Opinion

De Leon: Work-from-home, Netflix-and-quarantine life; Is it really chill?

Pat de Leon

IT HAS been couple of days since Filipino workers stepped into the office. Like millions of hustlers around world, pinoys have been doing their jobs and "staying put" at home to avoid spreading or catching the coronavirus contagion called Covid-19.

From your couch, you can now have a face-to-face meeting with your boss, who'll make side remarks about your growing beard or your "woke up like this look."

By just using your phone, you can brainstorm with co-workers. Or get lunch delivered. Or have groceries dropped at your doorstep. Or watch pretty much any series. (Suits, Peaky Blinders and Madmen for me here!)

But is it really that chill?

Look, our self-quarantine is an experiment to see how far our app-driven life can go. The experience is easy, but it hasn't put me at ease either. Video conferencing still fail most of the time.

The online tools we're using like Slack, Microsoft Office, Dropbox and what not to treat work as topmost, so it never really goes anywhere.

Not to mention that you'll need to pay more for food delivered by apps. Then there will be mornings when your broadband or cellular data goes out.

Quarantine might not seem like a big sacrifice, but sometimes these small stuff will prove that it is no snow day either. It lays bare the vulnerabilities and the vulnerable in our online -- everything existence.

But hey, that's okay. Atleast we're reducing carbon footprints on God's green earth while skipping the painful and tedious commute that we have to endure every day.

Stay active until our next chat!

UNDER THE SUN. A large umbrella shields students from the heat as they go home riding a bike with sidecar from Buenlag Central School in Calasiao, Pangasinan on Thursday (April 25, 2024). Pangasinan has been posting over 40 degrees Celsius heat index since a few weeks ago, and local government officials have implemented various measures to lessen the impact of the high heat index to the students.

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