COVID-19: Working from Home

We are spoiled for working from home. We have enough room that Shannon and I can both use speakerphone without disturbing each other. Our network has sufficient bandwidth that we can have high-quality video calls. Two of our options for workspaces are desks with nice chairs and plenty of natural light.

She was already working from home wrapping up her book. It’s published, and now she is beginning to market it. She’s also participating in a mentoring program and keeping one of her favorite clients on simmer. She might have been more busy if there’d been no isolation measures, but not much.

I’m quite fortunate to be employed by a health systems company that is working hard to help build hospitals all over the world, in a job that’s stable and means I still have a workday, regular schedule with meetings, and could almost pretend I’m simply choosing to work from home. I do have “Zoom fatigue” from spending about 6 hours a day on MS Teams without body language or spatial audio cues and, if anything, feel like work is more intense, now. I dare not complain! Most of my colleagues are coping very well. I’m particularly impressed at how many with young children, now at home, and working partners are handling their usual workloads gracefully. Too many with different employment situations are already suffering from economic uncertainty or worried about the near future.

Our department has moved some holidays from Christmas to May and June, giving us a number of long weekends. Somehow I still have so much introvert hangover that I am mostly spending this free time binging on TV and playing classic NES games (while Shannon builds her island in Animal Crossing).

This is one of a series of posts about my experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.