Shut. Down. EVERYTHING!
27 Jan 2020I’m now working at home instead of going into the office.
There’s been an outbreak of something new called Wuhan coronavirus, about which one can easily found out more on Google (and most likely will be able to do so in the forseeable future). It’s affected a large and growing number of people, and lots of people have already died from it, but officials in China have been doing their level best to contain the contamination, mainly by banning travel.
Well, they started out by trying to cover it up and arresting journalists who dared to print any stories about it, but eventually the authorities came around and decided to acknowledge that it’s a proper problem.
I work at a company that has a history of wildly overreacting to problems both major and minor. This time, they’ve decided to overreact to the Wuhan coronavirus, which has so far claimed one victim in Japan (not even a fatality–just someone who got a bit sick, and was caught by thermal sensors at Narita Airport, so the victim gets to enjoy a stay in Narita’s quarantine hospital), by imprisoning all of their employees at home for at least a couple of weeks.
Their reasoning for this is, of course, better safe than sorry, but they bolster their reasoning by saying that when there was a big earthquake in 2011, everyone did a perfectly good job of working from home for several months, during which the company continued perfectly normal operations.
Which makes me wonder why they bother even having offices at all. Let alone the hellish cram-as-many-bodies-into-the-tiniest-possible-space offices that they’ve been developing. Just let everyone work from home, all the time, as a completely routine thing. If the company can work just as well after a disaster with everyone working at home, could it not also work just as well not after a disaster?
Anyway, the company is now in disaster mode, despite the lack of an actual disaster. Maybe their decision to treat this as a disaster-in-the-making will ultimately be justified, because maybe this whole thing will turn into a proper disaster.
For my part, though, I’m going to enjoy the peace and quiet of not working in an overcrowded prison, with everyone else having meeting around me (or, as management no doubt thinks of it, “access to collaboration”).