Finally, the lockdown has been lifted in Manila this week so that meant that we’re officially tasked to come back into the office. As expected, it’s been very weird but mostly for reasons not necessarily concerning Covid-19.
Basically because of budgetary cuts done by the company I work for, there are only six of us (seven right now but one person will be leaving at the end of the month) left in our department. There were once as many as sixty people in our department, so this is a huge difference.
We once occupied a whole floor, and now we’re all sequestered to one side of the office, which feels very weird. It’s a very good thing in terms of social distancing because the six of us can really spread out but at the same it, it’s all very quiet. I somehow can’t get over the quietness, actually. I have always been that annoying person at the office who always has earphones plugged in so I thought that there wouldn’t really be that much of a difference, but there is a massive one. I never realized how much life the shuffling and bustling of people gives to a place. Right now, even if we play music at full blast, it doesn’t feel the same.
Being the ones left, we spent all of Monday checking all pedestals and cabinets for any documents that contained sensitive information so we can shred them. That was fun, people are so gross. The worst pedestal I saw was so full of crap that I had a hard time pulling the damn drawer open. A multitude of tea bags were found, a bunch of water bottles, at least ten Tupperware lunchboxes, a couple of pairs of shoes and all other sort of crap that my former colleagues felt okay to part with. I clocked in at over 20,000 steps that day, just zipping about from one end of the office to the other, moving and organizing papers that we need to keep just in case somebody looks for them.
I’m not complaining, of course; this was part of the job role. I’m just saying that it’s very weird to see only two cars on a parking lot that was once filled to the brim with cars. I guess it doesn’t help that the other departments in our company are still on a WFH set up, so I guess the quietness is really amped up. There’s’ talk of the people upstairs eventually using the vacant space on our floor to comply with social distancing measures but who knows when that’ll happen? And even then, I guess it’ll be weird to have to share a tiny pantry with people from other departments.
The drive to the office is surprisingly bearable. I thought that a majority of the city dwellers would return once the lockdown is lifted but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I didn’t think that I’d miss driving around so much, even though I’m using somebody else’s car right now. Back in 2019, I was cursing Manila traffic and look at me now, LOL.
This new normal will definitely take some getting used to (and a part of me wonders if I’ll even ever get used to it). I’ll keep you posted and I’ll write in detail about what happened soon, but right now, I just really needed to take note of this weird beginning.
