Home, Home on the Strange

I was at work the other day (yes, on-site, not at home) and working away on the high-priority, essential, very high pressure, and extremely stressful project I had been assigned several months ago, when, but soft! What email through yonder monitor breaks?

It was a company-wide email from a head cheese (who was so high up the org chart that I did not actually know who it was).

He wanted to remind everyone who was working from home that there are company resources to help them deal with the stress of having to be home all day long while receiving their full pay.

I pondered that for a moment as I sat deep within the bowels of a corporate building, designed to comfortably accommodate hundreds of workers, in which I was now virtually alone, save for 20 or 30 of my fellow essential employees spread sparsely throughout the building.  And it had been that way for months.

I re-read the email again to see what resources were available for those of us who had to get up every morning, drive down empty freeways, be stopped at the door to don masks, undergo an interrogation, get temperature probed, and then go on inside the virtually empty building to expose ourselves to potentially infected employees.

There was no mention of us in the email.

I went back to my inbox to scan my received emails and even my spam folder to see if I had inadvertently missed the email for us on-site employees.

Nope.  Nothing there.

Strange.  Perhaps it got lost in the mail server.

But that’s okay.  I occasionally got to enjoy being at home on Saturday mornings for a bit  before the inevitable phone call would come, asking me why I was not at work.

And, you know what?  That email was right.  That couple of hours I was at home on Saturday mornings was very stressful!  Can you imagine?  Sleeping in?  Enjoying a cup of coffee?  Stepping out back to look at the birds?   It was madness!

I was tempted to call the Being-at-Home Stress hotline, but then decided I would just go into work instead.

After all, it is very relaxing being interrogated, temperature probed, and treated like Typhoid Mary.

 

 

 

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