Home office

The last three days I stayed at home.  My doctor tried to talk me into sick leave, but what’s the point of boring oneself to death at home?  One might as well do some work if one’s work is suited to it.  Mine is.  Besides traveling, I mostly read and write.

So I stayed at home, following, in this particular instance, the guidelines published in the morning by the Federal Office of Public Health.  I pushed my bicycle aside to make space for the chair and reoriented my screen.  The bicycle looked a bit abandoned.  I haven't used it all week.  I was in no shape for it.

My company has only recently come around to the idea of home office.  One used to be allowed the occasional day at home only after a consultation with and the explicit approval by one’s direct supervisor.  This didn’t exactly sound like encouragement of desirable behavior.  Most people worked from the office.

Now, with Switzerland firmly in the grip of the corona panic, all has changed.  For my team, the home office target has been set to 75%.  There’s a category for it in the software that manages leave and absences.  Home office is the new normal.

Better than the sofa but not a real home office.

I don’t like home office.  I like my desk at work.  It is big and adjusts in height.  I also like my colleagues and the coffee and lunch without worries.  The noise in the open-plan space makes it hard to concentrate sometimes, but I have solutions for that, in-ear headphones for example.  I’m usually quite productive at work.

I’m not sure if I can replicate this from home.  My screen is a bit smaller, my desk doesn’t adjust, the internet is slower, and the bloody bike is in the way.  I was afraid I would be easily distracted at home, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  I rewrote an article about coronavirus and how our detectors are used to solve the virus’s protein structures without much self-interruption.

It helps that I’m feeling much better.  My nose isn’t running anymore.  I can think clearly.  I feel full of energy.  It seems that whatever infection I’ve been carrying with me is definitely on its way out, though it’s not gone completely.  The oncologist was still worried enough to shift the next chemo session by a couple of days.  It will now take place on Wednesday.

I’m not concerned about scheduling details anymore.  In the past, I had to set dates judiciously to fit them with my travels.  They’ve now all been called off.  The flight to California that was supposed to be a bit of a reward after the last chemo session went to the bin even before the American ban on travelers from countries with functioning testing programs against corona.  The workshop where I was supposed to teach was canceled a few days earlier when Stanford University went virtual because of a case on campus.  Now I have no limitations whatsoever when it comes to chemo dates.  They could be scheduled on any day.  But I’d still prefer them to happen soon and the whole thing to be over.