This day I literally spent on Zoom from 8.30am to about 7.30pm. My God. That was long. We started with the heavy part, 2.5 hours of discussion of a preliminary grant proposal that’s supposed to be submitted somewhere next year. Interesting ideas, with a lot of potential, and also potential for improvement, and I’m curious to see where that will lead eventually.
The rest of the day was our hybrid nChristmas party. Which was, obviously, a bit weird. Part of the people were sitting in their offices, and about two-thirds were at home, I think. The boss man gave a Christmas speech, various people sang, we played secret Santa, and there was the opportunity to get pretty wasted – booze collecting was the only real presence part. This was the first time I had alcohol since late September, so I didn’t need much. Needless to say I had only a small cup of mulled wine, and left it at that.
At the end of the afternoon, we played some fun games with the last bunch of colleagues. The last few standing. To me, this is often the best part. Due to this shit pandemic, I don’t partake in many in-presence activities, so having some social fun online felt like good fun. If there’s one thing I miss, it’s the social part of work. People in my department probably don’t see me this way, but I used to be a pretty social person. I still am. And it feels nice to feed some of that, even if it was with a silly online game. I think we all had fun. I may have agreed to tattoo a Spongebob Squarepants on one of my colleagues just before the day ended, so I guess I’ll have to start practicing again soon. It’s been awhile, and I could have some extra ink myself first…
Robin Heinen 