Noses, closures and boring the pandemic to death
Yap Xiong's take on a year of swabbing, working from his bedroom and the routines that keep us alive
I spent the first year of the pandemic digging into other’s noses. Back in April 2020, having just returned from my studies in Lebanon at the start of Singapore’s circuit breaker (lockdown), no one was hiring . But the Ministry of Health threw me a lifeline. No interview, no questions asked except “Can you commit for six months?” I ended up being a swabber for 14 months.
Up until July this year, I assumed it was normal to eat alone, get tested immediately when I got a blocked nose and dutifully shower with antiseptic soap before returning home every day. A frontline job of such nature necessitated these.
There was never a transition-to-work-from-home moment. Neither was there a possibility-of-returning-to-office phase. My office was the test facility, humming with dormitory workers and sick Singaporeans for seven days a week. There were no townhalls, zoom meetings or web and social media posts to work on. After a decade of doing web writing, communications and marketing, my daily communication was reduced to utterings of “This might be a little uncomfortable” around 200 times a day.
Then I got a job at SEC and everything changed.
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When I began to work from home with SEC, a conversation with my parents went like this:
Them: “Eh why you never go work?”
Me: “Oh. I got a permanent job. The one we talked about?”
Them: “So you just sit there and work ah?”
Me: “Yes.”
Them: “Hm. Ok so you very free later help me clean the floor…”
Beyond dispelling misconceptions from my parents about what work from home actually entails, it has tectonic shift in daily work. From going out every day for work to working from home; from using my room just to sleep to working from my room. As the outdoorsy one in the family and the designated errand-runner, the first major challenge was accepting that I needed sync my body activity to ‘office time’ in front of a computer. It felt weird to narrow my entire workday to the table in my room. But the excitement of work hasn’t disappeared – it’s just virtual rather than physical now.
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In the midst of uncertainty, I believe it’s good to stick to routines. It doesn’t matter whether I can eat out or work in an office, as long as I have a set of fixed actions that keeps me anchored. This means doing 6 a.m. runs, weekend swims, language lessons on weekday evenings, frequent visits to the library and the occasional cup of afternoon teh gajah.
“You have to bore the pandemic to death with a stable routine,” a Chinese friend, stuck in his Wuhan apartment for almost three months, told me.
But some kind of spontaneity is good too! During the short window of time when we were allowed back in the office, I really relished heading to the NUS track after work, and geocaching and hiking all corners of Kent Ridge down to Labrador Park. Singapore is physically small, but it is densely packed with micro-sized experiences and adventures.
I would not wish another year of work-from-home and travel restrictions, not even for my worst enemies. Even if I had to swab myself a thousand times, I eagerly look forward to reopening to drinking teh gajah in Johor Baru, to seeing the world physically and not just virtually.