Category: Absurd

MIQ Diary – Day 14 – How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.

430am. Good! Today is the day that I get out of here, so I want to make the most of it, even if I do very little, the experience of being awake is still worth it.

First things first – pack! It turned out easier than anticipated – done in 5 minutes. I went around the room several times to ensure that everything was in the bags. Easy.

The remainder of the day was spent doing precisely nothing, and it felt good.

My health check was at 330pm. As I mentioned yesterday apparently it needed to be within 3 hours of departure. Obeying rules for the sake of it isn’t my forte, but what the hell, just this once more.

The housekeeping team had requested that we strip the beds so I dutifully complied. It took longer than anticipated.

Then we had our marching orders:
6pm – bags on the trolleys outside the room.
615pm – a siren sounds and bus passengers for Auckland should go to the conference centre entrance.
630pm – bus departs.

Once again this military precision all felt overwrought and faintly ridiculous. Still, I guess they have to deal with a range of ‘characters’ in these places, so best to set the bar low. It happened as they said it would, and the low bar was necessary – some idiot managed to be confused by even these instructions. We nearly left late.

Final farewells were made, with good humour, and we were off!

The bus ride was about an hour and a half. We had to keep our masks on until we were decanted onto the pavement at the domestic terminal at Auckland Airport. Given our history over the past 2 weeks, this seemed faintly ridiculous. If there’s a group of people more credentialed to be considered COVID-negative, it’s us mugs on that bus.

Feet hit the pavement and Mask Theatre was over. It was good to see people smiling. We said our various goodbyes (awkward because it’s hard to build camaraderie when you’ve never met many of these people with whom you’ve just shared two weeks’ isolation experience.)

Scott was waiting for me. We headed home to see the cats.
—
So that’s my story. Some thoughts:
1. It’s not a nice experience, even for someone like me who actually enjoys some solitude. Avoid it if you can.
2. Despite it all, making the most of the time to work and think was useful.
3. Overall it was a very similar experience to last year’s. Slightly more polished this time, but they’ve had a year to get it to this point so most of the rough edges have been knocked off.
4. I can’t praise the team at Jet Park Hamilton highly enough. If you think MIQ is boring for 2 weeks, try doing it for over a year.
5. MIQ as a concept is completely unsustainable. We have to make some changes:
a. Allow fully vaccinated returnees to self-isolate.
b. Drop the eradication strategy in the bin, and learn to live with the virus because it’s not going anywhere.
c. Fix the hopeless vaccination rollout. This starts with stopping pretending it’s going well.

MIQ Diary – Day 13 – I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.

A 6am wakeup after an 11pm sleep. I’m not convinced anything is different – I just moved my seven hours’ sleep window slightly. Ho hum.

Another health check at 830am, all done efficiently, with hardly any waiting. I was informed that on Saturday it would be at 330pm instead. Apparently it needs to be 3 hours before we leave (because the process says so, rather than anyone expecting me to suddenly catch the lurgy mid-morning.

Those of you with sharp minds will have worked out that we will be leaving at 630pm on Saturday. They are putting on a bus back to Auckland Airport, which should arrive at 8pm-ish.

It was a relatively quiet day work-wise so I finished up early afternoon. I just couldn’t be bothered to do much. My motivation has been up and down here, and today is the first time it has been rock bottom.

I decided to read a book on Disciplined Agile Delivery (aka Unified Process with not much tailoring – and I’ll be giving the side eye to anyone who says different). It was a short book – though not nearly short enough for my liking.

I reneged on my packing promise.

Went to bed early. I figure packing might take all day on Saturday.

Nearly there, but not nearly close enough.

MIQ Diary – Day 12 – Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I’m ok with a 430am wake up, but today was 330am. Argh!

Today was (hopefully) my final COVID test. This would be the interesting one. Day 12 tests seem to put everyone on edge – especially the MinHealth people. A Day 12 positive test appears to be relatively rare, but it is a good indicator of possible transmission within the facility if there’s more than one. There was an incident last week in the Novotel in Auckland where some Day 12 positives almost resulted in an extended stay for an entire cohort, or at least a big chunk of them. I believe that was eventually ruled out after genomic testing showed the Infecteds didn’t have the same strain. I imagine there were many sighs of relief at that news. Hopefully such a situation doesn’t befall the plucky folk of Jet Park Hamilton.

