Washington: In the early days of working from home to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease, some Massachusetts Institute of Technology's researchers talking strategy on a video chat couldn’t help but get distracted by their team leader’s kitchen cabinets.
“There was absolutely nothing special about them except for the fact that they were in the private home of someone senior to us,” said researcher Kate Darling, who started gossiping about the cabinetry in an online backchannel.
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It was a minor and welcome disruption, an early sign of bigger hiccups that office workers, educators and others around the world are dealing with on the fly as the coronavirus pandemic shuts people out of offices, schools, coffee shops and co-working spaces.
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Integrating work life into the home has rarely been easy, but measures to contain the virus have brought those worlds into sudden and sharp collision.
Untold numbers of Americans are shifting their day jobs from offices to living rooms, spare bedrooms, kitchens and basements. This massive, unplanned social experiment can strain productivity and domestic tranquillity as toddlers scurry around untended and business meetings and classes shift to noisy group video chats that resemble a checkerboard of talking heads.
It is also forcing many parents to unexpected new roles. Carmen Williams, a therapist in Macomb, Michigan, found herself not only seeing clients sporadically but shelling out for a babysitter, paying tuition for her seven- and 14-year-old kids — and still teaching them school assignments.
“I’m not an educator!” Williams said. “I’m used to helping with homework, but I am unable to teach thought-out lectures and work. It’s overwhelming!”
This plunge into the unknown, accelerated by the growing number of states ordering residents to stay home, could impact how the US weathers an almost certain recession. That will also depend on how well individuals and their families can manage the complications of studying and conducting business from home — at least for the subset of employees with desk jobs and the ability to do their work remotely.
Tech companies are pledging to avert more serious disruptions by increasing data capacity to handle the onslaught of newly quarantined workers and students. Tuesday mornings used to be the peak time for video conference platform Zoom, but now there's an ongoing demand for that amount of data, said Kelly Steckelberg, the chief financial officer of the San Jose, California-based company.
Steckelberg said that the company has accelerated the opening of two new US data centres to meet the demand and is adding servers to its existing 17 data centres around the world. Cisco, which runs the Webex video conference service, said that it has prepared itself for “sustained peaks" in the US. after already handling a doubling of usage in Asian countries including China, Japan and South Korea.
Microsoft, which asked 50,000 of its own employees to work from home
AP
