May 2 ~ I guess I should consider myself fortunate: 6 years ago I left the gig economy and took a fulltime job with a Fortune 1000 company that has now become — via merger — a Fortune 500 company, doing what I’ve done for the last 35+ years: write new software and fix existing software when it breaks. Among the gray-haired IT cognoscenti I’m known as an “Ironhead”: a mainframer, a programmer of legacy information systems wielding my toolbox of skills (JCL, COBOL, DB2, SQL, Easytrieve, etc., etc.) to support those IBM retail/manufacturing/banking clients with their vast databases of customers, depositors and/or products.
It was the right move at the right time, as the company had a long history of retaining its talent (many of my coworkers have spent their entire careers at the firm). I even survived 2 RIF’s that claimed associates with way more seniority than I had (one was my immediate at-the-time supervisor who made the decision to hire me in the first place). All was well until late February 2020 when the world started grinding to a halt over fears of a “bug” called Covid-19.
The world has not been the same since. An idea of the bunker mentality that has gripped upper management, not just in my company but across the board nationally, can be seen in the continuously revised policy statements that emanate as the latest graph charts bring more bad news: within 30 days we went from an across-the-board salary reduction for all personnel worldwide to furloughs and layoffs; work-from-home deadlines that have been extended 4 times since March, the latest being June 1.
I said at the outset I considered myself fortunate, because I happened to be one leg of a three-legged stool supporting a core application, as “essential personnel” as it’s possible to be and thus immune from layoffs. Because two-legged stools only exist in Dali paintings or DC comic books, I assumed my 2 teammates and I were shielded from such upheavals. Alas, yesterday we lost one of the legs and have become that gravity-defying movable I thought could never exist in the physical world.
Adaptations and revelations pursuant to WFH fulltime:
- It does feel like house arrest after a few weeks. I’ve ventured to the office a couple of times (which since the 1st of March has become as forlorn & deserted as I’ve ever seen it, even on holidays and weekends when most employees are away anyway ~ before the lockdown there was always some activity occurring at the office due to the nature of our work) just to realign my senses to being away from that environment for this long for the first time in my working life.
- You start to notice traits of family members you’ve lived with for decades that you never noticed before, because the three of you have suddenly been thrown into close proximity 24/7. Some of the traits become close to unbearable because there is no reprieve or stay as in prior times, when the normal regimen separated the two of you for hours every day. You ask yourself if those negative qualities are grounds for divorce.
- Sleeplessness has become a greater issue than it was before: I wake up in the middle of the night and lie staring at the ceiling, wondering what is to become of us if we enter another Great Depression.
- You learn that you don’t expend the mental energy buildup you did before the lockdown: when quitting time arrives every day, since you are working from home all the time now, you are seized by a restlessness and claustrophobia that wasn’t there before.
- You drink more. I drink more.