06 August 2020

No return to the office in 2020

I figured I wasn't going to be back in the office for a while. But now it's official! The University has told us we can't be back until at least January. Oh well! Once I have good equipment here I can just keep this routine going. My house is lovely in winter so I don't mind spending a lot of time at home in the cold season too! Crikey. I thought it would be for three weeks. It will be nine months at least! 

I'm not yet sure how this will work when term starts. We will do some teaching in person, but we will now pretty much have to come from home for every time slot of face to face teaching. And there will be less than before, but still. If it's one hour on a day it's OK. If you have two or three it's different! I am fairly certain I won't want to bike from Bethesda to Bangor and back three times in one day. So how will that pan out? And I'm not even that far away from work! Some people live a lot further away. We won't be allowed to pop into the office in between, and some of us won't have a functional office anyway as all equipment will have come home. I will be one soon. And if you let us into the library where there are general computers for University use, then that defies the purpose of keeping us working at home. Then we would do less social distancing than in our own offices! So I'm not quite sure how this will work out,. And I don't think timetabling will manage to make sure we all have no more than one slot of face to face teaching per day. We have, I think, some 3000 staff, so try organising that! 

It might all end in me biking more. Oh well. Coming out of a pandemic healthier than you came in is not a bad thing! At least I will now only have to bike to Bangor; that's closer than Menai Bridge... 

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