Zeborah

There's been this brief period at work, at the end of last year and the beginning of this, when I wasn't in the middle of any high pressure projects and I actually got to the point of tidying some of the mess on my desk and going back through old emails to see if anything was still actionable.

And I deleted so many emails that inbox zero started to seem achievable. So I got more serious about this, and also tweaked my folder hierarchy slightly, and also went "What if I actually use the Tasklist to manage tasks like I've kept meaning to forever?" and by the start of this week I was actually doing this.

They tell you this makes you so much more efficient because you can spend all your time actually focusing on your proper work instead of spending a bunch of time sorting through your emails again.

They're right (at least in my case) - but what they don't tell you is that spending all your time actually focusing on your proper work is exhausting.

Sorting through emails may take up time, but it doesn't take up nearly as many mental processing units as working through two overlapping batch hiring processes and juggling the rosters involved in that and making notes on performance appraisals and dealing with a... deeply silly matter that still requires due process... and running a team planning meeting and oh god I'm a manager now quick let's slip in teaching a workshop about copyright compliance and whoops now I'm troubleshooting someone's login problems oh and now someone else needs me to explain why, not only can I not really give them a list of our databases (the category has fuzzy borders), but even if I did, it wouldn't answer the question they should be asking.

By the end of Monday it felt like it had been a full week. By today I was making a whole bunch of 2+2 errors. 2+2 errors are what I've decided to call the thing where you've got 2 in one hand and 2 in the other hand but you just forget that this means you have 4. Or maybe it's an Out Of Context error, ie you know a fact as it relates to one context but you just forget to apply the same fact to another context. Eg

• In the morning planning meeting I confidently mentioned that Joe Bloggs wasn't there because they were on leave; I remembered because they'd specifically apologised for that meeting. The meeting finished at 12:30, after which I worked through some vital roster-related emails, then went to lunch, then hurried back for my 1:30 one-on-one with Joe and was surprised not to find them at their desk.


• I've been super looking forward to my planned Monday off next week. Simultaneously I've been figuring that I can manage a slipping timeline if I can get a bunch of steps done on Monday next week (before the public holiday on Tuesday).


• When I finally put that particular 2+2 together today as I was closing my laptop and getting my bag and coat, I assured a colleague who's depending on that timeline that I'll check in online periodically through Monday to get those steps done. (It's mostly waiting to receive emails so that I can upload some pre-prepared files and click some buttons and then wait for more emails, so this isn't overly burdensome.) Hurried to catch my bus and three minutes later had to turn back to get my laptop, without which I can't do any of those steps.

I've managed to maintain inbox-zero-plus-using-the-tasklist for the full week but I'm pretty shattered. This week would probably have been pretty full-on even without a new organisational technique, but still I really think that the absence of the periodic downtime forced by needing to scroll through emails did contribute to making it a lot more intense. I'd like to continue using this technique (at least for a while; I go through organisation techniques like I go through chocolate bars) and maybe it'll also get easier with practice, but also in the absence of those little informal mini-breaks I think I need to get back into the habit of taking proper tea-breaks to decompress.

On the plus side, at the very *very* end of the day I finally put together the fact I knew about having Monday off, plus the fact I knew about Tuesday being a public holiday, and realised that this means that I get a four-day weekend!

My last post was six days ago, on Saturday.

Over the weekend, our prime minister (hereafter referred to as Jacinda because that's how New Zealand rolls) announced a four-level alert system and told us we were on level two, and what would happen if we reached levels three or four.

I have asthma - mild to moderate so somewhat vulnerable though not technically included in the "stay at home" recommendation under level two. But it seemed a good idea in general and my work is good with this kind of thing, so on Monday I went to work with the plan to just finish up ensuring that our key staff all had mobile devices and instructions to take them home each night, and then I'd start working from home on Tuesday.

Midway through Monday, Jacinda came on for her announcement. I watched it live and I could tell from her tone she was going to ramp it up to level three. And then she ramped it up to level four, and said at the end of Wednesday the whole country would be in lockdown and I think I said "Oh my god" out loud.