830am rolled around and I was at the health centre promptly…unlike most of the MinHealth people, who had seemingly evaporated. So I waited. I am not good at waiting. You told me 830am. I was here at 830am. You were not. Never make people wait for you – it’s disrespectful of their time. Grr. Anyway In this case it’s not like I had anything else to do, but still…five minutes felt like an eternity even when I had nowhere else to be.

Once I had checked the hand-written notes and corrected my name (really, Waikato DHB?) I was ready for the test. I opted for the right nostril again, as it was less uncomfortable than the left. In it goes…keep breathing…just a bit longer…job done. Results back tomorrow hopefully.

The usual health questions were also rattled off. I mentioned that I had a headache, and the MinHealth person looked at me like I had two heads. So I explained it was probably due to waking up before 5am every day for the past two weeks. I think this satisfied them but they ‘took notes.’ If this entire MIQ process proves anything, it’s that some people really believe that you can’t be too careful. They’ve clearly never completed a PMI Risk Management course.

I returned to my room.

My easily-bored nature requires variety, and variety is what I got today. I’d finally completed as much of the Spreadsheet From Hell that I reasonably could without more research, so I passed it over to the experts for more input (thanks, Alex, and apologies in advance.) I’ll come back to it next week. Many calls, mini-challenges and emails later, it was the evening.

I decided that I would start packing for my Saturday departure. It burnt some time and demonstrated that strange phenomenon of how exactly the same number of clothes and sundry items, positioned and folded in exactly the same way, can increase in volume by about 20 per cent in the space of 5 weeks and 3 days. I decided to abandon this chore for another day.

I received an email about post-isolation travel arrangements. We will find out more tomorrow…

I couldn’t get to sleep until about 11pm. I believe that made today was what is known as ‘a long day.’

MIQ Diary – Day 11 – If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll wait forever.

430am wake-up again. I’ve decided I can live with it, so I will make it a part of me.

I gave my sister in the UK another call and we made more plans, sorted more issues. It’s good to make progress. We know once Steve’s estate is in the hands of the lawyers, things will slow to a glacial pace, but we also know we will have done our best, which is all that really matters. Let’s see what happens…

The software release started at 8am and was done by 820am. Zero defects as anticipated. All is well. We can now focus on newer, bigger things.

I don’t say this often enough but I am very impressed with the team – they are achieving a lot with little time, money or resource. I’m truly bemused by the amount of waste in my industry. In my opinion, you have no claim to agility or innovation unless you’ve achieved something great with bugger all money and bugger all people. If you want to know how to do that, drop me a line. My rates are very reasonable. Actually just buy me a beer.

Spreadsheet hell day…4? I am losing count.

Duolingo has been my constant companion for several years now, and has also been a great way to while away the time in isolation. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a language learning app. It’s heavily gamified, and lots of fun. My Spanish is pidgin, but I could probably get by now. I started in 2019 in preparation to visit Galapagos for my 50th. That trip got canned in March 2020, a week before we were due to leave, but I continued with the Spanish lessons just in case we still get there one day. Hope springs eternal. Anyway if you want to learn a language, I do recommend Duolingo.

I received a survey from the MIQ people so I spent some time completing it. Hopefully some of the feedback gets to where it needs to be. Despite my overwhelmingly-positive description of MIQ here, it’s not a holiday, you know, and could do with some improvements to make things a bit more bearable for others, if not for me.

Tomorrow is Day 12 – the third and final COVID test, where the bleeding obvious will be stated categorically for the third and final time – I don’t have the damned virus!

MIQ Diary – Day 10 – I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Another 430am wake up. To put a positive spin on it, I got to make use of the entire day, plus it’s a really convenient to call my sister in the UK to discuss my brother’s estate. Every insomniac cloud has a silver lining, although I think this one is fraying at the seams slightly.

I had a good chat with my sister – we resolved a number of issues and made some plans, and all before 5am. Perhaps tomorrow I will sleep in. Wishful thinking never fails, after all.

A phone health check today. Apparently they were short staffed again. I wondered what other things they had to do that are considered higher priority. Then I read the article about 1600 border staff still unvaccinated, and I figured perhaps they were getting a jab. We should be so lucky.

So yet another day full of spreadsheets, and preparation for a big software release tomorrow morning. We had a couple of wobbles late in the preparation but everything ended up looking good.

Lunch and dinner were served, and as usual I couldn’t remember what I ordered so the surprise kept me occupied for something equating to Planck Time.

