Sounding the alarm

Some gorgeous sun today. The weather is up and down like a blinking yo-yo. My colleague Emma is the only other person in the office when I am as the rota is strictly managed so that no one of the same gender is in each day and so toilet-based transmission of Covid is reduced. This ignores the fact it’s a shared building with shared toilets and that the whole world and her aunt could be descending on the toilets to urinate, without us realising it. There was a fire alarm partway through the morning so Emma and I took the opportunity to go for a walk with hot chocolates. And we pondered why when a fire alarm sounds in an office, the thought that it could be for a real fire is never on people’s minds. The need to finish the email to Karen in Accounts always seems more pressing than a potentially life-saving act. Have fire stewards in offices cried wolf one too many times, or are we just an inept species?

My colleague Jack, who is one of the other very few people permitted access to the office, but not on the same day as me as he also identifies as male, left some homemade focaccia on my desk when he was in. His housemate had bought him a vegan cooking book and he has to be seen to be using it. I snaffled it as a very welcome treat.

The afternoon was spent frustratingly trying to scan a passport that I couldn’t get to save as one file. Cue various PDF apps and websites being used to stitch together the individual scans of a 48-page passport. I have to send this file to Mozambique as they need a copy of all pages of the passport, including blanks and the cover. Visa progress inches along painfully, but marginal progress is better than none.