So here we go, I’m all ready with my home office set up, from Monday everybody works from home until further notice. Nobody knows when the further notice will arrive, but from everything I’m reading, it might not be very soon.
If you want something to read, Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now is an interesting article that a lot of friends and contacts have been linking. It’s the first time I really pay attention to a pandemic, and I’m loving all the data sets that you find, I’ve been playing with this one maintained on GitHub by Johns Hopkins CSSE.
While back home in Italy everything is locked down, here in the UK there aren’t big consequences yet. Wondering if here they are incredibly smart or incredibly stupid, we will find out later.
The truth is that working from home doesn’t make a big difference in our line of work, I have been working with remote teams for more than 15 years, most of our life run through zoom and slack anyway. I do think that since it’s so easy for us, it’s smart for us to stay home, while people who can’t work remotely will have to keep moving. The less people around, the better, and while there are no limits to movement in the UK at the moment, I must admit that it felt a bit unpleasant travelling squeezed on the Central Line this week.
Meanwhile the local supermarket are out of pasta and toilet paper, but pretty much everything else is available.
I find this puzzling. In the next few days more toilet paper will be delivered, and, okay, those who were without will buy more toilet paper, but at some point we will reach saturation of how much toilet paper you can store in a house, right? And then what? What do these people know that I don’t? Is there going to be a big shortage of wood fibers used for toilet paper manufacturing? Oh well, we’ll see, meanwhile this from Euan is the funniest bit I read on the topic:
But no worries, I’m okay. I have plenty of toilet paper and enough pasta to last a few weeks. As you can see from the photo above I’ve plenty of booze and I’m planning to keep myself disinfected drinking plenty of Quarantini (a Quarantini is a regular Martini that you drink alone).
On the good news side, there will be plenty of savings. For the next few weeks there will be no lunches in restaurants and no shirts to launder (while the jury is still out on use of deodorant…).
Some say that this quarantine will mark a difference between those who can cook and those who cannot. I have a lot of interesting meals planned for the next few days.
That’s all for now. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.