This week the CBC sent most of its employees who could reasonably work remotely home. It came fairly suddenly on Monday shortly after the federal government announced it’s formal recommendation, formalizing something that was starting to happen organically in various parts of the organization late last week.

The Data Centres team routinely is required to connect to systems remotely to deal with support requests and other operational needs off hours, so for us this is a lot less disruptive than it might be for a journalist or somebody whose primary job function requires a lot of face-to-face meetings. It’s still a strange experience. I’ve had jobs in the past where I often chose to work from home, but since I’ve been a member of the Data Centres team, I’ve generally only been working remotely when I’ve been sick or had an appointment or delivery that I needed to be at home for. This is a big adjustment. Not only is it less than ideal to not have my primary workstation setup, I’ve also been thrust into coordinating team meetings and other collaborative activities via telework tools that we don’t have a lot of experience with as a team, and with almost no warning.

The positive side of things is that everybody’s been pretty helpful and seems to be doing their best to adjust to the new circumstances, under the conditions there’s not much more I could ask for in this respect. We’re all in this together, and it could be a long haul depending on how things go and how seriously Canadians decide to take our guidance with respect to social distancing — a term we didn’t know a few weeks ago.

I’m going to make an effort to log the experience here. Even if this has been a very busy week that has left little time to dwell on the situation, I’m sure that once things settle in I’m going to have a lot of time to think about things, so this is as good an outlet as any. Might as well make lemonade out of this and try to do some non-work related writing, something that I’ve been doing much less of in the past several years.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, this is likely one that I won’t forget!