I Am a Polar Bear

Today is the one year anniversary of the first day I didn’t get up and go to the office and so it seems fitting to write a blog about one year of working from home.

Ok, technically today is not the first anniversary of my first day working from home. I was supposed to go to Iceland on the 18th and for obvious reasons, I didn’t, but I took the holiday anyway and just stayed at home. On the Friday I ordered my desk so I clearly realised that my office needed sorting out but I didn’t actually start working until the Monday. The rest of the company who weren’t on holiday all took a day working from home this week last year just to check whether it all worked before being forced into lockdown next week anyway. Given our reliance on a direct connection to the server in the upstairs cupboard, I’d already been asked to get in touch with our IT people to see if we could figure out how to work remotely and so by pure luck, we were just about ready when lockdown hit.

As I’ve mentioned time and time again, working from home wasn’t quite the shock to the system that it was for other people. I’ve been employed for half the week since April 2017 by a small company in London and as their office is quite a long way away and as the company I was working for at the time part-owned said small company in London, the agreement was that I’d work remotely from my existing office at my other job. So sure, not working in an office was a change but on the other hand, I’d already spent three years not working with the rest of my company. We were using Zoom and Slack and cloud-based storage since before it was cool.

But not working in an office at all was a major change, and one that I regard as entirely positive. I know lots of people hate it. There’s one lady at my old job who prefers coming into the office and sitting there alone all day every day to working from home and there’s at least one more who I’m sure is counting down the days until she can return. There will be people whose homes are just not set up for working, people who have partners and kids under their feet all day, people who miss all the in-person stuff and people who prefer having someone breathing over their shoulder to make sure stuff gets done. But it works so well for me.

I’m not a people person and I didn’t thrive in the big noisy open-plan office. The solitude of working from home suits my character. There are so many things about it that I prefer, one of them being an extra half an hour in bed every morning. I can’t imagine sitting in an office ever again, surrounded by people and phones and drop-ins and “can you come into this meeting for a minute?”.

The first thing to do at home was get my office sorted and comfortable. The spare room had already been unused for long enough that I’d claimed it as my office for blogging and writing but it still had a wobbly single bed in it and while I had a small rolly desk, it had become storage. On that Friday I ordered a real desk, with drawers and shelves for putting stuff in, which was a huge novelty (my boss at the office where I physically worked wouldn’t let us have drawers because they were “messy”. Not as messy as being forced to put all your stuff on top of your desk, in my opinion). Early the next week I realised that I couldn’t work just on my laptop and I needed a second screen. Computer monitors were out of stock already at Currys so I used my initiative and ordered a small TV. That I have to switch it on with a remote control rather than a touch button in the bottom corner is a mild irritation but one I live cheerfully with for the sake of having that second screen. My office had already been a concept so my mum had given me a brilliant desk lamp for Christmas and now I had a desk to put it on, as well as my Christmas Echo Dot, which is company as well as tool.

I did a desk tour post last April and oh, how things have changed since then. I won’t do in-detail photos of every cube and every drawer but this is what my desk looks like now.

I suppose at the time of that post, I, and the world around me, was adapting to the new normal. The desk was a novelty, the later mornings were a novelty. And as the situation has developed and changed and stayed the same, my office and work have developed and changed.

The contents of the cubes next to me have changed in the last eleven months. The Russia craft stuff is now in my craft trolley – itself a new addition to the room – and I have all my language-learning resources in there. The stuff from the other top cube has just generally moved and instead I have all my recent scrapbooks and scrapbooks-in-progress there. My useful cube now has a shelf dividing it in two so I can keep officey stuff nearby. My desk-extension cube now has a magazine rack for the books and feels astonishingly more spacious as a result. The lower ones haven’t changed much except that I’ve added racks and boxes to try to keep the stuff in order. The little stone polar bear is still acting as a bookend but it now has rubber coaster feet on it so it doesn’t slide away if the books lean.

All my cables now feed into a storage box under the desk so I get my feet less tangled up. Because Brownies and Guides are currently done over Zoom in the evenings, I have a ring light on the windowsill so I look less like a pixelly grey-brown potato. There are various hand-made decorations around the windowsill and hanging from the window, I’ve got a gluestick that turns notepads into post-its so those are close at hand. My polar bear coaster now takes pride of place on the desk. There’s a new storage unit in the corner and the aforementioned craft trolley, which is a 2×2 Kallax unit on wheels, sitting at the end of my desk. In short, it’s gone from “quick, I need to put a desk together!” to “spending eleven months settling into an office where I’ll be working for the foreseeable future and beyond”.

