Are we the baddies?

[white_hart]

I spent most of my four days of work last week trying to work out how to manage the tension between the university being open and teaching going ahead in person and the government advice to "work from home if you can", when my team aren't completely back-office (we are responsible for teaching support, and also deal with general queries from academics and students which can be in-person as well as by email or phone) but most people's jobs can largely be done remotely (apart from dealing with in-person queries, though I think a lot of people don't necessarily see that as the core part of their jobs that I think it actually is). I ended up deciding that it didn't seem fair to try to pick and choose between people's jobs and say "this person supports teaching, and should come in; that one doesn't, and can work from home", especially as that would have ended up with the most junior people having to come in while more senior staff were able to work remotely, and have said that everyone should be in one or two days a week apart from the people who are clinically vulnerable. (I'm planning to be in three days, but might end up increasing that to four; I find it so much easier to focus in the office.) But I can't help worrying that that was the wrong decision, and I shouldn't be asking anyone to work on-site with case numbers as high as they are. And I miss last term when things had started to feel almost normal again. And mostly, I hate living through a pandemic and having to risk assess everything and make judgements I'm not remotely qualified to make. And I may have just had two and a bit weeks off, but after four days back I'm already utterly exhausted.

Comments

[cmcmck]

'Work from home if you can' is all very well but in all the jobs I ever had before I became a self employed historian for the last few years of my working life I couldn't and many people can't (step forward my working class ancestors)!

[white_hart]

Well, quite!