UNEXPECTED LUNCH

Unexpected lunch break today. After back-to-back, continuous meetings, I logged on to the fourth one of the morning, and immediately, everyone else started logging off. The names on screen reduced to ‘leaving...’ until only mine was left, ‘waiting for others to join’.

I was too relieved to worry that it might have been because of me. Three and a half hours of meetings is exhausting, especially when most of it doesn’t really mean anything to me yet. I just closed my laptop, exhaled, and went to make lunch, with a happy little skip.

What if it’s always like this? What if working remotely is a continuous stream of meetings through the day, followed by people doing their actual work outside of work hours? That would be a weird twist to the industrial revolution story: for the first 150 years, we locked ourselves into factory opening times, then, when we finally realised we didn’t have to do that any more, just when it looked like we were mastering our own freedoms, we decided to take the factory home with us.

I do not want to be working outside of my contracted hours.

Hopefully it will calm down a bit, the other side of the learning curve. I’ve a lot to take in after all; maybe I can start dropping out of things, like my colleagues did on my lunchtime meeting.

More this afternoon too. At least until 4pm. Then perhaps I can do some of the things on my todo list.

It’s a bit like town centres: at some point in the last few years, the balance weirdly shifted from work and retail, to coffee shops and restaurants. The pandemic accelerated it of course, but it was happening anyway. There are so many of these places! You do your shopping online and your socialising in Starbucks now it seems, or in an in-store coffee shop, where the model is that you’re tempted by all the sparkly things you see on the way to your panini.

The paninis though turn out to cost a small fortune, and the glittering array of coffees on offer are so packed with sugar, you might as well be wide-eyed Willy Wonka. It costs you in the end, that kind of thing.

And similarly then, I might be orbiting the expensive black hole of ‘taking my work home with me’ which I don’t think I like very much. Hopefully I can work it out.

I’m thankful for this lunchtime though.