So from Tuesday I was working from home and trying to remotely help 40-odd colleagues all set up their own work-from-home systems on a motley range of work computers (their own laptops; laptops I'd reassigned from other people; old tablets I'd got reimaged late last week in a fit of desperation) and personal computers (goodness even knows what) while ITS were still frantically trying to finish getting a more robust VPN set up (they'd also been working on it since at least last week). Trying to talk someone through setting up a VPN, on a device you've never seen, when they're not at all technically inclined, over the phone, is intensely painful. Also my home office is not a very heatable part of the house. By the end of the day I was tired and cold and in a bad fit of the blahs. Visiting my parents for a "last supper" and making a plan to be "lockdown buddies" with my sibling who lives with them (as Jacinda had mentioned if you live alone you could join another household's 'bubble') was a great comfort.

Wednesday was better: it was sunny so though the work was just as hard at least I was warm. And I got to go get my flu vaccine, and my ISP sent a tech to finally after three weeks fix some persistent issues I'd been having with my internet, and my gardener came to mow lawns and trim hedges. The earpiece on my headset disintegrated but that'd be fine, I could crochet a new one. Not sure what to do about my threadbare slippers but I'll think of something.

Thursday was the first official day of lockdown. I was still troubleshooting and had only managed to mark off 6 people out of 40-odd as definitely having access to everything they needed for work. Over lunch I went to the supermarket, which was surreal: I could cross the main road without stopping, and there was no music or announcements over the PA system at all. Then more talking people through accessing Outlook over the web, as the simplest possible prerequisite to getting them instructions to set up a VPN and access share drives. Some of the people were getting stressed by it all so I had to calm them down as well as deal with the technical problems. By the end of the day I was utterly exhausted. I was also hearing suggestions that the "lockdown buddies" rules were stricter than anticipated and since I'd pinned my mental health plans on that I was pretty distressed. I ended up taking meds for a headache and going to bed early without dinner.

[Summary of the rules for New Zealand for the next 4+ weeks, unless you're an essential worker like a nurse or a supermarket shelver:

• you can visit a local supermarket or pharmacy, preferably alone; you can even take a bus if strictly necessary for this purpose


• you can leave your house for some exercise each day, alone or with people in your household, but you can't drive to that exercise; keep it local


• you can talk to your neighbour over the fence

Anything else? Jacinda says no. The more you think about it, the more restrictive it is. Want to order some books online to get you through? They'll have to come from overseas. Want to post someone a care package to get them through? Post shops aren't open and it's not clear whether couriers will pick up non-essential deliveries.]

Friday, more troubleshooting. It feels endless. I think I reached 12 or maybe 14 people ticked off so really it is making progress. I'm also starting to understand some of the quirks of the systems myself. (Some things obviously need the VPN; others, bless them, only work properly with it off.) But I'd still had it by mid-afternoon so did as I told one of my staff to do and logged off early. With that afternoon time I caught up with a sibling and we trialed a few web-based comms systems. Unfortunately we both have ancient computers, so we've currently had to settle on a text-only Discord server, but will keep investigating options. Have invited the other siblings too, and almost all of them have turned up. [ETA 3 seconds later: all of them have turned up!] So am feeling a bit more settled and hopeful now.

I imagine I'll have many more emotional ups and downs. Because there's the initial questions and adjustments, and things still constantly changing, and the anticipation of loneliness and how to mitigate that. And all this is stress.

And I'm coming up to the time of year I need a holiday anyway so with this on top it'd actually be kind of nice for me if the lockdown was a break. But instead I still have to work my regular job but harder, so not only do I not get to pick up any new hobbies but I'm too exhausted for the normal ones. But at the same time I feel a bit guilty about wishing I didn't have to work, because so many people are losing their jobs or uncertain about keeping them.

This isn't strictly true. I feel it's inappropriate to complain about it because of that. But I also feel it's perfectly valid to wish it. Because like I tell everyone, and everyone needs to know, just because others may have it worse, doesn't mean it's not bad for me/you/everyone right now too. We're all allowed to feel sucky, and we all need to be kind to our brains and get plent of rest and destressing in.

This evening my calendar reminded me to go to the city library's annual booksale tomorrow morning. I'd been planning to go after my Saturday morning swim. I swam last Saturday; that afternoon the pools all closed; this Saturday the whole country will have been closed for three days. I knew something like this could be coming, but not so quickly.

