For the second time today I had to tell a client he couldn’t come to my house to drop off an audio file, because I’m self isolating due to the lockdown. He has the file on his iPhone and he can’t get it transferred to any other device or to Dropbox, in spite of me sitting on the phone for about 30 minutes in total explaining how he can compress the file, etc, etc. His deadline was also pretty unreasonable given that I have commitments for today and the Weekend, it’s four hours of unheard audio that he needs by lunchtime Monday, and the longer he was taking to send the file, the more he was pushing me for a commitment. With all this in mind you can infer that him coming to my house to give me the file will not be a quick transaction outside at the gate. It will involve him and me going into my office, trying to connect an iphone and transfer the file. All this might be okay in Pandemic free time, but I haven’t had anyone in my home except for my family since March, and we are self isolating until the peak has passed. Since I told him this, I haven’t heard from him again.

WHY don’t people think of the fact that things take time, and we don’t all want to work over the weekend? Currently my Saturdays are for house cleaning and we all have more pressure on us right now. Helping with schoolwork, childcare, no popping in at the shop for a quick takeaway – if you are isolating. I had another person wanting a 27 page document typed (in Excel) in half a day. I said I needed to assess the document before committing so he sent it. I only have a small amount of time today but I assessed it. It’s a scanned document so you can’t open it in Adobe and try to format and save in Word. It would have to be retyped from the start, which I told him and gave him when I could do it by. Again, I haven’t heard from him, but I wonder if he will be back on Monday…

If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught me it’s to stand by the courage of my convictions. I’m a people pleaser who has paid none or scant attention to my own needs in the past, but right now it’s a matter of life and death. We need to prevent the spread of corona virus and my husband and I are diabetic and very high risk. I feel like a disloyal worker (to myself) telling the client we can’t meet, but very proud of myself for putting the protection of my family first, and possibly preventing the spread of the disease. And it occurs to me that every day in every way we can all do something small to prevent this disease spreading. It beggars the question of the balance between economy and the virus, but at this point the virus is outweighing everything and I feel that if he used the internet correctly he would have been able to send it (I’m going over the interchange trying to figure out how I could have better guided him in this aspect, however maybe the problem is he is going to get someone who will say yes to meeting that deadline without assessing the audio, and he may also be back with a mess for me to fix).

The point of this post is this: During this pandemic your emergency is not going to become my problem. I will do it to the best of my ability in the shortest time possible to #typeitright, without compromising my family’s safety.

Have a blessed weekend all.

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