The evening was spent reading. I also made the grave mistake of thinking it would be a good idea to start watching Indiana Jones and the Kindgom of the Crystal Skull. My advice to you – never do this.

I tried to stay awake for a bit longer, hoping that it would help my wake up time but after experiencing that Spielbergian mess I decided the remainder of the day wasn’t worth experiencing. And so to bed.

Apologies if these posts are getting repetitive. If you’re getting bored reading them then it’s a function of my inability to make the repetitively inane MIQ experience remotely interesting. Only a couple of days left now. You can do it!

MIQ Diary – Day 9 – The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

I made some strategic changes to improve my sleep patterns.

Step 1 – I moved to the other side of the very comfy super king bed. I figured that the incessant glow from the lights out in the car park might be having an impact so I moving six feet or so further from it might help. While there are good blackout curtains in the room, they’re not very useful when there’s a ten-centimetre gap between the curtains and the window.

Step 2 – I closed the bathroom door. The always-on fan in there was a little bit too rowdy to be considered a relaxing source of pink noise. Less susurrating seas, more Dyson on max power.

And hey presto I slept until 6am. Probably a fluke – see how tomorrow goes.

Health check as usual. Bored now. The MinHealth person couldn’t log in. They complained about the technology, and I reminded them that after the recent Waikato DHB hack, they were lucky to have any tech at all. I then purposely zoned out as they read out their password letter by letter as they were typing it in. It’s hardly surprising they were hacked, given such a lack of security awareness. Thankfully for them my mind is like a sieve at the moment, and I forgot it soon after.

We talked about my deteriorating mood. Apparently they see a lot of this mid-way through people’s stay in isolation. It’d be interesting to know what they intend to do about it – I don’t know – perhaps a countrywide vaccination programme that’s faster than the speed of plate tectonics might help to reduce the prison sentence new arrivals are under? Clearly a crazy idea.

Lots of meetings today. They were all useful and edifying and made me feel like I had made progress, but there were too many to reliably process all the information that was generated. Note to self – fewer meetings.

The Spreadsheet From Hell took up most of the rest of my afternoon. It really is a monster – the sort of idiocy only a technologist could create to annoy another technologist. I am unfortunately on the latter side of the equation, and will be there for another few days at least. It’s almost enough to drive me to drink, but I resist the pull of the bar menu yet again.

Overall, time has passed satisfactorily once again. A few days more is all.

MIQ Diary – Days 7 & 8 – The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Saturday.

Another 430am wake up. I’m beginning to think there’s a cosmic alarm clock attuned to my wavelength. While I do like making the most of the day, this is getting ridiculous.

An 830am health check, again by phone. Questions answered. They keep asking me whether I have been outside in the past 24 hours, to which I respond that I have not. I wonder if they are going to forcibly expose me to sunlight, and whether, vampire-like, I will turn to ash.

I have felt a sense of trepidation about the weekend. During the week I can do work and interact with people who are also working. During the weekend, while I am happy to work (and it’s a necessary distraction today), I refrain from firing off too many emails so as not to bug people.

Thankfully today’s task is completing of a spreadsheet full of odd questions. Banal but strangely challenging to be succinct. Such fun, & with several hundred questions, something that could keep me occupied for weeks. Best foot forward, then!

A couple of phone calls too, which makes the time fly. Thanks to Ken Chertok & Kathy Scarborough for whiling away the hours with me – it is a lot of fun to talk 😊

My ear is thermometered by a roving band of MinHealth workers some time in the afternoon too. Normal.

Onward to the evening, during which I watch Apollo 11, a superb documentary about…you know what. Epic, although definitely better at the cinema. Check it out.

Then some light reading. My second read of Ted Chiang’s “Stories of your Life and Others” is keeping me engrossed.

I realise I am half way through my isolation. Why do we remark on arbitrary milestones?

And so to bed, at 830pm.

—

Sunday.

So much for being cured. I wake up at 130am, so decide to go force myself to go back to sleep. Then 230am, then 330am, then 430am. I yield to wakefulness.

Some weird dreams too. Exactly what my head is working on is a mystery, but I hope he knows what he’s doing.

830am comes around & I leave my room for an in-person health check. Banter. Normal, predictably.

No work today, I decide. Instead I watch a couple of movies. I figure you can’t beat some Indiana Jones to while away the hours, so I do Raiders & Temple of Doom back-to-back. They are great slice of hokum – exactly what is required on a wet Sunday.

