliness around others.
Remember shame – and for God’s sake, shower.