In Recovery

As I remarked in Sunday's post, last Saturday was a particularly taxing day in terms of what needed to be done work-wise, and the necessary travails spilled over into the Sunday itself. I must say that I thought I'd recovered from the mild trauma of it all by Monday, but just now I found myself uncharacteristically knocked out after the Maghrib Prayer, so I reckon I still need a good night's kip for normal transmission to have officially resumed.

I won't bore you with the full gory details of what took place, Gentle Reader, since it's the sheer boredom of the details that was so taxing. Suffice it to say that after happily completing my marking target for the day by 1.00 pm and assuming for the rest of the day I would get my life back, the sudden need to carry out some very urgent contact-tracing which landed on my plate (and the plates of quite a number of colleagues) an hour later reconfigured the day (and the next, to some degree) in an unappetising cocktail of ferocious activity and mind-numbing detail.

I suppose I knew this kind of work must feel like that for the poor souls who have to carry it out on a regular basis, but actually doing it introduced a whole new way of knowing based on very real experience. The thing is that you have to get the details right, otherwise you're going to unnecessarily mess up quite a few people's lives for no good reason. In a sense you're trying to help mitigate the spread of a very, very nasty virus, of course, but there's a kind of halo effect involved in terms of what it will cost in terms of huge inconvenience to provide uncertain protection to the community.

I allowed myself a good moan about it all - with Noi on the receiving end - in the middle of all the action; but, even then, the understanding that compared to those serving in the absolute front line of protection my grudging contribution was small, indeed tiny potatoes, helped give some much-needed perspective.

Having said that, am hoping the experience need not be repeated.