Working in a vacuum is its own kind of challenge

22 Feb 2020

I’ve now spent a month working exclusively at home, thanks to the Wuhan coronavirus scare. While my productivity has soared, my personal satisfaction has plummeted.

And then there’s my physical health. That’s taken a hit too.

So I’m working at home. I can concentrate on the tasks at hand extremely well. My desk in the office is right by the bucho’s desk, and he is prone to having meetings with his underlings where he spends inordinate amounts of time yelling a them about how incompetent he thinks they are.

(The incompetent person isn’t the underling. Just in case you’re wondering.)

So I don’t have to spend all of my time listening to an idiot yelling at someone who he thinks is an incompetent. That’s really nice. I definitely appreciate that aspect of working at home. If I decide to work on some project on my own, I can just do that and the work progresses really smoothly without interruption. That part is great.

The other night I went out to a local bar with my friend who went to the trouble of heading out to my neighborhood in order to spend some time with me. That’s what friendship is. We drank a bunch of beers, and after several of them he said, “Okay, last one for the road?” I was horrified. I said, “What, so soon?!” Then I looked at my watch: indeed, the hour had become late. I said, “Oh I understand: a week without human contact. That’s why I’m so appalled.”

He sympathized fully.

But one basic human need, no matter how neuroatypcal you might think you are, is contact with other people. I’ve had none of that at all the last few weeks. Work has kept me imprisoned at home, which is fantastic for preventing contagion from spreading, but terrible for the mental health of the people who have to work in those circumstances.

I’m a generally antisocial person. I understand this. I’m fine with this. My coworkers are, I assume, generally sociable people. They must be going absolutely nuts, not being able to talk with other people for so long. I wonder how they’re actually doing. Everyone’s been putting on a really good brave face. Several people are married and have families, and I assume they’ve been doing very well during this whole fiasco. But there are others who are single, and live alone, and I wonder how well they’ve been dealing with this forced isolation.

I hope they’ll be alright after it all ends.