Day 3: A bad time to take taxis
We worked, we ate, we had video calls
The best story I’ve heard so far about the whole Italian lockdown thing was that, last Sunday, a lady paid a taxi driver €1,200 to drive her to Rome, so that she would escape the lockdown in Milan. A day later, they put the whole country under lockdown, including - you guessed it - Rome. Karma is, indeed, a bitch. Unfortunately, I don’t personally know this amazing human being. I’m sure she would be really fun to go out drinking with. Whoever you are, if you’re reading this, please PM me.
Admittedly, the situation in the country is not the best. There are thoughts to shut everything down completely, apart from supermarkets and pharmacies. I discovered Glovo is doing Nespresso capsule deliveries, which is heroic.
There was a queue to get into Esselunga, Milan’s equivalent of Waitrose, today, to keep the number of people who are roaming the aisles at bay. This is great, because personal space doesn’t exist in Italy. People will come very, very close to you to talk to you. Or they will come very, very close to you, without needing to talk to you. They will just stand in your face, or around it, going about their own business. Social distancing must be the dream of every introvert.
If the new measures are applied, you’d need to write yourself a note just to go for a walk. This is the equivalent of writing yourself a sick note in school to skip gym class. It works, but it’s probably not a good idea. Thankfully we have a tiny balcony in our bedroom but, given my current luck, I’m sure the moment I step on it, it will collapse.
Our work has set up a virtual Coffee Break room, which is very cute. It basically means there’s a link on Slack, and when you click on it you enter a video chat with all the other people who happen to be there at the same time. You get notified when someone joins, but you won’t know who it is unless you’ve joined, too.
Someone logged on at 9pm last night, and I was afraid to click on it (turns out it was just a colleague in Brazil). To be fair, if for some inexplicable reason you found yourself walking into your office kitchen in the middle of the night and a colleague was just standing there, you would probably shit your pants (at least, as mentioned in an earlier post, toilet paper supplies in Italy are plentiful. After giving it some more thought, this is also influenced by the fact that Italian bathrooms have one of the most baffling yet underrated human inventions of all time: the bidet).
I started thinking about savoir-faire and how this translates into the online world. Leaving a kitchen comes to me much more naturally than leaving a video call. How does one end a casual online chat? Have we accidentally set up the non-kinky version of Chatroulette?
In fact, I’ve noticed many people lingering at the end of video calls. Maybe they’re just craving human contact. Or for something to happen. Yesterday, we almost burst into song. I think tomorrow I’ll play the BBC news theme when I log off, and dim the lights.
Back home in Cyprus, the priests are complaining because the government has banned large gatherings, including religious ones. They got offended because the Holy Communion, which requires hundreds of faithful churchgoers sharing the same spoon, will definitely not accelerate the contagion of a novel disease that infects the respiratory system and spreads through droplets coming out of someone’s nose or mouth. They explained this in a letter written using an archaic form of Greek that expired at around the same time they should have died.
Lunch: Roast chicken and carrots. Wednesday is the new Sunday.
Song of the day: Fuego (to which you can also wash your hands!)
By Greek goddess @soulaglamorous.