This Monday I was going to take the afternoon off for a massage. That's now cancelled. Today my shoulder's started throwing a wobbly.

Before now I think my most isolating experience was living in a small apartment (bedroom and bathroom and an illicit electric frying pan to cook in) on a New Caledonia high school campus. Once my computer died, and for the three weeks while I waited for my father to ship me a solution, my only contact with home was to walk 40 minutes to the town library and hope a computer was free to email from; then 40 minutes back. Even when I did have the internet in my apartment it was an isolated existence. I had maybe 10 hours of teaching a week. I had a few friends and colleagues. There were geckos and millipedes and too many mosquitoes. I read all of _Les Miserables_ in the original French.

I can't remember the feelings of isolation very well. I know that I began to say that New Caledonia was a lovely place to visit; and that I vowed never to teach English overseas again. (I then reneged on this and taught it in Korea, at an academy which was much more supportive.) I remember how much I relied on emails with home, and how excited I was for an upcoming text chat with the whole family -- and how devastated when they didn't show up for it. I felt utterly abandoned and forgotten. It turned out Dad had had an accident so everyone had to go suddenly to the hospital and they didn't know how desperately I needed for them to have paused for one minute to send me a quick email first. (Yes, half my life later I'm still mad about this.)

I've got better internet this time; we all have. And we're all in the same boat so I don't fear being forgotten the same way. But I can't go to the beach or the zoo or the Phare Amédée so it's kind of swings and roundabouts, you know?

I'll find ways to cope - I think most of us will; and it needs to be done; but it's going to be really hard.

Today started (after a certain amount of groaning and dragging myself out of bed) with a vendor breakfast. I avoid vendor things labelled as "hors d'oeuvres" because they're generally at the time of day when you're exhausted and starving and they want you to stand around attempting to subsist on food that would barely satisfy a sparrow and alcohol that would inebriate an ox. But a seated three-course breakfast seemed worth tolerating some vendor speeches for, even if it was at seven thirty in the morning. Luckily my cold was much alleviated overnight plus I planned ahead and took my own tissues.

Course one was muesli, yoghurt and fruit; course two was a breakfast steak, bacon, poached egg, tomato, mushrooms, and smashed potato; course three was various breads. Courses one and two were actually on the table the whole time, along with tea, coffee and juice; the above order is based on the menu which we all, more or less, obediently followed. Smashed potato, for the curious, appears to be what happens when the cook is too lazy to either mash the potato properly for hash browns or cut it properly for fries. I sound like I judge, but it does create a fun random mix of soft and crispy.

There followed eight hours' worth of sessions and mingling. I caught up with an old colleague who now works in Dubai, various other old colleagues, a lot of vendors at their stalls (they like someone to tell about their products; I like the free USB sticks. Also some of the products even if mostly we still can't afford them - actually it's often most useful to talk to the vendors whose products we already subscribe to because they can tell us the goss as I can nag them about those bugs we keep reporting), and a few strangers who have migrated to a system we're going to migrate to. After the last session there were drinkies and sparrow hors d'oeuvres, but it was bearable because there was also icecream (provided by a vendor, I think) and a magic show.

Then I came back to my hotel to crash for a couple of hours before dinner and realised it was already seven twenty. So that was a day.

In new and unexciting random maladies, my socks are perhaps too tight for twelve hours of conferencing because I now have an achy ankle. Also using my salbutamol inhaler because my lungs like the air conditioning (plus virus) as little as the rest of my respiratory system, yay.

--Okay, the "30 free minutes per 24 hours" doesn't seem to have a set rollover time, it wants to be at least 24 hours since you last used it.

It was originally predicted to be Snowpocalypse 2: Worse Than 1992!!!! and the supermarkets accordingly are all out of bread. Therefore all of yesterday it merely rained.

When I got up this morning it was raining particularly miserably so I took some extra clothes to change into at work if I got too drenched. Normally I shut Boots out of the living areas during the day, because she has a tendency to accidentally set off the burglar alarm (I don't even know how but she does), but when she saw I was going she said, "Yeah, not today, bubs," and went back to the bedroom to curl back up on my warm waterbed.

This seemed fair enough.

