Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…..

So many things make me break into song, even a clock against a brick wall. The song is Fly Like an Eagle, by the Steve Miller Band, and it’s definitely in my top 100 favourite songs.

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
‘Til I’m free

It’s mindboggling to think that a year ago, this weekend, Kirk was getting on a plane and heading for Chicago, just as the pandemic was starting to a take off. Or, perhaps more appropriately, it had already taken off, we were all just largely unaware of how far it had spread.

I remember being edgy about Kirk taking that trip, and it was only a week later that he arrived home, on Friday the 13th, the first day of my planned three week vacation, to an order that anyone returning from out of country would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days. So that turned my vacation into a self-isolation for me as well. I spent that day running around town picking up food and other necessities to make our two weeks easy and comfortable….knowing, through simple epidemiological logic, that it was going to be a lot more than two weeks.

He arrived home safe, and the airport he left was a nightmare less than 24 hours later. We were glad he’d been on an earlier flight out of O’Hare, since that was one of the images featured in the early days – it was packed like a cattle car, a perfect example of how to transmit a virus by packing people into tight spaces.

In the end, he didn’t bring anything unexpected home with him but, since then the world has changed in so many ways.

A year later and many of us are still working from home; the offices we used to base out of are known breeding grounds for transmissible pathogens. Any winter one can think of puts that in a spotlight. Whoever has children brings their flu and cold viruses to the office and within a short period it goes around the floor. We work in too close proximity, in buildings with windows that don’t open, and air that is constantly recycled. Add on to that a penchant for cramming ever more people into the same space and moving towards no dedicated desks but instead a shared workspace environment where one just looks for any open desk and set sup shop for the day, and it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that you have a recipe for transmission of whatever the bug-of-the-day happens to be.

It’s not a healthy work environment…..it’s all about money and not about healthy people.

What is also a bit shocking is that employers are still rationalizing why more people in smaller areas with an ever lowered ability to maintain distance or disrupt airflow from individual to individual is somehow safe. Again, it’s about money and the message coming from the top down is that we have to get through this so we can go back to the way it was, or rather back to the way we were going.

But I think there is a growing unease coming from the bottom up. Staff are realizing that they are not having their best health interests served, neither physical or mental, so those that have the capacity and the ability to work away from the office will likely continue to do so.

Time is slipping into the future; some are making the changes they have realized they need to better manage their work life in the future, and others are looking forward to going back to the way it was. Even though I will miss some aspects of the “before-days”, I’m definitely in the former category.