Work From Home Unexpected Hiatus #1

Out of the blue interruption to the working day from wildlife

Having worked from home for over a year, I am always surprised by the really minor but amusing incidents that interrupt a day that would never have occurred in the office. This week it was an evil and tyrannical miscreant causing chaos and disruption. They even had the cheek to taunt me from the roof of my house.

Just to set the scene, I have a normal house and a small room attached to the back (in the UK we call them a conservatory) but the main thing is that it has a lot of windows and a large opaque plexiglass roof. The room has a dining table and chairs and has been used as a work-from-home area. At the weekend, it reverts to a dining room. Last weekend we had some friends round for dinner, so I was tasked with clean-up chores.

What this means is to go outside and clean the roof of the conservatory, removing the brown-green mossy lumps and making it sparkling clean and white again. Moss builds up on the house roof, then slides down into the gutter on the roof and under heavy rain, it falls off onto the conservatory below. This is an unpleasant cleaning task.

It requires standing on the top rung of a wobbly step-ladder and using an extending broom and hose pipe. Vigorous rubbing of the roof causes the dirt to loosen and flow down the roof back over the person doing the cleaning. To further hamper the process halfway through, it started to rain heavily, but with an impending dinner party, I pressed on and completed the job, getting even more soaked and cold.

Back to the working day and my daughter had been allocated the conservatory that day, and by mid-day appreciated that you need sunglasses to avoid the glare. Mind you, that makes for some interesting video calls. I had been wearing a cap and sunglasses in the same place last year and got some odd looks on calls. However, this day was interrupted by a massive bang and a huge scream.

I dashed into the conservatory to see my daughter pointing skyward as the crescendo of bangs increased in pace and intensity. She had developed a manic laugh and just kept pointing as the roof darkened with a rapidly spreading curtain of dark velvety gloom.

“Magpie” was all she could blurt out.

Sure enough, sitting on the edge of the house roof was a really nasty piece of work. Big, aggressive, and not to be messed with. He was demonstrating his power by continually throwing moss from the gutter onto the roof below and was showing no sign of stopping.

As the mini-explosions of muddy moss kept hurtling down and pinging with a resounding sound on the roof, there wasn’t much we could do. My daughter kept laughing at the thought of all my frantic cleaning being unwound by a bird, and the fact her calls and work had to stop. I was resigned this bird had won and me standing outside to watch just made this insult feel even worse. Just like the Monty Python sketch, where the soldiers in the castle taunt the army outside the walls, the bird continued its onslaught.

Suddenly, with no rhyme or reason, the attack stopped just as abruptly as it had started. The bird flew off, and I was left with a sinking feeling and a dirty roof that needed to be cleaned again.

More About The Author

Greg is an experienced software professional and CTO. Having worked in several businesses, he is now passionate about helping others succeed in software development, management, and outsourcing when he is not cleaning roofs.