Thank you pandemic

for giving me the opportunity to put this graphic to proper public use.
It is printed to fully occupy a sheet of A4 paper and placed at eye-level on the secure door which is the only entry into my office. It has not replaced any other hazard warning sign in the same location and it has been in place for three full working days.
Yet hardly anyone has noticed it. It is true that most staff are working from home and that very few people are actually using this door, but even so, I would have expected a significant percentage of those coming and going to spot it. In fact it has only been spotted by our Health&Safety person, who, uncharacteristically, has not removed it and filed a report.

So what have I learned from this? That our environment is so peppered with warning signs that we choose to ignore them? The we are programmed to seek out only the signs we think apply to us? Or that the positioning of a sign has greater relevance than its size? Would a smaller sign closer to the swipe-in pad have had greater effect?

Separately, local roads are nice and clear for cycling, and as I rode in to work this morning I waved at the back of my colleague's car as it overtook me. S and his partner share a car. She drives him to the office to drop him off and then continues to her own work where she is a primary-school teacher. Shortly after we were all stuck into our daily tasks S announced that he had received a message from his partner to tell him that she was horribly late for work because the 3-mile queue to get in to Sainsbury's had entirely closed the A2.

At lunchtime a more depressing message notified us that she was being sent home because she was running a temperature. No option but to pack up S and send him home for the next fortnight. He will do his best to continue his work from there, but frankly, since half the planet are occupying 95% of the available bandwidth, there's not a lot of hope that he will be able to access the files he requires.

My main priority now is to maintain the banter and keep his spirits up. We have a similar sense of humour, but perhaps this is not the best place to share the Covid-19 joke he shared with me on Wednesday morning.