Corona Diary: Day 4

Bethan came in very triumphantly yesterday morning. She’d been to the local co-op.

“I’ve got eggs,” she said with wide eyes.

Unfortunately, no cooking wine because she’s not eighteen yet, but you can’t have everything.

Bethan is now on household duties. Given that she no longer has A levels to study for, she suddenly has a lot of free time on her hands. However, since reading books on her bed and chatting with her friends on Facetime doesn’t feel like an appropriate way to spend it, we’ve decided to put her to work. In the morning, she went shopping. At midday, she cooked lunch with strict instructions that it had to be ready in time for me to go to a meeting at 1. At 12.55, we decided to just take it out of the overn and serve it up as is. I’ve never eaten anything that fast which didn’t involve some kind of bet.

Work is continuing to be a challenge. While the current technology is very good, the simple fact is that home life involves interruptions. I’ve lost count of the number of colleagues who’s simple wisdom has been slightly overshadowed by the noise of Transformers playing in the background.

I had my own version of it. Around 5pm, partway through a 1:1 with one of my team, I became aware of a great deal of clomping coming from the room next door. Also, the kind of tinny stereo that I associate with headphones on a train that aren’t quite as personal as the wearer assumes them to be.

I continued the meeting, and the one after that, trying to ignore the fact that I was being serenaded by a miniature robot version of Ariana Grande.

I then went next door to confront what I assumed was Bethan having a dance party.

I turned out to be Sue doing an onlne exercise class, having finished work for the day, and seeming to have forgotten that I hadn’t.

“I figured it was just a social call,” she told me.

I suggested that my social calls wouldn’t normally involve discussing server loads.

“Oh well,” she said, “I presume you couldn’t hear much through the door anyway.”

I informed her that I had been forced to time most of my questions so that I asked them on the upbeat of her prancing and got the answer just after the downward thump.

“Did that not help?” she asked.

We also tried a pub quiz in the evening. Big Drop Brewery were hosting an online event via YouTube. We decided to connect with our friends. This proved to be more technically challenging than expected. First of all we tried connecting via WhatsApp. This is great for us because we have a Portal. Unfortunately, our friends don’t, so they could only communicate back by propping up a phone on a table, which didn’t entirely capture the entire family.

They then suggested Facetime via a laptop. Unfortunately, the only Macbook we have is my work laptop, and I’ve never used Facetime in my life. After some searching around, I managed to find the app, hidden in one of the submenus. However, the next challenge after launching it was working out how to call out. The instructions for calling someone by searching for them in your Contacts list didn’t seem entirely appropriate. Or rather, they were easy to follow but rather lacked the appropriate next steps after I opened up the Contacts list, saw that was completely empty, and didn’t see much point in typing a name into the search bar anyway. Trying to set up a call the other way was equally problematic. All they needed, our friends teenage daughter explained to me, was my Facetime login to my iCloud account. That all made perfect sense to me apart from the words.

She tried walking me through opening up the settings to find my AppleID. I opened up my settings and we agreed that, yup, they looked nothing like each other.

Eventually, out of despearation, I suggested they just try my gmail address.

Turns out I do know my AppleID after all.