So, what’s been happening at Mow Cop towers on the second day of our coronavirus self isolation.
After last night sitting up late, sitting up chatting, drinking and smoking, this morning’s supposed early morning walk turned into Chris going out on his own.
From 8am my phone litterly exploded. I had a dozen phone calls before 9 a.m. That hasn’t happened in quite some time. Most were support calls or calls from people asking to buy equipment, presumably because they can’t buy laptops from the normal stores as even ebuyer seem to be short on laptops at the moment.
All my support calls this morning were to do with VPN and Office 365 and I spend till dinner time getting people logged on to their offices from their home PCs and also fixing SharePoint issues in Office 365 so staff have access to work files.
It seems quite a few of my customers are now beginning to use the services we set up a long time ago for occasional use to allow all their workers to work from home. Hayes and Partners and Kime O’Brien both now have the majority of staff working from home in self isolation.
I wish them and all my other customers to be safe over the next few weeks. I hope that they can keep their business going despite what’s going on. Theres a lot of really good people out there who are self-employed but employ other people as well and I’d hate to see them lose their livelihoods or have to let staff go. I thought about this alot and I dont want anyone of my friends and family to die from this.
At the house I left Chris pointing the side of the house. This is another task that I really appreciate him doing, pointing off a ladder is not easy. We’ll see if we can con Helen later in to giving you a foot massage.
It must be killing Chris’s feet standing on that ladder all day.
I’m breaking my own self isolation today by driving to two places of work.
The first place I’m going to is a warehouse in Middlewich and then off to Macclesfield to one of my clients offices. Thankfully both places I have the keys for as there is nobody there. All their staff got sent home last Monday and have been self isolating for a week already.
I’m going to install a new VPN as the old one isn’t quite capable of handling the amount of stuff connected to it. The VPN there both using was setup to allow small members of staff but now it’s overwhelmed and new hardware is needed to support nearly 50 staff at one place and 20 at the other.
I have to say as I drive around just how beautiful it is today. The sky is blue the trees are beginning to burst back into life and the roads are as empty as a eunuch’s underpants.
I spent all afternoon installing the VPN and setting up Windows laptops, installing Office 365, adding bits of software to various PC’s before sanitising them all. Various members of staff will be collecting them in the next 24-hours so they can work from home.
Total journey time today was 1 hr 21 minutes. Mow cop to Middlewich to Macclesfield to Mow Cop. Normally this takes well over 2 hours.
Speaking of home! On arriving home Chris and Helen have got the BBQ lit, so we had burgers and sausages for tea while we watched the sun go down over the Cheshire plain. Amazing sunset, great BBQ food.
Another long day, another day safe, another day of fun and laughter and another day of coronavirus self isolation.
