Status-Q

As a result of the virus, and its effect on my consultancy clients, my ‘work’ has fallen to about half its normal level. I hope this doesn’t carry on for too long, because my income has also fallen by about two-thirds. But, just at present, I’m rather enjoying it, and, as people usually say when they retire, “I’m busier than ever”.

The fact that it’s been sunny here at the same time is just icing on the cake. I’ve even been doing some serious lawn maintenance, which perhaps indicates that I’m closer to retirement than I had previously thought. (I used to joke that I knew I was getting old when I voluntarily went to a garden centre as a weekend activity. But in recent times it’s been even worse: I’ve noticed that I’m not even the youngest person in the garden centre! Sigh.)

Anyway, since I have no kids to home-school, the lockdown’s giving me an excuse at least to start catching up with the huge backlog of tasks that I’ve been putting off for months. There are the important ones, which I’m sure we all attend to first: tweaking the configuration scripts in our home automation systems, for example. Making sure our lightbulbs have up-to-date firmware. Redeploying our web services using the container orchestration framework du jour. That kind of thing.

But eventually we get to the more mundane but essential tasks of daily modern life. You’re probably considering some of these too:

• Is my home and off-site backup system working reliably?
• Are all my family members using a good password manager? (And can they get access to mine if anything should happen to me?)
• Do I still have any remaining email accounts with so-called ‘free’ providers, who read it in order to sell me things?
• Have I merged all the photo and video projects from my laptop onto my main desktop machine?
• Is my blog properly backed up, and where?
• Are there any rooms in the house which don’t have proper ethernet cabling yet?
• What do I still need to scan in my filing cabinet before I can be truly paperless?

Fortunately, I have plenty of other projects to distract me before I can get down to these, which means that we may need to be in lockdown for some months before I actually do old-fashioned things like descaling the coffee machine or looking through the piles of dead trees in my in-tray.

And this is good, because it’s important for people to be able to stay active in their old age.

Especially when the garden centre is closed.