Coronavirus

Sooner. They said I can go anytime after 4 weeks, but not more than 12.
I'm thinking I'll go in about 8 weeks. If possible, I'd like to be all set in May, so I can travel abroad.
 
I was going to put this in the Rant thread, but it is directly tide to all the Covid restrictions of the past year.

I remember when work was 9-5 and then you went home. MAYBE you got the ocassional call from work to your landline phone, but whatever it was it could usually wait until the next d'ay. There have always been jobs where people have been connected to telegrams, phones or computers all day every day, but for the vast majority of us, it wasn't the case. With the rise of affordable cellphones in the 90s, early 2000s (and beepers before that) now most people had a leash the boss man could tug on whenever. Smartphones only made it worse with all the apps you could do things from anywhere. Yet.... for the most part, work remained 9 to 5.

Now with "home office," teachers are overloading students with more homework than usual, because, "They're home anyway," and companies schedule meetings all day for their employees. I've seen this with my students who complain about other professors' workload and the people I give private tutoring to constantly reschedule our classes due to being scheduled for meetings constantly. I'm talking 6, 7pm.... well after office hours, during dinners or just spending time with your family. These meetings go on for hours and students go to bed late anyway since they spend all day in virtual classes and then the tons of work being done.

March 12 will mark exactly one year Mexico began its lockdown and in that year I've noticed this trend of the line between work and home errode further and further. It used to be media moguls, bankers, investors, etc who were tied to their jobs like this, but now it's everyone. This "new normal" is erasing our "free time." I myself get instant messages at 10/11pm and just ignore them. My GF says, "aren't you going to answer those?" and I just say, "Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow, I was done with work at 4pm, I'm off the clock, they can suck it."

I fear that even when we go back to in-person work, companies will feel at liberty to continue this trend as they saw how convinient it was during the lockdown.
 
Both my current and previous managers have been very conscious about that. And I can't remember the last time anyone from work called me after hours (except for non-work stuff).
 
My employer is extremely conscious of it. They're in the public sector so they'd be setting a poor example to local private sector employers if they didn't. Plus there's a large trade union. They regularly reiterate the message that we should stick to our hours, take all our mandated breaks and not work through lunch.

The voluntary covid testing at work finally turned up a positive case this week, possibly asymptomatic. Nobody else seated anywhere near that person has so far shown any symptoms or tested positive, which is a really encouraging sign.

And the UK has finally hit the 1m mark for people who have had both doses of a covid vaccine. It's taken a while because they've focused very heavily on getting a first dose out to people ahead of doing the follow up dose, but they're finally increasing the daily numbers of second doses. It's getting to be something of a postcode/surgery lottery, though. There's supposed to be a strict priority order based on occupation (healthcare/care workers), older age groups, people with certain very high risk health conditions, people who are carers for older or disabled people or volunteers for care/welfare charities. But some GP surgeries have moved on to offering it to others because they've had spare. The government's latest inclusion criteria are a bit cryptic too. The definition of what makes some conditions severe is interpreted in different ways by different GPs, and there's some element of poverty rating for the local area and ethnicity of patient factored into it - not sure where they get the data on ethnicity of individual patients. I recently heard of someone who thinks she made it onto the priority list because her patient records incorrectly said she smoked 60 cigarettes a day instead of 60 a week. :lol:
 
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