This is part of a series of posts about "normal", day-to-day life in the pandemic.

Part One- 23rd March 2020, in which I talk about wiping clean the blackboard with our weekly schedule on the first day the kids' school was closed in Lockdown.
Part Two- 27th August 2020, in which I talked about the return to school at the start of the school year meaning the return to some sort of structure to our daily/weekly routines for the first time in 5 months.
Part Three - 14th May, in which I talked about my first day back in the office in over a year... (mainly through the lens of my coffee drinking rituals.)

Usually, I use this website to write about broader media/technology/society stuff rather than the minutiae of my personal day-to-day life, but while I was writing reports for work about the 'big picture' pandemic stuff since the beginning of March 2020, I also wanted to be writing down the "small picture" stuff somewhere. So I'm retrospectively numbering my last three posts on the subject, and following on from the coffee theme of the third.

This month, I've been drinking the kind of coffee that I probably drank the most of before the pandemic; a cappucino from the office's bean-to-cup coffee machine, from a plain white mug.

Although I think machine-made coffee isn't the best, its good - not quite as good as the cappucino I make at home ¹- but on the other hand, the hassle of cleaning up after hand-frothing milk means I only really make those at the weekend; not when I sit down at my desk at home for a day of (remote) working.

It also isn't as good as the coffee from the coffee bar upstairs - which _is_ better than the coffee I make at home (made by a professional barista, using a more powerful machine- I'm not entirely sure which one makes the biggest difference)- but also more expensive. I tend to only treat myself to one of those when I'm also treating someone else though.

So, its machine-made coffee from a generic mug. I've missed it.

What makes this month in particular worth marking was the return to the 'normality' routine of the school term, which kind of makes it the closest thing I have to a new term, and the start of a new school year. Hopefully, a 'normal' school year without having to deal with masks in the school, self-isolation, home schooling etc. We will see…

For me, its also been the start of my new weekly routine; my work's new "way of working" policy of a minimum of two days a week in the office doesn't technically start until 1st October (when everyone has had the opportunity to be double-jabbed), but as the rest of my household is settling into their new term-time routine, it seems like as good a time as any for me to do the same.

Besides - much as I like working from home in general, I've been really missing being around other people in the office, having casual conversations with a grown-up other than my wife, and generally getting a small taste of 'normality' again. (Maybe 'normality' is a bit strong - it isn't yet full-blown normality. Lets say 'normality-lite'. Or maybe 'pre-new-normality' - things like making sure that you've got your laptop charger/mouse/headset in your bag are still something you need to remember to think about, not yet embedded into the muscle memory of the leaving the house routine the way that remembering your keys/wallet/mask are.)

And finally, last Monday was the first day when all covid-related restrictions in the office were lifted. So, masks are now optional (although a few "please wear masks when walking around the office" signs still linger, and the boxes of surgical masks dotted around are still a kind of reminder that not wearing a mask is still a choice), social distancing is no longer mandated (meaning meeting rooms are back to "normal" capacity, and all desks are available again). So as far as it can really go for now, I'd say that the office is now technically "back to normal".

Of course, life is still some way from normality yet. Making any kind of plans for travelling abroad still feels like a bit of a gamble. Its anyone's guess whether we'll get a similar Christmas to last year with last-minute lockdowns, or the Christmas we expected to get. (Or at least, the Christmas I was expecting the week before Christmas when "tier 4" got unleashed...) Societal norms for things like when you should wear a mask or how much space you should give strangers in public are still a bit fuzzy - masks on trains, the underground and shoppin centres are starting to become conspicuous by their absence. I haven't noticed the lingering smell of hand sanitiser for months. "Protect each other" seems to have fallen off the agenda. To use the framework that Canvas8 have been using since the very early stages of the pandemic, we're still in the reevaluation stage - the "new normal" is in sight, but not quite here yet.

But that means that what we can do (which we couldn't when we were still adjusting to life in a pandemic) is start getting ready for it. The question isn't "when will this end?", but "how will we continue?"

So - my new routine is being in the office on Mondays and Wednesdays; my wife's day off (she works 4 days a week) is on Mondays so she does the school drop off/pick up, and on Wednesday my daughter will be in the school's breakfast club and after-school club so that I can be in the office for the 'normal' office hours (more or less - getting home before 6:00 to pick her up still means a slightly early exit.) Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, I expect to be working remotely - unless there's a particular reason to come into the office. (Which will be a pain, because I'll have to deal with childcare admin - something which pre-pandemic was my wife's domain, because she finishes work earlier than I do. Now that I'm mostly at home and she's out at work 4 days a week, its become mostly my responsibility. I've been half-joking that since the pandemic I've become "mum".)

"The office" has changed since that last post in May - gradually, but noticably. At the start of the month, there were enough people in that it was no longer a large, very quiet floor and largely empty desks; although the big "out of use" stickers that were on every second desk (to enforce social distancing) have been removed, the desks are still mostly empty. There were enough people that there was generally a constant, quiet background noise of either people chatting to one another, or talking on the phone (read: Teams ² ) calls. By this week, its been more like a quieter-than normal but still "normal" office environment.