I also do some more Kindling. Ted Chiang again. Very, very good.

Meals are delivered at noon and 6pm. I order these a day or so in advance so by the time they arrive I can’t remember what I said I wanted. I treat this as a fun game (without the fun) – guess what’s in the box. I am not very good at the game though, so I am routinely incorrect. I am incorrect again today.

More movies, more rain. I avoid alcohol, although it’s on my mind.

I am not quite sure what makes me switch to the present tense for this update.

MIQ Diary – Day 6 – Rejoice in small things and they will continue to grow.

A 630am wake-up! I am cured! Well, perhaps not entirely as I woke up at 1am and 3am. I still think my sleep patterns are on the mend, albeit slowly.

820am and a I received a phone call from the MinHealth person telling me there would be no face-to-face health check due to staff shortage. I resisted the temptation to ask whether it was due to illness…

We did the usual routine (sans thermometer in the earhole) over the phone instead. I put the phone down and realised I felt a bit disappointed that we couldn’t catch up in person. Cabin fever, perhaps.

The morning flew by, with a few Zooms, but mainly with many small-but-important admin tasks. Invoices, reports, Kanban reviews, data cross-references, due diligence documents…the list wasn’t quite endless but it was still significant. The tasks were individually quite trivial but having done them all left me feeling like I’d achieved something big. If my brain were a provincial hotel room then I had just vacuumed the carpet of a week’s biscuit crumbs.

The Kiwi Sausage Sizzle happened in the afternoon, and I was the recipient of two sausages wrapped in bread and covered in onions. Having only eaten lunch an hour before & with dinner likely to turn up in a couple of hours, I did what any sane person would do. I ate both of them. And unsurprisingly they were terrible.

Ninety-nine per cent of New Zealand sausages are dreadful. The other one per cent is labelled ‘gourmet’ so the extortionate prices can be justified by the idiots who buy them, but they are still largely dreadful.

New Zealand sausage culture (which is a thing) is a travesty. Sausages are treated as cheap food, they are made cheaply, with awful ingredients & are cooked poorly. New Zealand should learn from the UK, where the sausage is a work of art. Even the cheapest UK sausages are delicious, packed with real ingredients & cooked with an appropriate degree of reverence. Hang your heads in sausage-based shame, New Zealand!

But besides all that, while the Kiwi Sausage Sizzle sausages were not good, they were still a welcome distraction.

—

I spent the rest of the afternoon pottering with more small items of concern.

The fiction on LinkedIn is that people are changing the world through the power of [insert utterly banal product or service here.] The truth is, “Oh no they’re not.” It’s the small things that make a difference. Attention to detail is what matters. Wave your arms about as much as you like about your highfalutin’ concepts, but if you can’t deal with the details you might as well go home.

God, I wish I could go home.

Anyway, yet again today I didn’t change the world, but I did make it a bit tidier.

MIQ Diary – Day 5 – Better shun the bait, than struggle in the snare.

Another early start. 445am and I was wide awake. There are signs of improvement, however. It’s not like my time zone-itis will be cured overnight, but instead slowly & incrementally over many nights.

I fiddled about with some work things & soon it was 830am & health check time! Today I received my Day 3 test result…negative. No Chupa Chup ☹

The MinHealth staff are great – very friendly & professional. I suppose being friendly is part of the job, although I don’t think you can really fake it. Good on them all for making the stay as pleasant as possible. I know I am singling them out from a wider team of very good people, but they are the ones I have daily contact with. The kudos handed to everyone else here goes without saying. There, I said it.

The Waikato District Health Board ransomware hack a while back has put a serious dent in some of their technology and it has had a real impact on them being able to do their jobs. I now experience it first hand as the MinHealth person struggles to read their own handwriting on a scrap of paper. It’s not hard to see how such a thing could cost lives in a different situation. Hackers are assholes – but the Waikato DHB leadership who created the conditions to allow the hack to happen – I have special, unpublishable words for them.

Anyway, back to my room for meetings & musings.

The people who tested positive with COVID on Day 3 were shipped off to quarantine late in the afternoon. During the time they were moved, we weren’t allowed out of our rooms & once they had departed all the common areas were deep cleaned. A siren was activated to indicate when it we were allowed out of our rooms again. Sometimes this feels like a bad movie. Anyway I wish The Infecteds well, and hope they have a full recovery.

