Continued from the last post. Like many other Singaporean families with young school-going children, we’ve likewise also had to make big adjustments at home when the circuit breaker period started in early April. I’d already been on work from home arrangements for two weeks before that, and had been able to enjoy the peace and serenity at home – conducive for telecommuting. But with the missus and both kids also both migrating home, I rapidly had to make do.
In a sense, our home was as prepared as we could be already at this point – at least as far as equipment and technological needs were concerned. Several months ago I replaced our home WIFI network with a Mesh-enabled one – specifically a TP-Link Deco M9 Plus AC2200 Smart Home Mesh setup – as WIFI signals in the dining and living rooms had been a little spotty. The Mesh network dealt with Internet connectivity issues solidly. I’ve also got seven laptops at home, and on top of that, a desktop PC (which I mostly use as storage for the several TBs of family photos and videos and their backups), and four tablets; the iPad Pro 11, iPad Pro 12.9 (2018), the venerable iPad Mini 4, and the MiPad 4. So, easily enough computing devices for everyone. Table space though was a different matter; we had an average sized dining room table which could fit two persons, and somewhat a somewhat cluttered study with tables on opposing sides of the room. In theory, just enough space but in practice it would be a tight squeeze, since we each wanted privacy and some space for ourselves.
Fortunately, five of the seven laptops could be charged by USB-C – so I sprinkled the house with six USB-C 45W+ charging points around the house, and bought an additional portable laptop table to supplement the three we already had in the house. That basically permitted each of us to, basically, have our own ‘corner’ in the house for work/study home arrangements. The arrangement went largely like this for the month of April:
Wife in the dining room, as she (like me) used two laptops and also frequently had to refer to a pile of notes and books to conduct her lessons.
Hannah in the children’s room
Peter in the study
Me alternating between the study (mostly to keep an eye on Peter) and the master bedroom. And yes, I also use two laptops.
We also needed audio gear of course; there were already two over-ear headphones at home, but these were Bluetooth wireless ones – including the Creative SXFI that I bought a year ago. I couldn’t successfully configure the Bluetooth microphone on either to work on my work laptop – some administrator setting issues and the like. So, I picked up two more wired headphones and also a spare set of earphones, all of which had built-in microphones.
The first one or two days of our family work/study from home arrangements saw me far more busy than I expected. Like many of my colleagues at the faculty of IT where I teach and work, and judging from there posts on social media, many of us who’re also parents became tech support during this period. The litany of support issues the two kids/wife present daily included:
(a) “Daddy, how do I record?”
(b) “Daddy, can you help me scan this worksheet for SLS?”
(c) “Daddy, what’s my password?”
(d) “Daddy how come I can’t hear anything on this laptop?”
(e) “Dear, can you connect my MOE laptop to the home WIFI?”
(f) “Daddy, how come my laptop at only 10% this morning? It was at 90% last night!”
(g) “Dear, can you fix the printer’s wireless connection?”
(h) “Dear, how come I can’t connect to Google Meet using his browser?”
(i) “Daddy, how come my friend cannot hear me on Google Meet?”
(j) “Dear, what is this pop-up telling me to install a Windows Update? Do I click on it…?”
And this isn’t also counting the occasional call for tech support from siblings. Thankfully, most of these technical difficulties and issues got resolved after the first week as the wife and kids settled into this new normal. Hannah particularly got fluent very quickly with the Lenovo X1 Carbon she was assigned that it didn’t take long before she started clicking on web rubbish and fake and spam web pages started appearing. Time for me to look into parental control software soon!
The amount and intensity of work also differed between the two kids. Hannah was probably the busiest among us, as her school piled a lot of work on its students, and even sent daily reminders to parents like us to follow-up. H routinely would start her lessons at 8AM, and normally finish around 8:30PM though with breaks for meals, piano-practice and rest. Peter on the other hand had it very easy in comparison. He’d usually finish his home-based learning activities in two hours, another hour for offline work. The rest of the day he’d go from room to room and have fun haha.
Unlike the city of Wuhan, Singapore at this point hasn’t gone into full lock down, and with restrictions very slightly starting to ease at this point of writing, the worse seems to have gone past, hopefully. So, we were still able to get groceries from the supermarkets. Restrictions and checks were gradually also stepped up as the weeks went by in April. Firstly, a dedicated hour of shopping was set aside for the elderly. Then you could only visit selected wet markets on specific days of the week depending on our NRIC number. And at the end of April, all of us had to bring along identity cards and undergo temperature checking in order to even enter. Since everyone now had to either order take-out, opt for food delivery, or cook at home, the supermarkets also got a lot more busy and racketed up so much sales that one supermarket chain could even pay an extra month of bonus to acknowledge the hard work its staff had put in. The both of us also settled into a routine where we’d take turns to visit the supermarket – mostly Fairprice Nex – to get groceries on account that the missus gamely took on the challenge of cooking dinner every night and selected lunches on weekdays too. Specifically, I handled the midweek grocery run – usually WEDS 6AM – and the wife, the weekend one.
in order to help reduce some of the shopping load, we also increased our online shopping activities, in particular to get some of the heavier items that we need occasionally or prefer to buy in bulk, e.g. rice, detergent powder, tissue boxes, toilet paper, UHT fresh milk cartons. Unlike a few other places in the world, Singapore thankfully has not reached the point – hopefully never in fact – where daily necessities would be scarce, so at no point in time did the supermarket really run out of absolute essentials like rice, noodles, toilet paper (haha), vegetables, eggs, meats and the like. What however was telling was the amount of comfort food that was being consumed, so much so that food items from selected brands could not be easily found. Specifically, it’s hard to find Leggo pasta sauces, and various brands of ice-cream. Pasta itself also became a little hard to find in the early weeks, but the supermarket chains basically sourced for and found alternate brands different from the ones they normally carry, albeit at very slightly higher prices apparently.
Even if I could find the quantities of items Fairprice Online to qualify for free delivery, getting a delivery slot was an even bigger challenge. Specifically, in the month of April where I literally checked the Fairprice Online site every few hours to see if I’d get lucky, I counted exactly three times where I found an available delivery slot. Things were quite a bit easier ordering from Redmart – I normally find delivery slots with a bit of trying – though their grocery range is a fair bit more limited. Finally, there was also Amazon Prime. Never had problems finding delivery slots, but their range of necessities and groceries are really quite small, at least relative to the brands I normally buy and at price points I can stomach. For non-groceries like pet food and bedding items for our two guinea pigs and also household electronics, I counted on the usual online shopping sites like Lazada, Qoo10, Shopee and Aliexpress – orders continued to be fulfilled on these platforms, albeit with slightly longer delays at delay.
And finally, we’ve not had our home helper come by to clean the house for a month now, since Singapore also disallowed part-time helpers to visit during this period. Fortunately, the Xiaomi Viomi v2 robot cleaner that I bought in late March has risen to the task of keeping the floors clean. It runs around the house every day to vacuum and mop. And unlike the Ecovacs Deebot 900 it replaced, I’ve not had the map reset at all – not even once – when the bot gets stuck somewhere.
I might do a third post in this series: perhaps an updated one when the pandemic approaches its end, or maybe sooner than that if I care enough to write about Donald Trump and the pandemic!
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