It started snowing on the way to work. By the time I got out there it was thick enough (though not yet settling) that the bus driver was saying if it kept up they'd be off the road within an hour. So (having shaken a quantity of snow to the floor) I relayed this to the boss, and about quarter of an hour later she decided to send home anyone who doesn't live in the local township, and offered me a lift back.

By the time we got back into town it was definitely sticking, in a slushy way. I've brought in Boots' litterbox, swept my porch, and turned on the kettle and the gasfire. Boots remains curled up on the waterbed but she'll probably exchange it for my lap once it's warm enough here in the living room.

Now to catch up on a few hundred journal articles and do some planning for that rapidly-approaching conference paper....

I guess this is what happens when you kill all the people who created the world
and then take over in their place
there is no transition meeting
no one tells you these things
(from Better Myths which is fantastically funny; generally it has language which is problematic in multiple arenas, but this one's fairly good)

In unrelated news, rewriting my CV keeps giving me fantastic revelatory ideas for new (professional) blog posts. Well, technically one came from staring out the bus window at the Beams of Hope, but I was meant to be rewriting my CV at the time, so that kinda counts.

It's been a while since we had much aftershock activity -- the unprecedented pair of snowstorms we had three weeks apart seems to have insulated against them or something, which was one good thing about the snow. (I also enjoyed playing in it and having time off work; otoh I didn't like being cut off from being able to feed my cat, twice; and it made life harder for people who didn't need life being made harder in the slightest.)

But we did get a 4.2mag. aftershock at 5am-ish today, which seems to have ruined a lot of people's mornings. My own reaction was a groggy, "Bah, I'm not letting a piddly - hmm, feels like a low 4 - stop me sleeping in." And went back to sleep. From evidence, the cat's reaction was similar, which is gratifying progress.

In other recent EQ news, I got my letter from EQC listing all the damage the inspectors noticed while they were around here. It takes a page and a half, each line being one wall or ceiling or window or other feature, notated with a super-brief "Collapsed chimney" / "Structural damage" / "Floor has moved less than 100mm" / "Impact damage" etc. I also get a "Broken glass" and "Broken power fittings" and "Cracks to ring foundation", but the vast majority is "Cosmetic damage".

There's also a new Red Cross grant which was called the Alternatives to Sewerage Systems grant until someone noticed the acronym and changed it to something I can't remember because it's nowhere near as fun. Anyway it's NZ$500 for anyone who went without city sewerage for more than 90 days, and after a few days of being vaguely aware of the grant, it suddenly occurred to me that that included me again.

This perfectly solves my voucher-from-work dilemma: I can pass said voucher on to Women's Refuge and never have to think about it again, and use the grant money to buy myself something nice without any unpleasant aftertaste about where it came from (plus not limited to shopping at the single mall).

On the subject of Red Cross grants, there are three broad philosophies:

1) the Red Cross is making it too easy for people to get money;
2) the Red Cross is making it too hard for people to get money;
3) the Red Cross is doing pretty well actually, as evidenced by the fact that the Letters to the Editor display a perfect balance between philosophy #1 and philosophy #2.

My uncle, it turned out at my Mum's sixtieth birthday dinner, holds philosophy #1, believing that the Red Cross should investigate more exactly which people need exactly how much money. My sisters pointed out that investigating would cost money and delay people getting anything, and corrected him on some points of fact, all the while referring to the Red Cross as "we" (with admirably faint emphasis) until it clicked for him and there was this brief pause and he said, slightly horrified, "You mean you both work for the Red Cross?"

This is how my family celebrates our sixtieth birthdays, people! --Actually it was all good, and we stuffed ourselves full of mains and dessert and cake and then went to Scared Scriptless (a theatre sports show which is a Christchurch institutions -- their normal venue has been red-zoned so they've been bouncing around, at the moment performing in an intermediate school's auditorium) which was brilliant as usual. (I mean there was the game that's funny because foreign people have silly accents, and the game that's funny because date rape's hilarious, and the games that are funny because homophobia and transphobia; but y'know, it was my Mum's birthday so I'm just going to give in to the kyriarchy this once.) The brilliantest thing was that one of my family managed to get a note slipped to their coordinator about Mum's birthday, and so he asked her some questions and then got the guys in the team (yes, they're all guys, this may have something to do with the kyriarchy both cause and effect; see also the demographics of QI and the predictable "Women just must not be as funny as men" that you get when you point this out to fans on their fan-forum, but that's a story for another day) -- anyway, he got them to improvise a song for her which really was utterly fantastic.

