One year on...

I recently realised that March ’21 marks the 12-month anniversary of working from home full time since lockdown began. This has given me pause for thought and time to reflect, drawing comparisons with how I work now as opposed to how I worked in an office. On the surface working from home makes things much more predictable and straightforward, less of the fuss and bustle that comes with navigating the job and each other. But the more I really thought about things, I began to discover that the things I once labelled ‘gripes’ were actually something else entirely….

HDM-I give up!

I’m extremely fortunate in that I have a purpose-built room in my house that I call my office, and I don’t have to book it to use it. In the various workplace offices, I’ve worked at, I can remember countless times waiting patiently outside a meeting room for the previous meeting to finish due to overrunning. We would stare purposefully through the glass at someone in mid conversation, to infer the indiscretion. We’d be ignored. We would decide to get forceful after agreeing to “give it another minute or so” before building up the courage to open the door and politely ask of the occupants could vacate. The indignation would register on the faces of the 2 people that were occupying a 12 person meeting room. We’ve won. A small win but a win none the less.

Incidentally, I promised myself a long time that if I owned my own business, all my meeting rooms would be named after Bond villains.

“Where are we for this two o’clock session?”

“Scaramanga.”

“Is Geoff joining us?”

“No, he’s stuck in Nick Nack with Dylis from Finance.”

“Ah.”

I digress.

I can recall many times when I’ve attended meetings in meeting rooms and colleagues (and I) have spent countless minutes trying to figure out how to screen-share onto the tv screen in the room. Searching in vain for the remote control frantically hunting down HDMI/1/2/3 on the TV inputs with the soul crushing “no input found” glaring defiantly back at us. And let’s not forget the age old “HDMI vs Mac” contest – often ending in PowerPoint presentations being emailed around as a result of adaptors being “in my other bag”.

If that weren’t bad enough – consider the minefield of sharing a screen from a laptop onto a TV in a meeting room, opening up a video conference, trying to understand where the sound should be coming from, muting and unmuting everyone, turning up the laptop volume, turning up the volume on the TV, finally getting the sound to work only to get the horrific infinite echo of doom that even after turning everything off at the mains, giving up and going home – still seems to be coming from “somewhere”.

Hardly any of these complications exist in the age of homeworking. One-click entry to video conferencing has become the standard, but I wouldn’t say that’s the end of it. If I look back perhaps those moments of madness were the opportunity to think about something else other than work. To laugh out loud at our own miserable failings in grappling with technology. A shared experience of abject failure; a readymade anecdote for the next social event. A gift not a gripe…

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