Weeknotes 120

I spent this week with the Canadians (they’re not all Canadian, I just think referring to them this way is funny) as my team descended upon London for our first in-person work meetup.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, and beforehand I felt a little uneasy about the impending step change in our relationships, but it was lots of fun and I needn’t have worried. Canadians are nice! I bet hardly any of them judged me.

It was definitely kind of intense and exhausting to be around a lot of people at once; spending several days together is, to state the obvious, a very different experience from chatting for an hour and then decompressing with my webcam off. But conversely it was so much more rewarding to be able to discuss ideas properly, do jokes properly, and generally relate to each other on a human level in a way I’ve been sorely missing since I started this job almost two years ago.

I found it interesting to see my home town through the eyes of so many simultaneous visitors. Everyone stayed at the Good Hotel — which isn’t — so we had the novelty of taking more trips on the DLR and dangleway than I ever have in my usual London life. The latter is particularly good after 7pm when they turn off the lights and you can look out over the city in the dark. Who knew?

We also did the climb over the O₂ and had afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason, both of which were much better in reality than I’d imagined. It helped that the sun was shining all week and the journeys between venues were relaxed and pleasant in their own right. If it’d been raining I expect everything would’ve been more difficult.

The best moments were some valuable time spent in small groups or one-on-one conversations. I stayed up very late but it was totally worth it for the opportunity to really talk and laugh. Despite being an introvert I’m actually excited about seeing people again at RailsConf next month.

I do like working remotely, but for the first time I felt a pang of sadness that there’s no office to occasionally visit and work from. Maybe I can just… pop to Canada… anyway?

On Friday I left the hotel and went home to take a COVID test in time for my Saturday flight. Predictably I was a bit worried about all the possible things that might go wrong with this as well, but Qured turned out to have a good system for remotely-observed lateral flow tests and it was all over quickly and painlessly. I didn’t really believe it was possible for me to have caught COVID again so soon but it was still a relief that I hadn’t.

Having administered the test on camera, I had to upload a photo of the result and wait for a medical certificate which I could download and then upload to the VeriFLY app along with my NHS COVID Pass to confirm my vaccination status, which in turn allowed me to check in for my flight online.

At the time this seemed like a large number of steps with lots of potential for problems so I’m a little surprised that apparently every traveller manages to do it, unless it’s actually fine to show up at the airport without having done any of that stuff and nobody cares, in which case I’m a chump.

Of course I also had to get a new ESTA because I haven’t been to the US for years. Fortunately my Global Entry membership still has a few months left on it so I breezed across the border in record time.

Now I’m in California and extremely confused about what time it is.

It doesn’t help that I’m having to get weeknotes out of the way much earlier than usual. Amazingly Jekyll appears to ignore the time zone of a post when calculating its date, so I felt like I needed to publish this one before 4pm on Sunday (in California) to prevent it from showing up as having been posted on Monday (in the UK), even though writing weeknotes is traditionally an evening resentment.

Reorganising my day to accommodate wonky software is inconvenient and dispiriting but still much less painful than trying to fix it. Life finds a way.

I am, I suppose, having adventures. 👣