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Second week of lockdown
Apr. 5th, 2020 04:26 pmAnd that is the second work week in lockdown done. We're still running at around half the office making it in, and sort of managing to keep on top of the stuff that can't wait. If you didn't have to think about trying to remember to keep two metres from your colleagues it could be easy to forget that it's not just the normal summer drop in staff numbers, right up until you went outside for a walk or to the supermarket and stepped out into an eerie quiet.
At this point I think anyone who has the option of driving in is doing so, even though there isn't normally enough space in our car park to fit in everyone. It helps that the local Very Expensive Car Park is apparently offering free parking for essential workers, which includes us, although I don't know if anyone's needed to take them up on it yet.
I don't have the option of driving in, or at least would have to buy/rent a car and cope with driving again after not doing so for two years. (My driving licence wasn't suspended during the migraine drama other than the mandatory 28 days after a referral from A&E to the TIA clinic, but I would at best have found driving deeply unpleasant until a couple of months ago.) Driving is not exactly difficult at the moment given the lack of traffic, but I have more pressing things to spend energy and attention on. So I'm taking the bus.
The bus is effectively running every twenty minutes. Both of the route numbers (referred to on Twitter as "the student bus" and "the bus for grown-ups") are running at a twenty minute frequency, but doing so only two to four minutes apart. I can think of sensible reasons for that scheduling, but it means that I now have to plan to get to the stop timed so as to not risk waiting at least 15 minutes for the next one. I do not like this. I have been spoiled for the last decade with a bus service that on term time weekdays has a bus at least every ten minutes until around midnight and every five minutes during the day. I'm used to being able to rock up to the stop at any random time and find a bus there within ten minutes at most, unless it's gridlock day in which case the timetable would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction anyway.
Going by the ongoing smell of marijauna in the city centre, the drug dealers saw themselves as key workers for the first week; but they've obviously given up for lack of customers, because this week the air is finally free of the smell for the first time in a couple of years. This is good because I've had migraine aura on and off all week, and the gentleman eating something smelly on the bus on Wednesday and the gentleman who had the keyboard beeps on his phone turned up to eleven on Friday night were quite enough in the way of sensory triggers, thank you very much.
There are hazard tape stripes and floor signs everywhere marking out 2 metre spacing, both inside and outside buildings, and the supermarkets and banks have polite signs saying no more than X people inside at once, and at busy times someone on the door marshalling "one out, one in".
Yes, the police are patrolling, both to ask people whether they have a valid reason to be out and to keep an eye on empty premises because of course the ne'er-do-wells are seeing this as a wonderful opportunity for breaking and entering. Because people will people.
More and more of the few people out on the streets in the city centre are wearing masks or a scarf wrapped around to cover their mouths. Some of the latter are even using the scarf to cover their noses as well. However, I was *not* expecting to see a bloke striding down Market Street in full yellow protective jacket/trousers/hood and a gas mask with built in goggles... That was Friday night. I wonder what weirdnesses await me on Monday?
At this point I think anyone who has the option of driving in is doing so, even though there isn't normally enough space in our car park to fit in everyone. It helps that the local Very Expensive Car Park is apparently offering free parking for essential workers, which includes us, although I don't know if anyone's needed to take them up on it yet.
I don't have the option of driving in, or at least would have to buy/rent a car and cope with driving again after not doing so for two years. (My driving licence wasn't suspended during the migraine drama other than the mandatory 28 days after a referral from A&E to the TIA clinic, but I would at best have found driving deeply unpleasant until a couple of months ago.) Driving is not exactly difficult at the moment given the lack of traffic, but I have more pressing things to spend energy and attention on. So I'm taking the bus.
The bus is effectively running every twenty minutes. Both of the route numbers (referred to on Twitter as "the student bus" and "the bus for grown-ups") are running at a twenty minute frequency, but doing so only two to four minutes apart. I can think of sensible reasons for that scheduling, but it means that I now have to plan to get to the stop timed so as to not risk waiting at least 15 minutes for the next one. I do not like this. I have been spoiled for the last decade with a bus service that on term time weekdays has a bus at least every ten minutes until around midnight and every five minutes during the day. I'm used to being able to rock up to the stop at any random time and find a bus there within ten minutes at most, unless it's gridlock day in which case the timetable would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction anyway.
Going by the ongoing smell of marijauna in the city centre, the drug dealers saw themselves as key workers for the first week; but they've obviously given up for lack of customers, because this week the air is finally free of the smell for the first time in a couple of years. This is good because I've had migraine aura on and off all week, and the gentleman eating something smelly on the bus on Wednesday and the gentleman who had the keyboard beeps on his phone turned up to eleven on Friday night were quite enough in the way of sensory triggers, thank you very much.
There are hazard tape stripes and floor signs everywhere marking out 2 metre spacing, both inside and outside buildings, and the supermarkets and banks have polite signs saying no more than X people inside at once, and at busy times someone on the door marshalling "one out, one in".
Yes, the police are patrolling, both to ask people whether they have a valid reason to be out and to keep an eye on empty premises because of course the ne'er-do-wells are seeing this as a wonderful opportunity for breaking and entering. Because people will people.
More and more of the few people out on the streets in the city centre are wearing masks or a scarf wrapped around to cover their mouths. Some of the latter are even using the scarf to cover their noses as well. However, I was *not* expecting to see a bloke striding down Market Street in full yellow protective jacket/trousers/hood and a gas mask with built in goggles... That was Friday night. I wonder what weirdnesses await me on Monday?