2020 – Page 19 – Abhinav Bhatt

Work From Home Guidelines from a Non-Expert

Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.
Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park – The Lost World

Fiction has become a reality. Who would have thought that it would happen so suddenly? But it is not an alien attack, or Dinosaurs roaming around, or an asteroid coming (It is coming but it will pass from a safe distance, for now…). You just have to work from home and live with it. In the beginning, it looked like a welcome change. But I am not going to the office for more than 10 days now and real colors of Work From Home Life have started to show their ugly faces. I know it is more like Work From Bed, but here I am, as a Non-Expert, to help you rise up and beat your own expectations about yourself and do Work From Home, the right way.

Here are some non-expert tips to deal with the grim situation:

Bed is Bad

Avoid sitting on the bed for 20 hours a day. Maybe sit on the floor and keep the laptop on the bed. Or lie on the bed and keep the laptop on the floor. Don’t ask me! I don’t know… I am not an expert. But stay away from the bed because the bed will stay, backbone won’t. If you already have a desk and chair set up, use that setup. And like I showed in the pictures above, keep changing the directions to have some variety.

Distractions

Everyone is working from home or at home not working. This means you will have to deal with an uncountable number of distractions. Your maid, your family, your pets, your kids, in whichever order you prefer, are going to pester you. The way to deal with this is to turn the tables and become a distraction for them. Disturb them so much that they maintain a big social distance from you and thereby, isolate you enough so that you can work peacefully. There might be debates and fights though. Again, I am not an expert but I can just suggest.

Schedule / Length of the workday

Very subjective. For those who really work will struggle with this as there might not be a start time and end time. For others, a cake walk. They will start late, take breaks in between, shut shop early and when you message them / call them / ping them, they will have the connection problem, electricity troubles, and fought with spouse problems. For single folks, they will have movies open in another tab which would hog the bandwidth. Basically, everything is blurry so who knows who is working and from when.

Working Out

Make plans about how to work out as now you’ve got slightly more time. You needn’t go out but you can see on Youtube: How to meditate, how to do Yoga and which is the right exercise to do after every 25 minutes. Make plans surely. Implementing them can wait. Optimistic folks say that this will get over soon so why change your usual habit of not exercising at all.

Stay Connected

You will soon forget the familiar faces whom you liked, had a crush on, you hated or you were indifferent to. So, it is a good time to stalk or block them on social media sites. It is the right time to know their political views or what their hobbies are. This might change some perceptions, who am I to tell, being a non-expert.

Food and Hydration

You are going to become fatter. There’s no denying that. But everyone is going to become fatter, that’s nice no! Except for those with daily wage jobs (black comedy joke). You are going to definitely sit for more than you did in the office. In-office, you could take long breaks for tea. You could have water cooler conversations about Big Boss. You could sync bathroom breaks with colleagues (it is a thing, really). But at home, you just eat, drink water, walk 5-10 feet and come back and then sit again. You can go to your balcony to track the time and the Sun’s position at least, right?

Rest you can take care of yourself and come up with your own tips. I am not used to working from home and I don’t think this was ought to happen to everyone in this decade. But this is the reality so make the best of it.

Here’s a list of things which you can use to really spend your time wisely, while not working from home. Check the full thread below.

https://twitter.com/nickdennis/status/1241259501510184961

Happy Working from home. Enjoy till it lasts.

Do’s and Dont’s for Jokes in these times

According to South Park, it is okay to joke about anything after 22.3 years. But this was said by Eric Theodore Cartman in 2005. That time we didn’t have Social Media’s power which we have now. So, as per me, adjusted to inflation, the rate of social media growth, the ease of mobile phones, the handiness of the free time due to WFH, and a random constant number 3.14, the world nowadays can make a joke about anything which is 22.3 minutes old.

So there we had it. As soon as the news of disease COVID-19 caused by Virus SARS-CoV-2 came into being, it didn’t take long for the jokes to come. The first one I remember is that Indians can’t get it as we are the immune-st bunch of people because we used to clean the cricket ball, freshly taken out from the dirtiest of drains, by just bouncing it thrice and moving on. Then you would have seen the memes about more babies getting born after the quarantine and they would be called the Coronials.

The funniest part of the jokes is that as long it doesn’t happen to you, they all sound really chuckle-worthy. But as soon as something is directed at you or happens to your near & dear ones, it becomes a no-go zone for you, no matter who you are.

Therefore, I took the liberty out of the thin air and wrote some Do’s and Don’t about joking about the Corona Virus.

The Do’s & the Don’ts

Pundemics are okay, the Pandemics aren’t.
Racist jokes should be avoided. The maximum you can say about China is this: Nowadays, everything is Made in China.
Jokes about Panic buying should be encouraged. People who are not panic buying are getting panicked by others panic buying because now non-panicky folks fear that if they don’t panic now, the already panicked fellows will buy everything and there will be nothing left apart from having a panic.

Following types of jokes should be totally disbarred:

Knock Knock
Who’s there?
It’s WHO.
Who WHO?
Roses are Red, Violets are blue… You travelled abroad? We need to Quarantine you.
Nobody

Jokes about Flattening the Curve are fine. But you need to flatten your belly curve too, Sir.
Social Distancing jokes are fine, as long as you don’t irk people permanently that they diss you and keep a distance of 10 feet from you forever. (This is the worst of them all, I Know)
Jokes about Work From Home are fine but I want to write another blog post so I cannot pour all my creativity here.

I hope you all are following the protocol shared above as well as staying safe, aloof and giving cold vibes to everyone like it’s a Monday morning.

Jokes are what make us human. Again, jokes dry up when someone we know gets affected. Not everyone is equipped to crack jokes and not everyone is sane enough to take them. Till then, ciao? No no… sayonara… no that is also not safe and also the wrong country.

Namaste. (Can be used as a greeting as well as a goodbye, right!)

Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash

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2020 will be full of fireworks

Back in 2002, when I was still in school, 2020 seemed like a far fetched affair. There was some discussion originating from Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s mind about 2020 would be The Year. It felt like it would be a time when the World would have totally changed. Technology would have made leaps and bounds. India would have become a superpower (wink). Unfathomable, mostly!

And here we are. 2020 has already begun and within the powerplay, life has been nothing but a turmoil with a lot of work, sleepless nights, weekend events, (thoughts and personal plan about higher studies) and before we could take a sigh of relief, we have got the main event of the year (perhaps of this century), the Covid-19.