Oh oh! And apparently my bus, my normal bus, my dear #23, is now running out my way again! I saw it! This means I could catch it straight from here straight to the door of my work again! --If that building is ever my workplace again, anyway, which to our rage and dismay is sounding increasingly unlikely, but that's a rant for another day. In the meantime the #21 gets me almost-straight from here straight to my current workplace, just takes a bit longer.

So now my laptop says a) the battery's condition is "replace soon", which apparently means it's basically fine but be prepared, and b) the battery is not charging, which in my mind is rather further down the track than a) would suggest.

I think this doesn't portend any major problem for running off mains and that's how I mostly use it at the moment, but just in case, if I suddenly disappear from the interwebs, this is why.

(It's actually mildly tempting to just get a new laptop -- I've had this one for several years, and mostly it's fine, but more memory would I think make my speech recognition software a lot more reliable. It might even make Firefox stop hanging all the time, though I realise this is a longer bet.)

The battery now thinks it's recharging, but its estimate of how long this will take is slowly going up.

Anyways.

In other news, I've come up with a plan by which I could theoretically keep my house but move to a job elsewhere in New Zealand (or, for that matter, the world). I'd rather not move, but in the present climate it feels safer and healthier to have an exit plan.

I did admittedly have couple of hours of my ordinary tasks first thing in the morning -- part of which involved communicating with some Internal Relationships (to use position description jargon) about whether or not they could attend the seminar. Then my manager instant messaged me to ask if I could a) make posters and b) do the physical set-up for it, so I made the posters and checked about extension cords and such.

Usually it's quarter of an hour to walk between campuses, but I had to go via another branch to pick up the dataprojector, so it turned out half an hour. Half an hour to set up. One hour for the seminar. Half an hour for lunch (which I spent with the speaker) and then a 40 minute meeting with her and an Internal Relationship who hadn't been able to make the seminar.

Then back to the other branch to return the dataprojector and discovered that the office it resides in was occupied. Now, this colleague -- just as, if you go between campuses you have to spend quarter of an hour walking, so if you meet this colleague you have to spend an hour and a half talking. Law of nature. I don't understand everything he says or how on earth he segues so smoothly between so many disparate subjects, but it's always fascinating.

Then I walked back to my current home-branch. I'd planned to check my email for emergencies before I left, but (partly due to a blister -- I may eventually give up on these boots :-( ) I only got there in time to pack up, phone the pharmacy, and grab the bus.

Attempted to return an interloan to the (temporary) public library except, even leaving earlier than I would on days when I have a 1-hour lunch plus proper tea breaks, it was closed by the time my bus got me there. On the way though I got attacked by a sudden fit of melancholy at seeing a glimpse of its proper (but inaccessible) location and walking over a hump in the sidewalk(*), and haven't figured out what I'll spend the evening doing to combat this yet.

(*) Have I mentioned humps in the sidewalk? And in the road, of course, but many/most of those are more or less levelled by now. I must have. But they're so fascinating. The asphalt has actually stretched over the sand volcano that's erupted beneath it. Stretchy concrete! So cool!


Oh, also I'll recommend the charity anthology Tales for Canterbury. 34 stories, extremely competitively priced DRM-free ebook (print version coming soon), proceeds to Red Cross. I reviewed it on Goodreads.

There's this plaintive wail Boots has started doing about 30 seconds before she throws up everywhere. This turns out to be enough time to leap up, scoop her up, and dump her on linoleum instead of carpet. ...I didn't know she'd even eaten that much tonight. <thinks> Unless she saved some of her breakfast and only ate it a little before I got home, that'd make sense.

Her other new thing is to stand at the dish I've filled with kibble and to chirp questioningly at me. The question is, "How about that nice gloppy stuff instead?" Then we come to a compromise, which is I mix a bit of gloppy stuff into the kibble.

In pilling news: mashing the pill into the gloppy stuff (separate from the gloppy stuff added to the kibble, that is) has worked two days in a row. Thanks for all the other suggestions; I'll keep them up my sleeve in case Boots bamboozles me again.

