Time to enjoy the things we missed by working from home

With more than a touch of irony, work from home, the 2022 version, ended on the same day as D-Day, the anniversary of the Normandy landings in 1944 nearly four score years ago.

China Daily had a picture of a 24-hour restaurant with a line of people snaking around the place, waiting like Cinderella for midnight for it to reopen and celebrate the victory over omicron.

The paper even had a chat with a resident who was celebrating the idea of finally being able to go out with his girlfriend for a meal at the eatery.

That much is true, when you think about it. You do not appreciate something until it is gone. Dining inside a restaurant was one of those somethings.

For a number of weeks, routines changed. Drastically.

We would hike over to testing stations to have someone tickle our throats with swabs. Sometimes, the test results came back at 3 am the next day.

I would keep looking until 2 am and then fall asleep, while watching Star Trek, Strange New Worlds or the new Star Wars series, Obiwan Kenobi.

That would kick off my mornings. I would then trudge back to my apartment and crash into bed to catch up on the sleep deficit I had accumulated.

Since the pleasure of dining in was suspended, Sherpa's became a constant companion on my cellphone. I would send an order before 10 am and double up on the order to cover dinner, too.

I would track the guy bringing the food over on the app on my cellphone. When the motorcycle was 2 kilometers away from the south gate, I would head down and wait just inside the barrier.

Luckily for me, the food deliveries normally had the name of the restaurant on. No fumbling around trying to figure out which order was mine.

I would wave to the delivery guy, and he would hand over the food across the barrier so the food would not be left in the delivery shelf, wilting away in the searing sun.

It got to the point where the delivery guys would recognize me waiting in the shade of the tree near the south gate of the China Daily compound and half run over to pass it across the barrier.

Come to think of it, the summer sun was not so bad because a slight wind would often kick up, cooling my sweaty forehead.

One day blended into another.

My wife was told to go into work and, for a while, we thought life was headed back to normal.

As easily as the restrictions relaxed, the whole thing shut down again.

A popular bar got hit by an outbreak and we went into testing for an entire week or so.

After a while, the routine has become familiar, if a little dreary in its repetitiveness.

My wife was told to go back to working from home. The colleagues she so enjoyed talking with headed back to the isolation of their own dwellings across the city.

The mental grind of being alone in a comfortable apartment, well, gets into your head.

There is nothing physical ailing you. The difficulty is all in your brain. The hard part is that you hope it ends one day and you want to smell the world all over again. Or, revel in the chatter of office gossip.

One can only hope it will be over soon. For now, just soak in the quiet. "Hello darkness, my old friend," I hum to no one in particular.

But now, with the summer at its height, and the pandemic currently in retreat, it's time for everyone to appreciate that "something "which they took for granted, but missed when it was gone. For me that's going out and running around the city.