“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 1,000 (Monday) – one thousand

For better or worse, this little writing amusement never had an exit plan. Heck, there was never even an entrance plan. It spontaneously sprung forth as a way to process the mental shift of the sudden transition from working full-time in the office to full-time remote work from home. My launch to remote work had two hours notice to grab what was needed from the office before leaving for the day and beginning to work from home the next morning. The supplies grab consisted of a notepad, a few printouts from a current project, a blue pen, a red pen, a highlighter, and not much else. 

There wasn’t even anyone at home to talk with about the situation at hand, global or hyper-local. There still isn’t. The void is mostly okay, but felt especially keenly when there is good news to tell and nobody to share it with. The writing took over, which was mostly me talking to myself. 

My team and I thought working from home would be a two-week long scenario. In the early days of the pandemic, nobody knew what was going on and it was an intriguing and almost intoxicating blend of stressful, mysterious, and a dash of exciting with a hint of adventure. Remote life, hunkered down in the BungaLowell during the pandemic, was little more than working, eating, sleeping, ordering food deliveries, and writing. It lasted a solid 18 months before reverting to the hybrid schedule and regular, outside human contact and often awkward in-person conversations (at least on my part).

Snow tracks.

Through it all, the daily logging of the minutia of one little life became a habit with no actual plan to either continue or to stop. Today's tidbits are, in a nutshell, it snowed last night and there were little critter tracks this morning; work included the Mortgage team's presentation of a Christmas story (The Night Before the Night Before Christmas) with breakfast pizza; the Post Office was visited at lunch to buy stamps; it was soup for supper. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that day after day, people kept reading. Sometimes, friends reached out if a posting seemed late. People commented on posts in real life conversations. And as the calendar began to close in on 1,000 days, a couple people asked if there was anything special planned for the milestone. Fun fact – very little, if anything, about this entire bloggy adventure was planned. Most of it has been cranked out in a nightly span of one to three hours propelled by a state of panic.

The approach to 1,000 days and the sense that there should be something special to commemorate it made it feel more stressful than usual. There was no plan. It has all been a stretch of “flying by the seat of the pants” and there is still neither a continuation plan nor an exit strategy. The best I can come up with is a revision of the title because while life is no longer “Remoted,” it still often feels random.

Maybe it’s time to let this revert back to the original “random thoughts,” words chosen deliberately back in 2009 to allow for randomness of both topics and timing. As for keeping the daily counter, I guess we’ll see.