Quarantine Work Life

We have 3 types of people doing quarantine right now.
1. Those who lost their jobs due to shelter in place order.
2. Those who work at home due to the shelter in place order.
3. Essential employees who are at work and are enjoying the lack of traffic on their way in.

Now to the first group...I'm so, so, sorry. Being unemployed due to no fault of your own has got to be the most frustrating thing in the world. It isn't that you can't work, it's that you aren't allowed to do work. It is like frustration on steroids.

The 3rd group have many subcategories in it, but they are the ones going everyday to work and really have more constraints at work due to this damn virus. You probably growl at the empty desks of those who were sent home to either work or to just not work. You  have to be reminded of social distancing every moment, even in the bathroom. It is a balance of worry and anger. And if you are in the medical field, you are pretty certain you are going to snap but you just aren't sure when. Your training keeps you centered. I applaud you from an appropriate distance.

For those of us in the 2nd group...I feel ya.  Our work schedule is a bit odd. We get up, walk out of our bedrooms, and then we are at work. No warming up the car, no traffic, no trying to find coffee or breakfast...we are just there in whatever outfit we decided to stumble out of bed in.

There is a certain ritual that involves going to work, one of which is complaining about the weather or traffic to our co-workers. There is the game of trying to not be too early or too late, just in time to show up and work. Then we have the ritual of getting that first cup of coffee, if anyone left us any...or we get to be outraged at how no one can make coffee and we make a fresh pot. If you have a water cooler, you see if anyone left you any water. And if they didn't, you change out the bottle in frustration...because only you seem to know how to change those things out. Then we have the social gatherings to find reasons to get out of, pot lucks, random food surprises...people getting upset because they didn't get enough of something or that so-and-so brought the same thing in for the past 20 years.

These are the things that occupy our time and mind. These are the glues that bind us in our mundane work lives.

Now we have no reason to be late, no one to blame for not making the coffee and water comes out of our faucet with no problems. There is no traffic, no dress code...all of our fundamental reasons to be pissed at our jobs is gone. If it is messy, it is our problem, if the garbage is not taken out we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Now people from group 1 and 3 are flipping us off in a big way and I can't blame them. We have a steady paycheck with no risk of leaving the house. In theory, we are living the dream.

But let me also say....we can't enjoy quarantine the way we want because we have deadlines during the day. Work and home are one and the same. We spin our chair around and we are home from work.  Then we have to start our "quarantine life"...

I'm even more convinced the movie Groundhog Day is a very dark comedy. We are in a routine with no end in sight.

I'm not gonna lie, the moment I go back into work I'm going to complain about how I miss working from home. My job also now knows that I can work from home...which is a bit unsettling. I'm also happy I have work to do at home.

But it has to be said...I'm tired of blaming no one but myself when things are not right. I need to blame someone else. Life, liberty and the pursuit of finding someone else to blame when things go wrong.

Also, this much together time makes us all a little extra squirrelly...

It's a hard Quarantine life...for us....