Merkle quarantine diary - week 3

What better way to start the day than by chatting with a Belgrade colleague and seeing how the data from a new form runs through the entire SAP product range? From the Commerce Cloud via SCPI further towards C4C and/or the Marketing Cloud. And it still works! It's amazing what we can do. Gives you a bit of a mental boost after you had to accept a realistic reclassification in social relevance in the last few weeks. But others still get it a little harder, our Belgrade friends are only allowed to leave the house from 5:00 to 17:00, on weekends even only until 15:00.

The unpleasant thing about this day: lots of votes and requests for help. In the past, our distributed team has often used video calls to handle these, but now it's all about that, and at least I'm exhausted and my head is spinning even faster than usual. And it's not even possible to simply turn left or right to ask the other people on my six-island things. Everything has to be worked out with chat tools. I'm more and more broken when I close my laptop in the evening.

The only thing that helps is to go for a run along the Nidda, to watch the cute little Nutrias eating their food and watching the embankment crumble.

I miss the osmotic communication of the open-plan office. All the information that you usually get when your colleagues are on the phone or talking to each other is now completely missing. I noticed this in my first meeting of the day, of which there are several again today. There are two refinements, the usual daily standups and several unplanned internal and external phone calls. So I have "feet of work", to quote my proverbial colleague. By the way, I also miss getting my feet under the table with Tobi, my project manager.

In the afternoon I can finally devote myself to development again. A nice round of remote pair programming with my Belgrade colleague Sava, during which we both realize that our development should actually work after all. Developer's everyday life. In the end it really works. Everyday life of a developer.

At the back you can see that today is perhaps a good day for home office. At the beginning of the month all the accounts have to be made and the responsible tool goes on strike. The poor project managers, you can feel their heavy hearts up to here.

I'm beginning to realize how nearsighted I am. Everything that used to take place away from the monitor (meetings, simple babbling with colleagues, foosball, running through the halls to the coffee machine, ...) now takes place on the monitor and within your own little four walls. So my transformation to a mole is well on its way, today I even confused an orange with my orange plasticine ball. What a mess.

Otherwise, business as usual for this Friday. Two standups, a little support at the customer, a little help from colleagues, a little help from colleagues, a little development. It's running. Nothing exciting, just that everything is a bit more strenuous and time-consuming than normal.

I don't know if you've noticed it the last few days, but I'm not a big fan of home office. Normally not, and even less so in its epic form than at the moment. But let's put it this way: I'm now physically in my mid-20s, mentally just before puberty and according to my birth certificate about the sum of both (contact requests under code 0311). I have already experienced one thing or another and I am sure that we will survive this and have a lot of fun again afterwards. So: here's to another week of home office and a few roaring parties when the mischief is over!