{"id":8039,"date":"2021-09-08T22:45:06","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T22:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/?p=8039"},"modified":"2021-09-09T15:32:21","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T15:32:21","slug":"534-days-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2021\/09\/08\/534-days-later\/","title":{"rendered":"534 days later"},"content":{"rendered":"
I had set my alarm early, but woke up before it went off. After leaving the office on 23 March 2020, I was going back. My company have asked for people so start formally returning from the end of September, but the office is already open for those that want to use it now. I figured that it would be good to test the water before everyone<\/em> is back. Meeting up with my boss, some colleagues and a whiteboard to try and make sense of where we are and where we are going work-wise seemed like a good excuse to go in.<\/p>\n

One of the best things about working from home is that for the first time in my life I\u2019ve been able to develop a regular exercise habit, either getting on my bike trainer or going for a run most days. At the weekend I noticed that this year I have covered more exercise distance than at any other point in my life. It didn\u2019t feel great to miss out on exercise today, despite being up earlier than usual to get ready for the commute. As I wandered from my house to the train station I was already missing being at home.<\/p>\n

\"Take

Take *that*, 2015!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Regretting

Regretting the journey, five minutes in.<\/p><\/div>\n

The station was dead. Usually there is a long queue for the ticket machine; I expected this to be longer than usual if people had ditched their season tickets. But there was nobody there. The car park was nearly empty. On the platform, where previously there would have been hundreds of people milling about I counted less than 20.<\/p>\n

\"Where

Where *is* everybody?<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Barely

Barely anyone to the left of me\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\u2026barely

\u2026barely anyone to the right.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have heard horror stories of people being stuck in COVID carriages where fellow passengers had long since abandoned their masks. Happily, this wasn\u2019t the case on my journey, with about 95% of people that I could see all sporting masks of various shapes and sizes. The train was extremely quiet, and although we picked up what seemed to be quite a few passengers all the way into London Euston, I ended up getting to the end of the journey with a still vacant seat next to me.<\/p>\n

\"Oooh,

Oooh, new trains!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Taken

Taken as we pulled into Euston. I wasn\u2019t the only one with a vacant seat next to me.<\/p><\/div>\n

At the other end, the usually bustling streets of Euston Road were far less busy than usual, and the tube station was quiet too. I almost had to double-check that it was<\/em> the middle of the week.<\/p>\n

\"Euston

Euston Road, as it usually looks on a Sunday.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Euston

Euston Square tube<\/p><\/div>\n

\"It

It looked like this up and down the train.<\/p><\/div>\n

Arriving at Moorgate was discombobulating. The modernisation work on the station had come on significantly, and there is now a shiny new entrance that I had to navigate. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings and point my feet in the direction of the office.<\/p>\n

\"A

A shiny new Moorgate, emerging from the construction work.<\/p><\/div>\n

At the office I was greeted by a new layout in the lobby, with plastic screens shielding the receptionists and a large temperature sensor that had to give me the all-clear before I could be let in. My pass didn\u2019t work; I had become a permanent employee during lockdown<\/a> and needed to get a new card that reflected my change in employment status. After a little bit of admin to validate that I really did still work there, I was given my new key and was let in.<\/p>\n

After so long out of the office, it felt strange to be back, but also like I had never been away. Everything was pretty much just as we had left it over five hundred days ago, with only some additional signage to indicate that we had been through (or are still in) a pandemic.<\/p>\n

\"I\u2019ve

I\u2019ve missed this view.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of my IT colleagues were in the office, and I found myself listening to a conversation that someone was having with a coworker in Johannesburg. I wandered over to contribute to the discussion, and realised that this<\/em> is the sort of thing that I had been missing out on. With a handful of us in the office this kind of \u2018distraction\u2019 was valuable, but with more of us it could easily get frustrating; I was reminded of times where I had sat at my desk with noise-cancelling headphones covering my ears, playing ambient cafe sounds<\/a> to drown out the words around me.<\/p>\n

One of the perks of going in before everyone else returns is the free food and drink currently on offer. It was brilliant to get a good<\/strong> morning coffee again along with a cooked lunch. I found out that I\u2019d turned up on bean burger and curly fries day \u2014 perhaps not the best idea when I\u2019d done less exercise than usual, but I had to have them. I\u2019d missed them.<\/p>\n

\"Bad,

Bad, but *so* good.<\/p><\/div>\n

Wednesdays are usually meeting-free but today was unusual in that we had a couple in the diary. We fired up our Surface Hub in our collaboration space and joined a \u2018town hall\u2019 discussion with the CEO of our Angola office. It felt good to be sitting there with other people as we watched the session, with everyone else dialling in remotely, particularly as we were passive participants in the meeting. One of our colleagues wanted to ask a question, and it was interesting to see him go back to his desk and dial-in to Teams separately to ask it.<\/p>\n

Getting together in the afternoon with a few of my colleagues to talk about the bigger picture of what we are doing was superb. This<\/em> is the reason to go back. We didn\u2019t solve it all \u2014 far from it \u2014 but we offloaded a lot of our thoughts to each other and made an excellent start.<\/p>\n

I ended the day at around half-six, the last person in the office, and wandered back to Moorgate. Again the tube and train were very quiet, although I did see quite a few more maskless travellers than in the morning.<\/p>\n

I think it is going to take some time to get a balance back again. Working from home permanently is definitely not ideal, but I am not sure how much time in the office is<\/em> the sweet spot, particularly when half of my immediate team are located in other countries. But I\u2019m confident we\u2019ll work it out, and I\u2019m glad I took the first steps back today.<\/div>\n

I had set my alarm early, but woke up before it went off. After leaving the office on 23 March 2020, I was going back. My company have asked for people so start formally returning from the end of September, but the office is already open for those that want to use it now. I […]<\/div>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8039","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-work","7":"h-entry","9":"hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6793,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2021\/02\/02\/exercise-or-sleep\/","url_meta":{"origin":8039,"position":0},"title":"Exercise or sleep?","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"2 February 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"It was a struggle today. 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The weekend of cycling didn\u2019t look that dramatic on paper but it took its toll, and I found it to be an effort to string coherent sentences together. I\u2019d felt ill on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Weeknotes"","block_context":{"text":"Weeknotes","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/weeknotes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"I go past this bus stop every day when I walk to my office. 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