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Dec. 21st, 2020 10:58 amToday, the 5yo should have been seeing Santa.
The event was organised by a local community group, based out of an old stately home near where I live. The initial plan was a masked-and-distanced in-person meeting in the very beautiful reading room at the house, but then with covid cases locally beginning to spiral, that plan shifted into a personalised video call with each child who’d booked.
Then on Saturday evening this latest lockdown was announced with almost immediate effect, only a few hours warning. And a little later we received an email from the very upset organisers to say that they were going to have to cancel the event and issue a refund, because the Santa Suit and video equipment are all locked away in the house (community centre), which because of lockdown they are no longer permitted to enter. There wasn’t time on Saturday night to retrieve it. So all those kids won’t be getting their call from Santa today after all.
Such a shame. Luckily we did get to wave to him on Saturday, as a different version of him did a masked-and-safely-distanced walk around the neighbourhood, accompanied by an elf I went to school with!
Also today, my brother rebelled against his work.
He works in a telephone support centre, taking calls from people having technical issues. They switched to homeworking back in March and that worked fine for months.
Now, this job has never been ideal. It is in another town and Bro doesn’t drive, so he has always had a really long commute on public transport, working unsocial and constantly changing shift patterns, so the move to homeworking was a blessing for him. He could work his shift without a 90-120 minute commute at either end, without having to worry about missing the last bus, without having to leave the house at 5am to get to work for 7.30.
At the start of December, with covid cases locally already beginning to spiral out of control again, the company abruptly decided to recall all service desk staff to on-site working, claiming they weren’t answering enough calls. The entire management, however, continued to work from home. This has been a nightmare for Bro, who has asthma and generall fragile health, once again condemned to hours on increasingly flaky public transport every day (a lot of services are no longer running, so getting to and from work is extremely difficult), as well as hours spent in a poorly ventilated building with a whole bunch of other people, in a town with soaring virus figures. Government advice still says that anyone who can work from home should continue to do so, but the company got around that one by claiming call centre staff as key workers.
Now this week, we are back in full lockdown with a new and even more highly transmissible form of the virus circulating generally. The company is still insisting that all service desk staff must continue to work from site, while their managers remain safe at home. The service desk staff have all been complaining, lodging health and safety appeals, to no avail.
So today my brother rebelled. He decided not to risk his health on public transport. Instead as his shift began he logged on at home to carry out his shift in safety. How the company will react remains to be seen. But they were endangering his life. He doesn’t need to be on site to do his job. If they try to sack him, he has a strong case to take to tribunal. And I will be behind him all the way!
(ETA: Apparently the entire team independently made the same decision this morning! Only one person went in, and that was just to collect a headset. Mass action for the win! The company will have a hard job sacking all of them!)
The event was organised by a local community group, based out of an old stately home near where I live. The initial plan was a masked-and-distanced in-person meeting in the very beautiful reading room at the house, but then with covid cases locally beginning to spiral, that plan shifted into a personalised video call with each child who’d booked.
Then on Saturday evening this latest lockdown was announced with almost immediate effect, only a few hours warning. And a little later we received an email from the very upset organisers to say that they were going to have to cancel the event and issue a refund, because the Santa Suit and video equipment are all locked away in the house (community centre), which because of lockdown they are no longer permitted to enter. There wasn’t time on Saturday night to retrieve it. So all those kids won’t be getting their call from Santa today after all.
Such a shame. Luckily we did get to wave to him on Saturday, as a different version of him did a masked-and-safely-distanced walk around the neighbourhood, accompanied by an elf I went to school with!
Also today, my brother rebelled against his work.
He works in a telephone support centre, taking calls from people having technical issues. They switched to homeworking back in March and that worked fine for months.
Now, this job has never been ideal. It is in another town and Bro doesn’t drive, so he has always had a really long commute on public transport, working unsocial and constantly changing shift patterns, so the move to homeworking was a blessing for him. He could work his shift without a 90-120 minute commute at either end, without having to worry about missing the last bus, without having to leave the house at 5am to get to work for 7.30.
At the start of December, with covid cases locally already beginning to spiral out of control again, the company abruptly decided to recall all service desk staff to on-site working, claiming they weren’t answering enough calls. The entire management, however, continued to work from home. This has been a nightmare for Bro, who has asthma and generall fragile health, once again condemned to hours on increasingly flaky public transport every day (a lot of services are no longer running, so getting to and from work is extremely difficult), as well as hours spent in a poorly ventilated building with a whole bunch of other people, in a town with soaring virus figures. Government advice still says that anyone who can work from home should continue to do so, but the company got around that one by claiming call centre staff as key workers.
Now this week, we are back in full lockdown with a new and even more highly transmissible form of the virus circulating generally. The company is still insisting that all service desk staff must continue to work from site, while their managers remain safe at home. The service desk staff have all been complaining, lodging health and safety appeals, to no avail.
So today my brother rebelled. He decided not to risk his health on public transport. Instead as his shift began he logged on at home to carry out his shift in safety. How the company will react remains to be seen. But they were endangering his life. He doesn’t need to be on site to do his job. If they try to sack him, he has a strong case to take to tribunal. And I will be behind him all the way!
(ETA: Apparently the entire team independently made the same decision this morning! Only one person went in, and that was just to collect a headset. Mass action for the win! The company will have a hard job sacking all of them!)
