Doomsday

My daily journey to work is approximately 3 miles each way, roughly half of which is on this industrial estate, while the other half is along the more normal commuter traffic to be found on Chatham & Rochester High Streets – a standard mix of residential and small retail premises.

As you can see, the industrial estate does not indulge in drop-kerbs, making the pedestrian sides of the roads unusable to bicycles, scooters, or people reliant upon mobility scooters, forcing us all into the roadway which we must share with full-size articulated container trucks. And as you can see, the full-size container trucks have no inhibitions about occupying pedestrian space to make more room for road traffic, which in turn, renders the pedestrian space dreadfully uneven and full of massive puddles. Thankfully, the HGV drivers show far more courtesy to cyclists on the road than the drivers of private cars do. But that's another story.

Today's big story is that my organisation chose to operate a full Doomsday drill. All staff were requested to work from home to test how well our home-working infrastructure copes. Naturally there were some exceptions; reception, the drawing office and the team whom I believe juggle receipts and invoices. I work in the drawing office and we cannot work from home until such time as it is agreed that each of us can be supplied with the necessary super-powerful laptops and ancillary large screens required to perform our tasks adequately. I did comment that I could get along with fewer screens, but I might require a chair superior to the folding picnic chairs I have at home.

I confess that I loved the monastic silence in the office today, but I would be a lot less happy working in total isolation from my drawing office colleagues, a little bit of banter now and then is good for the soul. The receipts and invoices team, although they are quiet themselves, are used to the normal hubbub in the large open office upstairs, and so they resorted to listening to the radio to feel less leprous. Reception was another matter entirely. She is perhaps our only staff member over 70, and the only person who will be permitted to move between floors if full segregation is implemented on Monday. By WHO guidelines, our most vulnerable staff-member. It all feels very weird indeed.