All in all it was one of those days that slipped by with few remarkable occurrences. The interruptions have become routine now, and work has been a saviour thus far – I have been avoiding alcohol as it’s a very easy fix for the kind of boredom that affects my brain, & I don’t particularly want to fall off the wagon for something so trivial as having a quiet day.

There is a limit of one bottle of wine, or six bottles of beer, per person per day. That’s a couple of hours’ entertainment for me. I am sure I will take the wine list up on its kind offer at some point, but in the meantime my avoidance tactics involve going to bed early – which is, in part, why I am waking up so early. It’s a price worth paying, I think.

Preface

I have recently returned from a month in the UK, where I was attending my brother Steve’s funeral, and helping my sister sort out his estate.

My time in the UK was the usual mix of bitter-sweet. I do miss my friends and family, but the UK is no longer my home, so I was very happy to get back to New Zealand on Sunday evening.

New Zealand has a strict isolation policy for returning travellers. The Managed Isolation & Quarantine (MIQ) system means travellers must spend 14 days in a government-run isolation facility. Basically a hotel/open prison. In these facilities, strict isolation is mandated – social distancing, mask wearing, etc etc. We are treated, as a precaution, as if we all have COVID. And we pay for the privilege – NZD3100.

You may think this is extreme, and I would agree. The problem however is that it’s really one of the few countermeasures (other than geography and population) that New Zealand has against COVID. Our vaccine rollout could charitably be called laughable, regardless of how the government spins it. There are no mandates around the use of tracing apps, and the levels of routine testing are what you’d expect from a nation that isn’t very good at organising things.

I have been keeping a daily MIQ diary on LinkedIn, which I am now republishing here. The first post will be a catchup of days 0 to 4. I will endeavour to repost the rest here daily as I write it.

Also feel free to reach out and connect on LinkedIn if that’s your thing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarkerussell/

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MIQ Diary – Day 0 – Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.

Last August when I returned from the UK I recorded my 14 days in NZ Managed Isolation on LinkedIn. I’ve just returned from the UK. Here we go again.
—
I landed in Auckland at 930pm Saturday after a mentally bruising month in the UK and the best part of 24 hours in the air, punctuated by two hours in Changi. The ground & flight crews were fantastic throughout even if they were mostly dressed in polythene bags. Small electric shocks must be part of the job spec these days. Singapore Airlines proved once again why they’re one of the best in the business. Bravo!

I disembarked onto the wet tarmac in Auckland & was herded with about 30 others onto a bus for a short drive to the terminal. We trudged through winding corridors, and then through five layers of scrutiny by various personalities (from the “I put too much sugar in my coffee” MinHealth person, to the “staunch is my middle name” MAF drone.) Efficient & professional. Nice.

Thus, I finally made it through the first part of New Zealand’s anti-COVID protective tarpaulin. A bonus was being snuffled by a beagle but he was just looking for drugs so I left feeling empty & dissatisfied by the encounter.

So, onto the second part of New Zealand’s grand anti-COVID strategy…which doesn’t include urgently vaccinating the population because, well, yeah. Ahem.

Instead travellers get Managed Isolation (aka MIQ) for 14 days in a hotel. Strict isolation procedures. Staffed by military and MinHealth types. All for a fee of $3100. It’d better be good.

Onto another bus. The friendly announcer says: “Kia ora everyone, we’ll be taking you to a hotel in Hamilton.”

A deathly silence descended throughout the bus.

Hamilton? That’s two hours away.

Kill me now.
—
The two hours riding the bus also allowed me to ride most of the Kubler-Ross curve. But…Hamilton?

We pulled into the Jet Park hotel, right next to Hamilton Airport. I had no idea Hamilton had an airport, let alone a hotel.

We disembarked (socially-distanced), checked in and were in our rooms within 10 minutes. Top marks for efficiency. They’re making it as painless as it can be. It explains all the layers at the airport so the MIQ facilities don’t need to do it. Good job, and a major change from last year.

Despite my initial JAFA (look it up) reaction I’ve found that this is an excellent hotel. Great staff and a bigger room than I had in the Pullman in Auckland during last year’s MIQ stay. Fast wi-fi, decent food, a great shower, climate air, clean, nice decor, and an iron! Plus no idiot neighbours playing hip hop like last year. It’s cold outside though – true Waikato weather, apparently.

