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Today flew by with a tonne of meetings. Trying to make some changes to home office setup, namely ordered an adjustable standing desk and a balance board. Ways to avoid sitting still less. So used to walking from one corner of the office to the other to get to meetings. An 800 sq-ft apartment doesn’t take many steps to get around.
Continue readingMonday was one of the quietest days in a while. After the invigorating run on Sunday started to look for any budget home exercise equipment such as a treadmill or running machine. Wanted something that wasn’t too flimsy, but also easily storable and not something that would cost too much – are we going to use it after this over? I don’t know, probably not that much. But also, when is this over?
Continue readingEach day I’m going to be posting an update from past 24 hours of my experiences living in New York City during the coronavirus lockdown. So far I’ve been working remote since Thursday 12th of March with NYC seemingly progressively shutting down.
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Continue readingA week today was the first time I started working from home. In that time streets have definitely got emptier but not necessarily day over day, I think Monday was still the quietest. Started the day with a 9am call and yesterday was crazy at work as everyone seemed to start reacting to Coronavirus, so didn’t wake up early enough for a walk.
Continue readingTook a longer walk this morning in really nice warm weather. Made one stop at UPS to drop off a parcel, one woman in there ahead of us talking with the man behind the counter. The man and woman were discussing one of the variations of the only real conversation point right now. Everyone’s got one thing on their mind, but conversation can split in a few different strands from the central topic. This particular topic captured a couple – how quiet it is generally, and what do you do in the evening? After a while you start to go to bed early..
The walk was actually quite eventful, more so than expected. As we passed Trader Joe’s supermarket, there was a line wrapped half way around the block and then right down to the bottom of the avenue. It’s hard to judge how many people were in the line given people applying social distancing but I’ve never seen anything like that, much least at 9am on a Wednesday. I don’t really understand it, the initial panic buying proved needless and we went food shopping on Saturday without an issue. There had been suggestions from city mayor of a more rigorous lockdown but that was quickly dismissed by NY governor.
Work has been incredibly busy today. With my tech client, demand has clearly been there for laptops as people adjust to new working environments and styles. For the first time since starting to work remote we started doing video conferencing instead of audio only. This was helpful in adding a new dimension to the day.
Social highlight of the day? The walk in the morning and then a short walk in the evening to buy some beer and watch Survivor then Shark Tank. Wednesday evening is normally our ‘date night’ – we try and keep it free every week to hang and do something together. Since it is Wednesday we ordered food in, first time for not cooking this week. It’s a small thing but it’s about trying to keep routine as usual as possible – making Wednesday feel different from other days.
Danielle’s work was quiet today, which meant we had the TV on and a couple of laptops. Seemed to stretch the already dodgy internet beyond where it was happy. To solve for this I ordered a new router from Best Buy vs the crappy Spectrum provided. This in turn was the perfect lunchtime walk, a nice 20 minute stroll to Union Square.
Continue readingTrying to stick to usual routine. Got up at usual time, shaved. Enough time for a 30 minute walk before my first call of the day at 9.30. In less typical routine, practicing social distancing by making my own lunch today, for the first work day in probably years.
Managed to get another short walk in this afternoon in place of the usual lunchtime walk to get food. Cooked dinner for the second day in the row. Coming out of this quarantine I’m going to be a better cook!
Another walk after dinner- any way to keep active and avoid the apartment walls that are going to become all too familiar.
NY announced movie theatres, theatres, nightclubs (damn) and commercial gyms closed until further notice. All restaurants and bars are limited to takeout or delivery. During out evening walk we thought about how we’d continue to support local businesses – occasionally picking up or ordering food in from our favourite local restaurants.
Almost everyone chose to work from home today. Everyone’s saying they’ll come in on Monday but to be honest it feels like everyone is just waiting for the official “stay home” communication. It’s already happening in other places.
Continue readingToday the whole company did a trial WFH day to prepare for a potential coronavirus lockdown. The idea was to test if we can connect to the networks etc. For the most part everything worked OK, couple of VPN issues aside. Dell team had done an unofficial trial last Friday but it was different knowing the whole company WFH.
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