Off routine

I almost forgot to write today! One thing I love about my job is that I get to work with people from around the world. This morning, my team, which is spread across Europe and the Americas, joined a video call with a team spread across the Asia-Pacific region of the world. They were having a meetup in Thailand, which is 12 hrs ahead of my time zone. You know the saying “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere?” Well, it was 5 o’clock for both of us. Only my 5 o’clock was in the morning, and theirs was the one the saying is for.

I don’t usually get to interact with a lot of my colleagues on the other side of the world. It was a treat to get to see them and talk to them and laugh with them. Since our whole company is distributed and deeply, fundamentally, at a cellular level understands the weird wildness that time zones introduce when working, scheduling, and coordinating with others around the world, everyone was super gracious about those of us who joined early in our days not being fully functioning yet, and those of us ending our days wanting to wrap up and enjoy the evening. The differences in time zones can be mind bending — it’s bizarre to see someone’s window in a video call, where they have bright afternoon daylight when the sun isn’t even up where you are, or it’s night there and your day is just beginning — and it makes us all a little more compassionate for each others’ situations when we’re in a call together.

So that was a fun start to my day, and it was also 10 hours ago, and now I’m tired and I need to go time at a swim meet. It’s not unusual to be up that early — my alarm goes off at 5 a.m. if the cats haven’t already woken me up. However, being coherent at 5 a.m. is a different story, and I usually take three hours to myself in the morning to exercise, eat, write, and do all my morning stuff before logging in at 8am. Since I didn’t do any of that today, and just started my workday at 5 a.m., I was out of my normal routine and totally forgot about writing. But once my brain fizzled out at work around 2 p.m., I remembered, and here I am.

The call this morning spiced things up for me since it was a change from my normal, and weirdly, now I’m in the Christmas spirit! The call had nothing to do with Christmas. It just shook up my day enough that I did other things differently today as well. I listened to Christmas music while I worked, then went and worked from a café for a while and got myself a peppermint mocha (I rarely work in cafés). It was fun to go off routine for a day. I’ll be glad to be back to my structure tomorrow though :D.