Heart and Crossbones

Term 3 started and I began a new contract at the Australian Electoral Commission, part of surge staffing for the Federal Election which was set to happen anytime between August 2021 (highly unlikely) and May 2022 (increasingly likely as Covid-encrusted 2021 wore on).

Although I was interested in the job and thought it would be a great experience to be involved in the communications for a Federal Election, I’d decided I wanted a job where I could leave at 3pm so I could be around for 13-year-old George after school. So, assuming that they only had a full-time 9-5.30 job to offer, I told my recruiter that as great as it sounded, I only wanted to work until 3pm, so I wouldn’t be accepting it.

Although we were still very much in a pandemic, the Electoral Commission wanted people to work in the office everyday. One of the questions I asked in the bit where they ask you if you have any questions was, would I be able to work form home if my child is sick. They said yes, and explained the remote secure-connectivity platform that facilitates that.

I left the interview with a sinking feeling that as much as I thought it would be an interesting job, and the interviewers seemed great, I knew that I wanted to be there for George in the afternoons.

The recruiter rang as I was getting in my car but I didn’t answer, I wasn’t ready to have the conversation. I rang my mum instead. Once home I rang back the recruiter and told her I want a job where I can go home at 3pm, so unfortunately wouldn’t be accepting this obviously full-time position.

I was surprised a couple of days later when my recruiter called me and said the AEC wanted to offer me the job anyway and I could leave at 3pm! Even 2.30pm if I needed. I was thrilled! I knew I could call another shot and said I’d be ready to start AFTER the school holidays, in just over two-weeks time. But when I got there, I soon realised things weren’t as straightforward as working to a manager who said I could leave the office at 3pm..

The woman who hired me allocated me to another manager – who I don’t think had been informed of the 3pm leaving time. As it happens, George told me he was happy to get the bus home with his friends, so I didn’t need to leave at 3pm to pick him up. But we agreed we both liked the idea of me picking him up a couple of days a week. The first couple of weeks I was able to do that – I would just leave at 3pm. But I sensed the manager I’d been allocated to wasn’t quite on board with that.

As days went by and I saw how busy my team was, and registered the looks I got when I knocked off early, I realised I couldn’t really do the 3pm leaving apart from if there was an appointment or illness. I spoke to the woman who hired me and we agreed on full-time hours, but that it would be fine to leave for school pick up early sometimes if I logged on from home. “I’m outcome-based”, she said, “as long as the work is done”. But it wouldn’t matter soon enough anyway, as little did we know, an ACT lockdown was just around the corner .

The weeks leading up to the lockdown were a strange kind of limbo, like nausea. Knowing the stress my friends and family were feeling in Sydney, feeling a strange sense of “survivors guilt” here in the ACT, at the fact we could come to work in offices without compulsory masks (the two-week mask mandate in July had been lifted by this stage). Although we were signing in everywhere with the ACT Covid check-in app and venues had capacity limits, Canberrans were living a relatively normal life. But there was also the feeling that surely this nausea would result in a big vomit any minute – it must only be a matter of time before we went down too.

I didn’t like this pandemic life that we were all living… even vicariously (at that time). When was it all going to end? Or was this just how life would be now, different cities succumbing, being locked down in a continual cycle forever?

I’d park my car at one of the ANU carparks and walk through the campus to the city centre and the AEC office. As I walked I thought of my own days at uni in the 90s and what a happy time that was – both my uni life and the 90s in general, when no one thought of pandemics – they were the stuff of the distant past and/or fictional apocalyptic BBC dramas. But what was this fresh hell we were waking up to every day in the 2020s? I would listen to music from the 1990s in my headphones as I walked, and sometimes at my desk as I worked and it wrapped me in a soothing blanket of happier days gone by.

I would check the news headlines on my phone every day post NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s 11am press conference and my heart would plummet as the NSW Covid cases soared, now in the hundreds of cases everyday.

“Are you worried about your mum?” asked my friend Elena (who in a lovely coincidence happened to work in my office).

“Yes!” I said, and explained I was worried about her picking up Covid at Woollies. “Could she go to IGA instead”? Elena suggested -“you know, because there would be less people there”. She had a point. But I think Mum had switched to online delivery by then anyway. And I worried about my dad and also my asthmatic sister who couldn’t get a vaccine quickly – people were scrambling to get Pfizer after it was revealed there was a small risk of blood clots with Astrazenica- there were waiting lists and queues and it just seemed so hard.

I felt lucky I could book in for my first Pfizer vaccine on Aug 6 2021. I felt headachey and tireder (than usual) the next day, but relieved I’d had it and was booked in for the next one in three weeks’ time.

George and I went shopping in the city the next day and on the way home saw a King Charles Cavalier in a convertible. And it made us happy. We thought how lucky we were not to be locked down. Little did we know what the next week would bring to Canberra…

A few days later, the morning of Thursday August 12, I got an excited text message from my sister in Sydney that she’d finally managed to book in for her first Pfizer shot! Thank goodness. Also that morning, a colleague in my office announced, “There’s a case here” as we went for our morning coffee run. “Here in this building?” I said? “No here in the ACT.”

We found out a short time later, that the Covid case had been to a nightclub until the wee hours of the morning and then had gone to church early on Sunday followed by a lot of shopping. Busy boy. This was the Delta variant by the way – before we’d even heard of Omicron. I couldn’t concentrate at work the whole morning, I just wanted to pick up George from school and go home.

I was actually relieved when a couple of hours later, ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr announced the snap lockdown, starting from 6pm that night, over the ACT’s 1 COVID case. But at least now we would be in lockdown lockstep with my family and friends in Sydney – we would go through it together.