Interaction-starved?

At time of writing, Boris Johnson has placed the area I live in a Tier 3 lockdown. This means… well, whatever they say it means, which changes from minute to minute. The upshot is I work from home and visit the office to pick up paperwork maybe once a month. The rest of the time our department works with an MS Teams video call going - we mute ourselves when we don’t need anyone, and only turn the mic on to ask colleagues about something or to let them know what’s happening. This has worked really well despite my concerns, and we as a team have adapted to this whole working from home thing quite easily.

What it’s also done is inserted us into the home lives of our colleagues. Now luckily for us, we like all the members of our team and there’s no awkwardness with this. Instead of us now arriving in the office, talking about whatever TV show or weather is current as we work, we’re now party to everything that goes on in people’s houses. We see the grandma arrive to pick up the young daughter to childcare. We see the husband or wife come into the room behind people to pick up something or provide a fresh brew. We see the dogs and cats trying to get attention from their loved one who seems to be ignoring them to stare at a laptop screen all day. We see the young kids rushing up to show their parents their work from school, or to complain they’re hungry, or ask if they can turn on the TV. And all of these people, because they’re functioning members of society, wave to the camera and say hello, say that they hope we’re well where we are, etc. It’s nice. It’s a break from the work routine.

It’s also made us more friends than just colleagues, I think. Now when we come on in the morning we don’t dive straight into the “right, who’s doing this task this morning so I crack on with this other one?” Instead it’s “how’s Grandma today - is she still picking up your daughter?” or “any news on your brother-in-law in hospital?” and “did you get that toy for your dog?” And it’s made my colleagues realise something.

I used to live abroad. I was there for eleven years. And when I came back, I had to adjust to 90% of my friends being still there whilst I was not. Time zones may have tried to stop us, but wi-fi enabled communications apps made it easy to video chat to them, to have a simple phone call, to constantly text and send memes. Before the outbreak of Covid, my colleagues thought my life was a lonely one, with no-one in my flat but me, no pets or children or partners in the place, no friends around the corner. What they didn’t understand is that I felt like my friends were all here, just out of sight - because they were a Whatsapp message or a FaceTime call away. It’s been like that for me since 2002, when I moved to Hong Kong and used the primitive comms apps of the time to text for free and video call family in the UK.

Now we’re all at home and they’re using the same comms apps to keep in contact with friends and family who don’t live with them, they’re starting to understand why my life is not lonely. Now they get that you’re never truly alone when you have a smartphone - for better or for worse. Right now I think it’s for the better of course. I normally do. In fact, when I think it’s not a good thing I simply turn it off. Problem solved.

I think this prolonged lockdown is having an affect on not just how you behave at home, but how you react now to people in general. For example: I went out today to get a haircut. I got to a pedestrian crossing, waited for the traffic to stop, and then me and the people on the other side of the road started to cross. The car to my right had its windows shut as they were calling someone on a hands-free phone. We could all clearly hear the phone ringing. And then someone picked up and called “HELLO?” Without thinking (I believe), me and three other pedestrians raised our hands and joyfully called out “HELLO” like we were shouting to a ship out at sea. We all realised what we’d done, then laughed about it behind our face masks and carried on walking.

Why did we respond like this? Because it’s polite to reply to people saying hello to you? Because it’s a knee-jerk reaction to greet someone if you think you’re being spoken to? Who can say. But I know I wouldn’t have done that before all this Covid kicked off.

Perhaps we’re all getting interaction-starved. Yes, we have video chats and constant contact with people, but it’s all in controlled environments. When you put us back into a situation that could throw up weird events like the HELLO incident, maybe we all fall back on instincts. Maybe we still need to be in those situations every now and again to keep our horizons where they should be, otherwise how do you know up from down?

In any case, we all got a giggle out of it and we all went on our way. It was enough to amuse me on a wet and windy Manchester morning, when it was eight degrees C and feeling very much like October. Where has the time gone?

And on that note, that’s me done. Three posts in one month? What’s that about?

Soopytwist, everyone.

Image by Thomas Ulrich from Pixabay