Day 51: Working Hours Are a Lie

Day 51: May 16, 2020
Global cases: 4,717,009; Deaths: 312,902
Egypt cases: 11,719; Deaths: 612

Nada Naguib
Multimedia Journalism alumna

Despite Ramadan and a global pandemic forcing a lot of us to work from home and messing up our routines beyond recognition, I still set my alarm to 9am. It’s my small way of keeping my day somewhat normal.

Waking up at 9 gives me one hour to lazy about before official working hours start at 10 (not that anyone else follows the official working hours anymore). I get a few hours of working by myself in peace before I get the first work-related notification at maybe around 1pm and then it’s a mad flurry to balance emails, Whatsapp notifications and the actual work I have to do.

At 5pm, I call it a day … it’s two hours after the official Ramadan working hours anyway.

I go to the kitchen to help my mom prepare whatever needs to be prepared and set the table for iftar. I’d like to call what I do helping, but honestly it’s just me standing in her vicinity, holding my phone, listening to voice notes and then ranting about work.

Perhaps she finds that entertaining and that helps her in some way.

After iftar, I wash the dishes, make my coffee and then my mom, dad and myself watch TV.

Right after iftar it’s when the series Khiyanat ‘Ahd (Betrayal) starring Yousra starts, so I guess the decision of what to watch was decided for us by whoever controls the TV schedule.

I’m no art critic, but the series is silly. At the beginning of Ramadan, I described it to my sister as “something that was written by someone who is watching people live but has never lived themselves”. It’s more than halfway through and I still maintain that opinion.

But when the main character’s son died, I got emotionally invested so now I need to know how this ends.

My father, on the other hand, only hangs around for half of the episode before something bizarre happens, and then starts his lecture about values and good behavior and gets up and leaves, only to watch the next episode with us the next day.

For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.

That’s when I get a WhatsApp message from a work friend; it’s not actual work but work-related gossip. Because when most of your employees are young women in their 20s, word gets around fast. Especially when that word is how you don’t think they’ve been working enough.

After the episode ends I get up to do my daily yoga (because, yes, I have joined the fleets of people who now use their newly found free time to exercise). I only get about five minutes through before I see the notification on the bottom left corner of my screen.

I hope it’s my friends telling me about a social catastrophe they’ve committed, but no. It’s work.

Why on earth did I turn on desktop notifications?

I try very hard to keep my calm, keep my zen, open up my chakras or whatever the proper yoga word is, but once the least bit of stress creeps into the routine, it’s hard to set it aside.

And so, at 9pm, I begin my second round of work, finishing up the tasks that I have just received feedback about, even though that feedback should have come in much, much earlier in the day.

By 10, I promise myself that that’s it! No more work! So I decide to finally get some reading done in peace.

Right now, I’m reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. When I first read the story as a child, it was funny and whimsical. Silly Alice, dreaming of a mad hatter and a crazy queen. But as I read the bizarre story now during the most bizarre time I hope to ever live through, it dawns on me how sane Alice actually might be.

She hopes that things make sense, and so do I.

*ping*