For this past year we have all been taking part in a strange experiment. We are working .. from home. It was a great idea at the time. Our commutes were reduced to length of time it took us to yawn our way over to our laptops. We rearranged our book cases to ensure the uncracked spines of “Ulysyss" and “Eat pray love” were visible and all of your “scream your way back to sanity” books were safely out of shot. We have even developed a whole new business terminology to accompany our new zoom life.
For example if a colleague says “I’m don’t have any capacity for that today” what they really mean is: I’m a little hungover in fact this very phone call woke me up. If they use a zoom background they are a hoarder and cannot show you how they live and should they say their camera isn’t working they are almost certainly using the toilet.
But it’s fair to say that the novelty wore off quickly. We still had the same if not more work to do and the added responsibility of being at home. The postman wants to chat and I have to clean those window and oh not another zoom!!
Yes it’s lovely that we don’t have to wear our suits to work any more but that’s just as well because they all seem to have shrunk… haven’t they?
Yes it was wonderful that we could bake bread on our lunch break or watch The Simpsons while replying to emails. But that other place we used to go was nice too, we’ve forgotten what was it called again. Oh that’s it. Outside. We stopped using it because we don’t have to go anywhere and oh .. there was all of that rain…..it’s just to much.
But something happened this week that made us all shift our gaze from our laptops. We had what in Ireland we call; “weather”. It was very late and we weren’t quite sure at first. But yes the sun was out, it was warm .. we didn’t need the jacket but we’d ring it just to be sure … it definitely is Weather.
The hibernation was over and we emerged from our zoom cocoons bleary eyed and blinking at the orange ball in the sky. We remember this!
Immediately the hunter gatherers among us rushed to the butchers to buy their body weight in raw meat which they hope to incinerate in their back gardens in the great tin foil fulacht fiadh … the barbecue. Watching the lighting of a barbecue is the closest most of us will come to watching a bomb disposal expert work. A little trolly full of flammable stuff that never seems to Catch fire so other flammable stuff is added. Then we reach the tipping point where the thoughts of so much flammable stuff catching fire is truly terrifying. But we are sustained by that little bit of hopefulness that sunshine brings. After all, we have survived a pandemic so let’s roll the dice with a small, localised explosion and e-coli.
Warm weather always brings a new found sense of adventure. When we worked in offices it was on sunny days that we would take longer lunches or leave slightly earlier. It is always hard to only get to enjoy the beautiful weather through a window, but it is more difficult when that window is your own. We’re at home. The only thing keeping us from enjoying the sunshine is lack our of ingenuity.
It is worth knowing that the webcam of a work laptop can be disabled using a simple household hammer. For work calls if you raise your voice just slightly your line manager will never know that you are attending this virtual one-to-one from the shallow end of a swimming pool.
If you insist on working outdoors a zoom back ground of your own living room in a dishevelled state will fool your colleagues into thinking that not only are you at home but perhaps you are working too hard and maybe should be sent flowers, all the while you paddling on Dollymount strand.
That’s not to say we won’t be caught out. If, between the morning-meeting and the afternoon-meeting you develop a tan, just tell everyone it is liver failure. It’s not ice-cream on your lip it’s a coldsore and if you accidentally answer wearing sunglasses just point out that you have always been coolest one in the office and they simply have to get used to it. Of course the confident among you might find it simpler to say “It’s a nice day I’m stopping work to go outside”.
While it is a vary daring move it would be awful for our employers to forget the many times during this strange experiment that we didn’t stop working. We didn’t have to go out to grab a sandwich so we just kept working. The rainy days when we couldn’t go out so we just kept working. We had no bus to catch so we just kept working. We woke up early so we started working. It would also be shameful for them to forget that when they had to close their premises, we welcomed them into their homes and onto our wifi. It might even be good to remind them that as long as they are under your roof they will have to abide by your rules. But does that ever work?
Get out, explore, breathe…. we’re nearly there.
Written on 3 June 2021
Originally Broadcast on The Business Show on RTE Radio 1 on 5th June 2021
Audio produced by Liam Geraghty