You see, my boss at the second job asked me to come and work there permanently. The 2017 agreement was that I wouldn’t be commuting to the London office and… well, so was the 2020 agreement. I literally don’t have an office to go back to when the plague is over. The company has done ok during all this. We’ve expanded: I’ve doubled my hours, we have a new consultant (also an ex-employee of that other company and thus an old friend of mine who I’ve known since 2009) and a new comms person, both of whom live within a mile of my house, and we’re advertising for a second consultant. We’re now up to six people instead of four and we got up to eight at one point, so now we have regular 09:45 Monday team catch-ups, which are new since about November and set in stone as of only about 2021. The boss no longer phones me on my phone but instead on the call function in Slack. We still do the “good morning” on the #general channel every morning but now we’re all saying good morning to each other instead of just to me because I’m no longer the only remote person.

At my old job, everything lived on the server which made life difficult for getting at stuff if you were either working from home or had a Mac. Here, we’ve sorted it all out long ago. We’ve used and rejected Dropbox and we’re currently using Google Drive. Our databases are on Airtable and we’re currently looking into a better backend website than various WordPress plugins that force our various things to play reasonably nicely together. We live off Slack, but we use Zoom for video calls rather than Slack’s video function. I can go a week without even thinking to check my work email because we just don’t use it, and months between getting an email I need to pay any attention to.

As for me, I’ve even gone more cloud-based in my own life. I set up a paper diary for the beginning of 2021 but I haven’t used it. I guess my old diaries were my link between work and home and everything going on in my life. Now I have my phone permanently propped up beside me and permanent access to my OneDrive. Besides the fact that paper diaries are inconvenient for constantly crossing things out and rescheduling them for after the pandemic and then finding the pandemic didn’t stop when we wanted it to and rescheduling them again, I’m enjoying how I can still colour-code my Google calendar and put events in against different accounts. Yes, I know, everyone else figured that out long ago. But bearing in mind work lives off a Google account, I had to either log out or use private browsing to open my personal calendar on my work computer without disturbing my work accounts and either way was inconvenient so I just never did it. I keep a lot of blog stuff on my own laptop and everything else on OneDrive. I’ve moved my blog schedule/content calendar to Airtable and I use OneNote to keep stuff between my laptop, my work laptop and my phone, including the current draft of The Iceland Book.

I said earlier that I have a few favourite things about working from home.

• Complete control over my environment. No longer do I shiver through the summer because someone doesn’t understand that the sun being out doesn’t heat the building and opens the window regardless of internal temperature.
• No longer do I hear the strains of Ed Sheeran drifting across the room every hour on the hour.
• No longer do I have to hear about that stain on humanity who presents used to present breakfast TV while exuding hatred and nastiness and how he’s “every woman’s ideal man”.
• I don’t have to hear anyone tell every person individually about the PB he got on his bike on the way to work this morning before making his way to me for the eighth retelling.
• I don’t have to grit my teeth and smile at anyone commenting on my lunch.
• No one microwaves fish at home.
• I can pop downstairs for a couple of mini eggs or a drink whenever I want.
• Is next door’s cat yowling outside my front door? I’ll go down and cuddle her for a couple of minutes.
• Forgot to water the vegetables this morning? Let me run down and do it.
• Did I suddenly realise with fifty minute to go what today’s blog should have been about and hastily write the whole thing from scratch? (I don’t do that often but I like that I have the freedom to if I need to)
• I can sit all day in pyjamas if I want. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I pretend to be a proper working grown-up by putting an influencer-brown jumper over my pyjamas.
• I only have to brush my hair first thing in the morning on Mondays.
• I can work in slippers or bare feet.
• No one even notices if I have blue hair.
• No one knows if I don’t brush my teeth until after lunch.
• I can paint my nails without suffocating anyone.

That’s a lot of favourite things. That’s because I like my new setup. There are a lot of really terrible things about living through a pandemic but some of the changes I’ve been forced to make have been quite positive for me and I am personally in no hurry to return to office life.