A diary of a homeworker during the lockdown

Confession on what goes on behind the closed door

Ada Ubrezi
5 min readApr 3, 2020

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Source: Imgur

MORNING

7:15 AM. I jump out of my bed to switch off the alarm. The phone display tells me it’s the 3rd of April. I’m approaching the end of my fourth week of self-isolation, you know, since the Earth has started shutting down.

7:30 AM. As I don’t have to rush for a train, I fight the urge to nap a little longer. In my experience, a little longer might turn into an additional hour. I’d better get up and make myself some fresh coffee.

8:00 AM. Stopover in the bathroom to wash my face. I spend thirty seconds looking at myself in the mirror. So far, I haven’t started talking to the mirror nor walls, so this quarantine period is not so bad.

8:15 AM. Great! I still have some time left before jumping on the morning calls and stand-ups. I’d better use it to enjoy the coffee in a living room full of the morning sun. I check out the daily news. I bet not much has changed. Efforts to flatten the curve, part of the population complaining about being on lockdown, another part of the community ignoring the rules and acting like heroes who cannot get sick, inevitable economic decline, increasing unemployment rates. Even more mass surveillance on the horizon? Sounds peachy, not.

8:20 AM. Ah! A positive side to all the news, air pollution is cleaning up. Who knows for how long. Okay, I should probably adopt a little bit of digital minimalism in my life, not only because the majority of all online newspaper homepages display only negative news. Where have all the positive news gone?

8:45 AM. Let’s try to dress up for working from home.

9:00 AM. I receive yet another pandemic-related video. It’s a grandpa plowing the garden and a granny planting toilet paper rolls in line. It’s hysterical. I laugh a lot. Toilet paper hoarders seem to be forgetting it’s a runny nose, not a runny butt they will experience. But well, who knows. Maybe they just need to feel in control [apparently, this is it, or at least it’s mentioned in a psychology-related article I read in New Yorker].

10:00 AM. First, stand up, kicks off. While muted on the call, I’m thinking, would it be utterly unacceptable if…

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Ada Ubrezi

I enjoy researching different topics, occasionally, I’ll turn them into articles.