As for me, if anyone cares, this week's been challenging.
Haven't left the house for 4 days now, which I'm cool with so far and provisions are holding up on the food and toilet roll front, but I am running out of vape juice. There's a shop 3 miles away from me with a supermarket next to it so I may venture out at some point over the next week to get some and also re-stock the essentials (I'm trying to time this just before things go into first phase meltdown as I'd really rather not be out then, but ultimately that's probably futile as I will be out during one of them). If I want to play Russian Roulette with my lungs there's a co-op very close to me that I could just buy some fags and food from, but I'd rather not be potentially cocking the barrel and putting the gun to my head by smoking.
Trying to keep a business operational and move staff to work from safe(r) locations from my kitchen table has been quite tough. Long days, with a huge number of calls, Teams meetings, Skype calls and an inbox that's growing faster than the virus itself and every time I beat it down the fucker just comes back again. Due to the position I hold I want to show leadership at all times and stay in contact with my team as much as they need, which has actually been fine so far and I'd put this week on a level of "not as bad as other weeks I've had during my career". But, and it's a huge but, it's all been done against the backdrop of knowing full well that where we are now is a piece of piss compared to what's coming.
I can't quite work out what this will look like, but there'll come a time when we all as a society realise we're on Italy's trajectory and that's going to hit hard. When it does we'll still be climbing that peak, with a fuck load more to traverse, but the further up it we go the more people are going to be out of action and the harder it will be for those left to cope.
People in my team are going to get sick, two of them are in the risk group, one of which is older and in the risk group. I don't know the family circumstances of all of the team (as we're split between two offices), but one of them has an 84 year old mother with early stage dementia in a care home. So if they don't get sick, their loved ones will. I'm fully expecting to have to have a conversation with someone who has lost a loved one that they couldn't say goodbye to and will not be able to hold a funeral for. I'm not sure how I'll deal with that, let alone how they will. As people start to drop off from being able to work, essential functions will no longer be able to be carried out - I've already adopted the mantra of if it doesn't keep our people safe or keep the business going then we shouldn't be doing it.
We'll also start to lose branches, and customers will not be able to pay us when the work dries up (everyone is over trading like a fucker at the moment to get as much work as they can done which is only going to end one way), so the pressures will ramp up hugely. It'll become harder to get emotional support from friends when they start experiencing the loss of loved ones and I won't be able to support them properly either. Then there's the possibility I might lose someone I care about myself. I won't be able to see them or say goodbye to them, but all of the above will need to carry on as I'll be letting down people in the business who're a lot less fortunate than me if it doesn't.
If we get through this without any of the above happening to me or people I care about then I'll consider myself unbelievably lucky, I already am in many ways. I genuinely don't know how those on the front line of the NHS are going cope and each and every one of them should get some form of formal recognition when this is over.
The biggest thing I've noticed so far is that time seems to be losing meaning. Events have moved so quickly and I've been rushed off my arse, so the week should have flown by, and actually it has in some respects, but then I stop to think and last Friday seems like a lifetime ago. With February feeling like a distant, but simpler memory already. I don't understand how that works yet, I guess I'll come to.
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Originally Posted by Bernanke
talk but on the financial impact, I'll be refunding my £5K rail season ticket in the morning and absolutely pulling up the drawbridge to any businesses that would ordinarily have got my money (e.g. gym). I'm going to be coming out of this looking like Jeff Bezos with hair from a short-term April (+ May, June, July....) overheads perspective. Now if I wasn't as selfish and actually continued to fund them (maybe even gone as far as buying gift cards to my regular haunts) and I was the model for the rest of society, we could ride this out real smoothly. Maybe.
