When smart working seems like a social experiment
Video conferences, the baby at home from the nursery, the sick mother: a fatal combination
This week, due to a curious and mysterious series of astral conjunctures, a combination of lethal situations has come true: smart working, the child at home from the nursery, the sick mother, video conferences. All together.
Let’s proceed in order. Since the virus started biting again in January, my wife and I both worked from home again. For a while everything went smoothly: me on the table, she on the sofa, with their respective laptops.
But then little Tommaso was not very well, already starting last weekend: luckily nothing serious and no Covid-19, above all. But in any case, our son had a nice full week at home from daycare.
We did not know, however, that this was only the first fact that we could not have foreseen. The second was the possibility that the mother also fell ill at the same time. Thus smart working has almost become a social experiment, a curious form of torture, a real test of physical and psychological resistance.
The child, already very lively on his own, recovered quickly from his stomach ache and started wandering around the house free to destroy everything and mess up the house, while his father tried to work on the PC in some way. Meanwhile, the mother was too tired and bruised to be able to handle the situation.
In those days, among other things, there was a busy schedule of professional conferences and video calls that I managed to complete anyway.
But the chaos was such that - to give an idea - Jinnie, the dog of the house, seriously considered the possibility of going back to the kennel:
“I was more peaceful there,” she said.