In other news entirely: have been back at work now for three days. The first day I managed to go something like two whole hours before bursting into tears. Yet the second and third days, no problem. Possibly it's just that for the last weeks before my holiday I was feeling like crying all the time, and the associations were still there? Or possibly because we're at a point where we need to be more future-looking, but in terms of work, looking at the future feels like looking into a vacuum: it makes my head implode.

Anyway, if it was the former it was solved by spending a chunk of the evening reading library blogs and lolcats, and if it was the latter it was solved by my manager being sympathetic and also giving me a project to work on. Literature review, whee! Not the most exciting thing in the world even for me but I know its shape.

Also today I met with a phd student who explained to me all about his research. Normally they say something brief like "gold catalysis" and I struggle with how to tease this out to work with them because I don't know anything about these subjects. Whether this one was just a fluke or whether it was helped by an inspired tweak I made yesterday to my standard introductory letter remains to be determined by further experimentation; but either way it was terribly cheering.

My inbox is a mess. I've read it all but can't remember if/what I wanted to reply to. At one point I managed to reply to something twice but mostly I'm forgetting everything. I'm going to go through and trash the bulk of it so I can stop feeling guilty. If you asked me something that wants a reply, try again.

Just, I have the concentration span of a-- I think I was just doing something. --Also my verbal faculties are back to abnormal. ("Back to" because I remember them doing the same in September.) Where was I? Oh, right, I was going to say I'm sort of reading my friends' lists but if something's a bit long or if I've fallen into the kind of stupor where my bed could burst into flames and I'd just shift back a bit, or maybe into the kitchen(1) if it got too hot, then chances are that even if my eyes move dutifully down the page I won't have actually read it. Responding to things that require any thought or consideration of nuance is utterly out of the question. Occasionally I start to try then give up and just close the tab.

(1) Footnote. Um. I'm generally sitting in my bedroom these days. Partly because the living room is full of a) books on the floor and the chairs and generally everywhere except the bookshelves and b) a cracked fireplace that isn't really any immediate danger but on the other hand why take risks? But mostly because I can see out the window if anything interesting happens, like posties or Red Cross or Aussie cops or the army; and likewise people out there who notice that the two houses on either side of me (that is, two on the left and two on the right) are all destroyed can nevertheless also notice that mine is occupied. But the kitchen table is also a validly useful place to sit, and the spare bedroom is also a comfortable option.


I think that concludes those notes.

Went to work for a few hours Tuesday morning. Getting there takes 50 minutes (including walking to/from the busstop) because the roads are still quiet that early; coming home took 2 hours (waited longer for the bus; more traffic; stopped to buy lunch). Original plan was to stay at work and later go to choir, but work had insufficient space and I had insufficient energy. I could still have gone out in the evening but that really would have taken 2 hours travel to get there, and even though someone'd promised me a lift home afterwards I just. The energy expenditure in going, being sociable and trying not to cry all evening just would not have been worth the rewards of singing.

I got another piece of mail - a phone bill, dated 17 February. My time sense is shot, but careful calculations confirm that was 5 days before the earthquake. (Day-before-yesterday's bank statement was from the 2nd March.) It does appear from NZPost's website that we've officially got full mail delivery in my street, but I suspect things will be wacky for a while. If anyone particularly wants to take the risk of sending something, comment with an email address and I can send you address options, but really I do have everything I need and everything transportable that I want; I'm just in the entirely predictable energy/emotional slump that arises when things thump you and then everything else is twice as hard as usual. You can't turn on the tap to brush your teeth, you have to go and get the kettle from the kitchen.

(I'm pretty sure the kettle is still on the bathroom floor. I was in a rush yesterday morning; caught the bus by a whisker and slumped by a window feeling like the bottom of a bird cage, planning to sleep. Ended up giving directions to two sets of passengers instead, which despite destroying all hope of sleepytimes did at least lift my mood.)

Yesterday evening read a bit, and frowned at Sandbaggers disc 3 which has "bad sectors" even on my good computer (will try it at my parents' house sometime), and dozed for a while, and tinkered on the web, and went to bed early and got up late. Telecommuting this morning again, da de dah.