After a very long 'working from home' period since... whenever it was that the office closed last March, I had my first trip back to the office today. I figured it was probably worth getting out of the house and trying out the "normal" routine again sooner rather than later - if you can really call it that. But I think I also wanted to get an idea of what this current "pre-vaccine" version of 'normal' feels like outside of my own house, just before the next 'de-lockdown' phase begins.

So - that meant having to think about dealing with parking (prices have gone up... is the car park auto-payment system going to work? No...), before and after school childcare (I haven't missed the rushing around - and paying for it even less), driving into London in a car that has collected a frankly embrassing amount of cobwebs. There's a whole bunch of stuff that used to require pretty much no thought or planning, but now that I'm out of all of my old habits are suddenly something that takes a bit of thought and effort and energy.

And that also means a bit of anxiety. What if the car breaks down? What if the parking thing doesn't work? What if my office key card doesn't work? What if I forget my laptop charger, or my phone charger, or the dongle that lets me plug into the monitors at my desk, or my mask, or my hand sanitiser? What if I get a false positive covid lateral flow test? What if I can't connect to the office wifi- and then can't connect to the IT helpdesk to get connected to the office wifi to connect to the IT helpdesk? What if there's traffic and I'm late home to collect my daughter? What if there's something else I need to worry about that I haven't even remembered that I need to worry about?

I think when lockdown began, it was an 'event' - everyone knew it was happening, it was happening to everyone, and there was a general sense of everyone figuring out how to deal with it all- in their own way, but together. Wash your hands more, book some supermarket delivery slots, bake some bread, get a Zoom account set up, stock up on toilet roll (good!) because loads of hoarders are clearing all the supermarket shelves (bad!), watch Boris' announcements, go for walks but stay at home (protect the NHS, save lives...) Maybe you were furloughed, maybe you were working harder than ever (maybe both!) But everyone knew that everyone was dealing with the fact that everything was weird.

But now... its not really the same for everyone. Even everyone in the same household - my wife has been back at work for a while - the school opened up, so everyone had a 'first day back'. But I don't have that - chances are that everyone else in the office will have already had their first day back, so there isn't really a 'collective experience' like there was when it closed. For me, today was a one-off, weird day - but just for me.

So - we've been through an "everything is weird/weird is normal" phase. Now it seems slightly different - more like "normal is weird/weird is normal". And it feels like there's a lot more of that to come. Yes, people now feel like they can safely say that by October, everyone will have had their two doses of vaccine, so we will be able to take off the masks and sit next to someone at a desk without worrying about social distancing. (I'm really not sure that we're yet in a position to make any kind of predictions about what the state of the virus is going be in six months time - but I've never really been one to make predictions when I'm talking about the future, and I've been talking about the future in a professional/work context for over a decade now.) But there's still a whole bunch of 'weird' that is going to come with it.

So, this post is more of a 'consciously avoiding thinking about it all' post than an attempt to analyse or explain it. Instead, I thought I'd share something with the world that nobody outside my house really knows about, and thats my mugs. I like coffee, and I drink quite a lot of it. Usually (B.C.)¹ that was espresso when I woke up (and sometimes another in the car), then from the bean-to-cup machine in the office. But while working from home, I switched down to instant coffee on the grounds ² that I should probably be thinking about less caffeine and more water. (Albeit the fancy instant coffee that either has bits of real ground coffee in it or flavoured with hazelnut or vanilla. I'm not an animal...)

So, I've been drinking from these three mugs.

Straight away, this tells you something about the kind of person I am.

The kind of person who has lots of different mugs in the cupboard, rather than a nice matching set.
The kind of person who, in his forties, uses mugs to express some sort of 'signal' about his personality in the same sort of way that I used to use t-shirts. (Also in our mug collection - Super Furry Animals, Spiritualized, Penguin Books, Eddie Izzard. I use the word "our" deliberately - I think the only ones that are really "mine" are the ones that my wife chose and bought for me.)

The thing is, I'm also the kind of person who chooses their underpants depending on the kind of day that I'm expecting to have - even though nobody is going to see them (ie. the same way that nobody is going to see the mug I'm drinking from when I'm alone and working from home), it somehow feels like I'm not really preparing myself for the day properly if I'm going to be doing an important presentation or having an important meeting but wearing a worn-out old pair of boxers. I wouldn't call it a superstition... but if something were to go wrong, I would feel like I only had myself to blame.

Anyway - I have a similar relationship with my mugs.

"Free Rick" - from Rick & Morty, where season two ended with Rick in a galactic prison for the crime of "everything"- this felt deliciously ironic at the start of lockdown, but is now the mug I turn to when I'm feeling like (internally) expressing some sort of "free SomeRandomNerd" sentiment.
Pickle Rick (also Rick & Morty, obviously) - Rick turns himself into a pickle.

Morty: I-I'm just trying to figure out why you would do this. Why anyone would do this.
Pickle Rick: The reason anyone would do this is, if they could, which they can't, would be because they could, which they can't.

This one is generally for when I'm feeling a bit more like I can take on the world from the confines of my home office.
Code Monkey - Jonathan Coulton merch, from the song he did in his "thing a week" podcast, where he wrote and recorded a song each week and put it up on the internet for free. (Back in the days when the post-torrent future of the music industry was looking like 'free music/pay for something else' might be the way forwards, rather than the 'pay for music, but the artist gets next to nothing' reality of today. (95% of artists on Spotify generate less than $1,000 a year, and use the platform to reach fans that attend live gigs - where they were getting their income before covid messed up any business model involving lots of people being in the same place at the same time...)
This one is for when I'm feeling like I can take on the world, but plan on somehow using my R/VBA/Ruby skills to do it...

But the coffee machines in the office haven't yet been switched on again yet, so my "desk coffee" today (after the espresso in a thermos in the car) was in this;

The coffee itself was instant coffee from the kind of sachets you get in a cheap hotel room, with milk from one of those little sealed plastic thimbles that don't have quite as much milk as I want (but two is more than I want). And the desk I chose was on a four-desk table, where three of the desks were 'out of use' due to social distancing. (Not quite sure why - it feels like two diagonally opposite would be fine. Maybe I chose an 'extra socially distanced' desk by mistake - I chose it for the pleasing desk number of 123 rather than anything else.) ³

I am glad I went in though - partly just for the change of routine, but mostly because I had a face to face conversation (over a proper coffee) with someone where ideas felt like they were bouncing all over the place in a way that they just can't do on a Zoom/Teams/Facetime conversation. The cost of parking/petrol/childcare was easily worth it for that alone.

In the end, I did remember all of the plugs and wires and various things that I needed for the day. But next time I go to the office, I'm going to take an Aeropress.

Before Corona ↩
No pun intended ↩
Again - not superstitious. I just have a kind of belief in some sort of significance of certain numerical patterns. Not superstition. That's just irrational... ↩

Some Random Nerd