One of the perks and, as it turns out, perils of working from home (by choice) is that you can spend an inordinate amount of time in cafes, drinking coffee and trying not to eat cakes.
The perilous part of this comes when your café of choice shows up on a Covid-19 hot spot list. When an alert last week included one close to us, between two specific hour-long periods on a certain day, we spent a fair while racking our brains trying to remember what times were there, on which days.
Did we have the cheese toastie on the Monday? Or was it mushroom salad on the Tuesday? Sue’s sign-in app was no help as it had cleared its history (if it ever had one).
It was only when a friend who’d joined us at our cafe table called to say that she was self-isolating, that we knew for sure. So off we trotted to the Darlinghurst testing centre to go through the “wasabi moment” of having giant Q-tips stuck up our noses and were then given strict instructions to go home and not leave until we’d spoken to the NSW Health hotline.
I called the hotline and discovered the waiting time was 40 minutes but I could leave my number and they’d call me back. They did, a few hours later when I was on my Wahoo bike trainer, but I think my heavy breathing alarmed the woman at the end of the phone and she hung up.
The next day I tried again and this time a nice young man called Kevin took our details and told us that, before we’d be allowed out, we’d need to get tested again one week after the potential contact, and then again a week after that.
He also told us not to leave the apartment for anything other than the tests or any other medical emergencies.
Now, to backtrack a little, we already had a sense that the virus had us in its sights. The alerts for various places in the neighbourhood had been mounting up but we’d always avoided the critical times by a day here and an hour or two there.
Pretty soon notices went up in our lifts advising residents that the virus was getting closer and requesting everyone to wear masks in lifts and on common property.
Notice, this was a request, not an instruction, because the geniuses in NSW Health think, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that an apartment block is more like a house on a quarter-acre block than it is like an hotel or an office block where masking up is compulsory.
We are very privileged in that, in our building, we have great strata managers, excellent building managers, terrific concierges and an active and engaged strata committee.
Meanwhile, just as we were self-identifying as close contacts, the Premier was announcing everyone was going into lockdown and I have to say that we were totally unprepared for that.
We hadn’t gone out and bought the obligatory 200 rolls of toilet paper that everyone seems to think they need, I’d just toasted my only remaining slice of bread (soy and linseed, if you must know) earlier that day, and the final avocado had met its destiny under the last poached eggs.
The thing is, we couldn’t to go out and panic buy like normal people because we were self-isolating. There’s nothing particularly virtuous in this – there are security cameras everywhere.
In any case, we had enough to survive, with all the emergency back-up tins of black beans and packets of tortillas that I habitually buy to replace the ones I haven’t used yet. And we only had to wait a day before our online-ordered food from Harris Farms arrived.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking – how middle class is this bloke!?! Look, I paid my dues in porridge before it was trendy, and sausage and mash long before anyone ever though of putting the word “comfort” before “food”.
I was raised in an era when you only photographed your dinner if you were thinking of reporting the restaurant to the health authorities, in a country that deep-fried its pizza and where home-cooked pasta was macaroni cheese, end of story.
So we dutifully dobbed ourselves in to the building management and received a polite thank-you note attached to which was a set of protocols for what we needed to do to keep the other residents and employees of the building safe.
It was detailed and prescriptive and all made perfect sense but I was actually touched by the note asking resident, if they got lonely, not to chat endlessly to the concierge over the phone – because they were likely to be busy – but to let them know and they’d arrange for someone to call for a natter.
Did these helpful instructions about, for instance, basic things like safely disposing of our garbage, come from NSW Health or Fair Trading? Of course not. Apartments are just like houses, remember?
As I said at the top, we are very lucky that we are already setup to work from home and have been doing so for more than a decade. So the effect of the self-isolation has been to increase our productivity and reduce our spending (no cafe visits or shopping trips).
One downside is that thoughtful friends had a huge bag of biscuits, cheese and chips delivered, to cheers us up. Thankfully, I have the bike trainer hooked up and spend at least an hour a day racing other virtual lunatics round the roads of France, Japan, England and the USA on a program called Zwift (which sponsors the SBS Tour De France coverage).
I get a good work out and I don’t fall over when it rains, nor do I have to dodge psychopaths in white vans who see cyclists as an affront to everything Australian.
Oh, and I invented a new word – ‘Blockdown’. It means a whole apartment block has been locked down because of Covid-19. Let’s hope it doesn’t get a chance to enter common usage.
All joking aside, I really do feel for people who’ve had their lives turned upside down by this virus and I realise it’s not anything like a happy time for huge numbers of folk – especially parents, front-line and hospitality workers and business owners.
But, as the old proverb goes, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. For the record, Sue and I both came up negative in both our tests so far. It just remains to be seen how ill this wind is going to get for everyone else.
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Tagged: advice, blockdown, protection, protocols, support, Zwift
One of the perks and, as it turns out, perils of working from home (by choice) is that you spend an inordinate amount of time in cafes, drinking coffe
[See the full post at: Locked down and holed up in splendid isolation]
The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers.
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