At times like this, I feel like I am getting a tremendous amount of value out of my apartment. I work from home. I eat and drink at home. I binge-watch Netflix a lot more. Thanks to the many online meeting apps, I can even keep my distanced social relationship just by laying in my bed.
With traveling time to work now cut down, I am ahead by 2 hours each day. What would you do with 2 more hours each day? I sleep a bit more, I can make a few more coffee. It also means the fridge is less than 1.5 metre away from my home office. So raiding the fridge for snacks becomes a habit.
After developing a very healthy relationship with my fridge since working from home, I realized I needed to take back my body. I started going for run. Just today after a work meeting, I went out for a run in my local park. It felt great. But it wasn’t really a straight run that I used to remember. It was more like a run, dodge and run. Sometimes, it’s like a run, walk, run to the far side, take over and run again. It was almost impossible to run and still keep 1.5 metre distance from another person.
Dinner over Zoom was a hit. After a series of: “I can’t hear you. Can you hear me?” Or, “Your video is blank!” How many times have you had to go through similar rituals before your meeting starts?
Work meeting over Teams would go through the same series of: “Where’s Tina, is she on here?” Or when you start giving your project update and then suddenly realize, “Sorry I was on mute!”
When drinking over House Party, there would be a series of: So, what are we playing now? Or, why are you orange?
The other day I was on WhatsApp with my dad while my brothers were waiting on Zoom, “No, it’s spelt with capital ‘I’ not ‘Y’.” Dad tried entering the password again and still got it wrong. He was frustrated “I typed in ‘mam’ but it still says wrong password!” I repeated calmly “It’s ‘man’ not ‘mam'” By the time my dad got onto Zoom, we had already eaten half-way through our 40 free minutes.
It doesn’t matter what video call platform I am on, there’s always that few awkward moments when everyone stops talking and just keeps staring at each other with a blank face.
What about you? How are you finding this distanced social relationship?
Prior to this new social norm, trying to catch up with my social life or attending music festivals during the party season was already a challenge for me. Now that I am free of these activities, I managed to pick up things I had been pushing back. I started getting back to reading and gaming more. I picked up Wild Sheep Chase recently. I dived right into Final Fantasy Tactics too. How about you? Are you also finding yourself picking up things that you had procrastinated prior to this lockdown?