As I’m not home with my family for the next 2 weeks anyway, my location is largely irrelevant. I’ll be working mostly so this is as good a way as any to start a return to normality. My month in the UK reminds me that things can always be worse. And at least it’s not Christchurch.

MIQ Diary – Day 1 – So many questions.

It was a relatively lazy Sunday. I was awake until about 130am so I managed to sleep until about 730am. No sign of jetlag yet… My case was waiting outside my door so I wheeled it in & unpacked. A place for everything & everything in its place.

I remember from last year how MIQ keeps you on your toes. They don’t leave you alone. I think this is by design. Shunning human company is a favourite pastime of mine, but I assume others enjoy/need it. I got up & prepared to grin and bear the interruptions.

And so it began at about 10am with a knock on the door – my own personal military escort (I kid you not) downstairs to the Health Centre. The MinHealth person was friendly & chatty. Data was gathered. Very good.

One painless, deftly-executed COVID test later (I got a choice of nostril, which was nice) & I was out the door into the garden for a walk back to my room. Hi-vis staff were milling around in various locations so we waved & exchanged socially distanced greetings – not that I’d stop for a chat because until my test results come back (hopefully negative) I’m not allowed out of my room for any reason other than health checks. Or a fire. And it’s not like the sub-zero temperatures or the risk of uncomfortable smalltalk would encourage me to do so anyway.

Safely back in my room, I prepared for my day. Emails. Messenger chats, a bit of work. Youtube and Netflix…

I got through most of what I had planned, in between the phone calls from reception, MinHealth, reception, housekeeping, reception…they were all for perfectly sensible reasons, but being bombarded by multiple interruptions that could have been handled in one call was annoying. But as I said above, I think this is a feature of the MIQ environment rather than a bug, and is probably of benefit to the less-resilient or easily bored.

But in the spirit of continuous improvement, perhaps they could add one further question to all the others they asked today:

“How much can we bug you before you are forced to throw yourself out of a window?
—
Finally a big thanks to those of you who have contacted me in the comments, via messages and by other means. It is much appreciated, and I will be in touch.

MIQ Diary – Day 2 – Are we there yet?

Back to work today. Plenty of business catchups were had, & it was nice to see everyone again. We have a bunch of things to be getting on with, so this will keep me busy. It’s not something I would usually admit to, but in this environment it will be work that gets me through to day 14 relatively unscathed.

There was the usual slew of MIQ interruptions, all by phone today, which I found slightly more manageable than the rat-a-tat at the door. Just to be clear, opening a door isn’t something I have a challenge with in normal life. But here is far from normal – there is a DOOR OPENING PROTOCOL:
1. Wash your hands.
2. Put on a mask.
3. Open the door.

I’m not sure how I lived until now without a DOOR OPENING PROTOCOL. My life is richer for it.

The big event (as in, meriting a slightly raised eyebrow) was receiving my negative COVID test result, & being gifted with an attractive blue wristband. This wristband signifies that I am allowed out of my room into common areas for socially-distanced exercise & smoking. I do neither of those things, but it’s nice to have the choice to demur. I feel slightly less like an inmate & slightly more like a guest now.

My body clock has finally wrestled any semblance of self control from my waking hours. A very deep nap late afternoon followed by dinner followed by my desperate attempts to stay awake by watching a movie. My body clock was haywire in the UK too, so I shouldn’t be entirely surprised. Reversing the damage may take some months. Maybe I’ll go outside after all, for some natural light therapy.

The hotel is providing plenty of activities for the people here, which is great to see. It’s done via Zoom, but it’s encouraging that they’re interested in keeping us engaged. Mental health issues (whatever that vague term means) seem to be something of a problem in these places that nobody has a good handle on yet. So while even in my darkest moments I can’t see myself engaging in Zoom Zumba, Zoom Bingo or Zoom Basket Weaving, I think it’s excellent that the hotel is doing all this, & with a very positive, fun approach.

When I received my blue wristband I was informed that I have a health check at 830am. I think this will be my day 3 COVID test. It seems vanishingly unlikely that I have contracted COVID since my day 1 test (although perhaps by not strictly following the DOOR OPENING PROTOCOL I am exposed to heightened plague risk!)

Anyway I am sure I will enjoy a swab being pushed into my nostril. Maybe I’ll go for the left one this time. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

MIQ Diary – Day 3 – Boredom is your imagination calling to you.