Back in May, it felt like a big room full of desks that you could work at, even though your working day was probably going to be largely the same as working from home - any meetings would be 100% virtual, and little chance of an "unplanned" conversation (there are about ~1,500 people based in the office, so the chances of me knowing any particular random person I happen to bump into are slim) beyond small talk at the coffee machine. But over the months, its started to feel more like somewhere I might well see someone I know and either say hello or stop for a chat. Or sit next to someone, and have interesting and inspiring conversations over the course of the day.

Which is nice.

I even had a day this week where I sat at a desk with three other people from my team, which (because of one of the company reorganisations that media agencies seem to have to go through every three years or so) I hadn't actually done since before Christmas 2019. So that was very nice.

What takes a little getting used to though is the "someone I know" part - lots of people I "know" in the office are people I have never actually met before. People I have been on Teams calls with. People who have seen the inside of my living room, and maybe even chatted with my kids. People I've had to pause meetings with because they needed to deal with their own kids, or someone at their front door, or dogs that wanted to be let out. In short - people who I have had more "personal" contact with than perhaps any of my "pre-pandemic" colleagues, and people who I'm familiar with at sight. But nevertheless, people I've never actually met before.

Society has been fragmented - we all went into the pandemic together, but experienced it differently. The way society comes together again is going mean being re-configured in different ways. I've heard a few anecdotal stories about people who have only discovered in the office about people who have moved house, got married, had babies, and done the kind of things that you talk about in a normal, face-to-face conversation but not a turn-taking, screen-mediated group Teams conversation. I think we're going to be hearing a lot of those kinds of stories in the coming months.

Thats all quite wierd. But then, weird has become so normal that it hardly even seems worth pointing out any more.

I think what comes next is going to be the really interesting part though - the bit that really shapes "normality" for the next five years. (Its almost a cliché that "we saw five years worth of change squeezed into six months" - but a consequence of that is that the next five years of change are going to be totally different to what we thought we could see coming.) Next Friday is the "official" start of the "2 days a week in the office" policy, which means that in a couple of weeks, we'll start to get an idea of what a "full" office looks like in a "2 days in/3 days out" world. We'll start seeing data that supports (or refutes) our hunches about which days people will want to come in, and which days they would prefer to stay at home. The Economist's columnist Bartleby suggests that Mondays and Fridays will probably be the most popular "working from home" days, and that Wednesday will probably be the most popular day to be in the office.

So far, although I've been in a few times over the last few months I don't think I've had a single "meeting" that wasn't exclusively over Teams (including a couple where I've been talking on Teams to other people who were elsewhere in the office.) For all the talk of hybrid working, I've seen surprisingly little about how it should actually work - in the same way that Teams etiquette seemed to be something that we arrived at by consensus (ie. in what circumstances should you have the camera on vs off? Should you turn on whenever someone else turns on? Should you turn on if you're the first to join, or wait and see what everyone else does? Is there a particular type of meeting that lends itself to particular settings? Should your background be blurred, or replaced? Is it OK to replace it with something that people might think is actually your home office?) How many of those 'rules' that we seemed to come to a common consensus around (so, maybe more "norms" than "rules") still apply when you're in an open-plan office - where background office noise can disrupt calls, and call noise can be an annoyance for those around you in the office? Right now, 'remote' meetings still seem to be the default. I guess that will start to change in the next few weeks?

Either way, I think it remains to be seen what "hybrid meetings" really look like. One thing I'm hoping that we'll see (from a fairly selfish perspective) is a cutting down of the time spent silently sitting in meeting rooms, either for the sake of the three slides out of a seventy-slide deck that you have to be there to present, or worse - just in case someone happens to ask a question that requires your specialist knowledge. It feels like right now, there's an opportunity to really rethink the office environment and make it into the space that we want to go to.

Noise management feels like a really important part of what comes next. I remember visiting an O2 office some years ago, and being amazed by the meeting spaces they had - simple tables and chairs out in the open, but with this weird curved acoustic reflector above, which effectively amplified the voices of the people in the chairs, making it really easy to hear one anothers' voices over the background noise of the office. Although that worked great for face-to-face conversations, I'm not sure how useful it would be when someone is joining the conversation remotely. I think "hybrid" means some people "in the room" and some people joining remotely - but does that mean that the room gets its own mic/camera, people act 'normally' and other get to listen in remotely - or does it mean everyone wearing a headset like a 'remote' meeting, but potential 'back channel' conversations in the room with microphones muted?

Thats probably the topic for another post - without the "all-at-onceness" of lockdown (and the incredibly tight deadline that it imposed to get remote working, er, working), coming out of it is probably going to be a much more gradual transition than the shocking way we went into it. Slower, but no less significant.

Interesting times...

Which is now even better, since my wife got me a new espresso machine for my birthday to replace the old one that I insisted didn't need replacing - as it turns out, it was definitely worth replacing. ↩
Its slightly weird that "on the phone" doesn't actually involve a phone any more- like when PVRs like Sky+ came along and we still talked about "taping" things off the TV. ↩

Some Random Nerd