Months of quarantine on end
10 Apr 2020I’ve been working at home since the end of January. This was a company directive to prevent the spread of COVID19.
Remember when I thought I’d be writing about technical topics? Haha, how naíïve I was! No, instead I get to write about how I’m stuck at home for literally months on end with no contact with other people.
Although that’s not actually been a hundred percent true. I’ve had to take my bikes to get their shaken (“sha-ken”, not as in “not stirred”–or 車検 in Japanese), or biennial inspection certificate. I managed to time things appallingly badly and now both of my bikes have their shaken due at exactly the same time, which means I have to cough up an especially large amount of money all at once. Before I forgot about the scooter’s shaken a few years ago, they had shaken due a couple of months apart, which was nice for softening the financial impact. On the upside, at least this time round, I rode the scooter to the shop instead of having to have them send a tow-truck out to pick it up (and incidentally charging me an extra ten thousand yen for the service).
The other exciting bit about that is that the shop that takes care of my scooter is located in Tokyo, which is the coronavirus hottest hot zone in Japan. Fortunately it’s located on the edge of Tokyo now. It used to be located in Eifukucho, which I can only get to efficiently on the train by going through Shibuya station, which is a major tourist hub. Now it’s located near Narimasu station, which I can get to by hardly going to Tokyo at all.
So anyway. Apart from my exciting, taking-my-life-in-my-hands trips to motorcycle mechanics, I’ve been stuck at home, with my only trips outside being to grocery stores and back.
You’d think it’d make me super-productive! And it did, at the beginning. I had nothing to do but to concentrate on work. I got so much done! I got so much done that I simply finished all of my tasks at work, which was great, but then I had nothing left on my TODO list. Imagine that.
Now I’m stuck in a kind of work limbo, waiting for new projects to come down the pipeline. I could very well help out my more junior coworkers with their tasks, but the problem with that is that I’d finish their tasks ten times faster than they’d be able to manage it, and they wouldn’t learn anything because I’d just go zooming ahead of them too fast for them to follow. It’s important to let them do the things I put all that work into making easy, and have their struggles with it, so that they hopefully get as good at it as I am. It’s better for me to sit on the sidelines and deal with their questions as they come up. Often the questions they have highlight things that I’d overlooked because I was so used to whatever thing they stubbed their toes on that I’d gotten really good at avoiding it altogether. Experts, always get a tyro to try out the stuff you made! You’ll be amazed at the stuff you think is easy that’s actually very hard.
What that makes me think, though, is that I’m less being paid for the work that I do than the knowledge which is in my head. The more junior guys are trying these new things out, but they’re just stuff that I already did years ago and nobody was interested in using. So when the junior guy runs into some obscure obstacle, he asks me about it and I say, “Oh wait, I remember dealing with this when I was playing with it in 2017, here’s what the problem is.”
So that’s the current state of the work I do. I keep working on things that nobody’s ever going to need…until they hit the point where they finally decide they need those things. And then someone else gets to redo the research that I already did years ago, and sometimes, they remember that I was playing with that stuff years ago, and sometimes they don’t, and then they get surprised when I just volunteer advice which turns out to be correct.
But the other upside of that is that I get to make lots and lots of mistakes which don’t affect anyone. I get to make all the mistakes so my co-workers don’t have to, I guess. Which is nice in its own way.