Woke up at 2:30 a.m., did crossword puzzles on the phone until 4. Realized that hey, I no longer have any kind of commute or reason to get dressed any more, so I set my alarm for 7:45 and staggered into “work” in ye olde pajamas and bathrobe, didn’t even turn any lights on.

First day of working from home was actually quite chill and pleasant for me. Nobody around to nitpick my behavior! Half the kitchen table is set up for work and I’m thinking of it as a “Chinese wall” sort of situation since it means I’m using an area of the apartment I don’t normally hang out in much. Can’t see my laptop, not tempted to hop on it, and vice versa. Almost everything worked today (I can’t get access to one of the drives), the VPN was fine and did not kick me off. I had two phone meetings in the morning and afternoon--this sounds like it will be A Thing every day. Happily, I can still read news sites or whatever DURING the meeting, which is great because I got told to log off the VPN during those and it gives me something to do. Plus, I can actually do something in a meeting besides sit still and stare! It’s lovely! I also did an online meditation class through work.

Also, ate ice cream for breakfast and lunch, because I could.

I am slightly confused as to the following:
(a) We are to put it on our timesheets that we worked when we were setting up our computers. For example, it taking me an hour to plug everything in and then futilely attempt to see if the microphone would work* last night.
(b) But we are not to use overtime. Huh? What does that mean? Like I work an hour less on one day this week.
(c) Okay, fine, but it looks like we’re gonna have meetings at the beginning and end of every day, so “start late” or “leave early” is not so much an option? What do I do, take a 2 hour lunch?

* I plugged in my own, it looks like every setting is totally fine on the computer, but still no sound. WTF?

I keep volunteering to “work late” if we have VPN issues, but I doubt they will take me up on it if we HAVE to have early morning meetings every day, which we do. Sigh. Oh well, things went fine today for me, I got a lot done. I have brought up that we need to announce the bad news about mailing to people, so hopefully that gets done. They also did phone interviews and are on to picking 4 more to reinterview, so let’s hope that goes well.

People heard from today:
* Redhead Sarah said she’s isolating but did send me a cool pic and we commented on how the hell karaoke was still going on,
* New Temp Sarah, who is chipper. Why wasn’t I born naturally chipper like that? Why did Dad’s genes win out in my personality?
* Mom originally texted me sounding like she was sick because she said she had a stuffy nose, but sounded fine on the phone, said she was “working on the kitchen,” i.e. going through her “pile of shred” for the “shredding event.” I pointed out that was unlikely to still be going on. I will believe it when I see photographs of it, I’ll put it that way.
* Tigress, who wanted me to do more of her workload, i.e. proofreading. (She sounds fine.) She passed this on to me at about 4:40, so obviously I did not get through all of it by 5, but she didn’t make it sound like it was dire-on-fire so I was all, okay, fine, finish tomorrow. She called me around 5:50 to be all “why aren’t you still working?” (well, more politely phrased, but I got the drift) and I said hey, I started right at 8 in case we had yet another surprise meeting and the boss said no overtime. She wasn’t thrilled about that because apparently it WAS dire-on-fire, but couldn’t argue the point, and admitted that her day started a lot later than mine had and she’d missed the “no overtime” conversation from meeting number one. So, oh well.

I got email from my old director Linda saying that Robin Hood is canceled. We ended up emailing back and forth because I suggested we try to figure out some way to do it as a podcast. Turns out that “Robin Hood The Musical” isn’t the one I found via Googling, but an original show she and Germaine wrote up. So hey, we COULD do that! Not that either of us knows the technicalities of it, but I figure Scott and/or his best friend the sound engineer probably at least would know something.

In other news, the entire county and the county next door went to shelter in place* until at least April 7, which forced my work to completely and utterly shut down, including the call center. I fear they will be trying to make me answer the phones when they figure that out, at which point I will wish for death. God, no. The entire org has “suspended operations,” though I am pretty sure Dawn still has to work from what I read of that. I haven’t heard from her, I guess she is not in the mood either since Loretta and I realized we can’t go to the peacock party. My dentist is closing for a week except for emergencies.

* As for the yarn shop....according to the newsletter they canceled classes but are still getting a lot of sales and “even after refunding (a lot) in class fees, we still had a positive sales day” and are still in there doing online orders and pickup, are still open but limiting the number of people in there.

Anyway, am doing better today since it was a chill day for me. Though I did briefly walk by the work computer at 5:03 and saw that someone from another office was messaging me and I was all, “nope! They made it clear that I do not get overtime! Shut it down!” I’m sure she can email.

I have also done a little decorating around the house, putting up cute tie-dye-y posters from an old calendar of mine so that the walls behind my computers are decorated in the event that I absolutely have to turn a camera on. At least the living room is relatively neat now. We’ll just keep people out of the clothing-strewn bedroom when it comes to camera anything.

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