830am and time for my health check and day 3 COVID test. I first had to sign a permission document for testing. Hmm…given I’d already had a test on day 1, this was closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.

The Master of the Permission Documents asked me the usual health questions about symptoms, and I gave the same answers. He also asked about my general mood, which was actually quite buoyant. 9 out of 10. Good to hear the question being asked.

I was then greeted by my favourite MinHealth person for bants and invasion of my left nostril with a swab. More uncomfortable than the right. Lesson learned. I got a Coca Cola flavoured Chupa Chup for being such a brave little soldier.

Did you know the Chupa Chup logo was designed by Salvador Dali? Every day’s a school day, people!

Back to my room for a full-on day of meetings, documents, strategising and musing over several problems. It felt good to engage my brain properly again. Variety is critical for me, as I get bored easily. And this is the perfect environment for boredom to take its toll if I’m not careful.

The room is North facing so I get all day sun (when there is any). The day was beautiful so the room was gloriously warm. I took a few breaks to bask in the sunlight, although meanwhile outside the temperatures were somewhat less spectacular.

There were very few interruptions today, which I think helped. I received an email from the hotel manager announcing a sausage sizzle on Friday for people who make a donation to the I Am Hope Foundation, which deals with youth suicide and mental health. I donated. You can too:

https://givealittle.co.nz/fundraiser/jet-park-hamilton-managed-isolation-facility/

The sizzling sausages will be delivered to our rooms, so fear not – you won’t be reading about the Hamilton Sausage Sizzle Outbreak in our breathless local media.

All in all a very full, productive day. No time for boredom or introspection or philosophising. I didn’t collapse into any jetlag-induced naps, so the secret is clearly to keep myself busy. That won’t be difficult.

MIQ DIARY – Day 4 – Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.

I slept until 430am, did a bit of admin, had a Zoom meeting at 7am & it was then time for my health check so I dutifully masked up, wrapped up warm & went to the Health Centre. I was the only one prepared this morning – various people, equipment & pieces of paper were missing, so while the flustered staff buzzed around I chatted to one of the Air Force guys.

Then we heard the bane of existence – a FIRE ALARM. When you hear a FIRE ALARM you start in denial and hope – you hold your breath, waiting for the ‘test’ to finish. Then you realise it’s been going on that little bit long. Then you make eye contact with the person next to you. The same resigned, broken look comes over your faces, your shoulders droop. You accept defeat. You think, “Bollocks.” Yes, all that happened.

So we trudged, along with the rest of the hotel population (in various states of dishevelment) to the assembly area. The Waikato morning had outdone itself – amazing, beautiful clear skies – at 0.3 Celsius. Some guests were feeling uncomfortable for the 20 or so minutes we were socially distanced around the edge of the car park in a scene reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption. If the COVIDs don’t get you, the hypothermia might.

Eventually the fire brigade turned up & gave the all-clear. Apparently someone’s shower steam got to the over-sensitive smoke alarm. Oops. Hopefully lessons are learned.

We trudged back inside & I resumed my position at the front of the queue for the health check. Chats, questions, earhole temperature check (thankfully I wasn’t hypothermic) & back to my room for more business fun.

I’m used to the interruptions now so they don’t bother me (as much). The good thing is that they always tend to be at the same time each day. And I like predictability:
1. 11am-12pm – (knock knock!) deliver lunch & afternoon tea.
2. 1pm-2pm – (ring ring!) ask what I would like for lunch/dinner for the day after tomorrow.
3. 5pm-6pm – (knock knock!) deliver dinner & tomorrow’s breakfast.
4. 6pm-630pm – (ring ring!) confirm tomorrow’s health check time (it’s always 830am so this is redundant, but the person at the end of the phone is lovely so it’s good to have a chat.)

Highlight of the day (yes, better than the FIRE ALARM) was receiving 2 AAA batteries for the room’s aircon remote control. I especially enjoyed using a pen nib to reset the clock.

The final thing worth mentioning is that we received an email in the evening telling us that some of the arrivals had tested positive for COVID on their day 3 swabs. Many assurances were given, so as not to scare the horses. Statistically positive results are completely normal considering the number of people coming into the country. I wish people could get that into their heads.

The Infecteds (as I lovingly call them) will soon be moved to a proper quarantine facility. Think of the scene in ET when Eliot’s house is invaded by the Feds.