By Toh Hsien Min

A friend of mine was relating her adventures with taking her four kids to Japan for a family holiday, the first in three years.  It was as though they all had to learn how to travel all over again.  One of the sons went overboard stuffing himself in the departure lounge, forgetting that pacing can be part of the pleasure.  They all got on the plane, settled into their seats, the Dreamliner reached cruising altitude, and then my friend said she was awoken by her eldest telling her that D. had thrown up over himself.  Waking up in the middle of a flight is never the best time to have to figure out what to do, but reaching for the hand luggage S. realised that she had forgotten to pack a spare change of clothes for each child in the cabin bags.  D. ended up having to cope with damp trousers and just a jacket with no underlayer.  

Throughout the trip small incidents kept happening.  On the return leg at Haneda, another child needed some medicine, and water to take it with.  Except that having gone airside, and therefore having surrendered their bottled water, the family discovered that the airport hadn't quite got back to full post-Covid operations yet and there was all of one souvenir shop open along with one bar with a long queue of passengers waiting for highballs or beers.  As she joined the queue she could see one solitary bottle of Evian left in the fridge, and the twenty minutes or so in the queue with a gaggle of restless kids was a unique form of torture hoping that no one else would ask for the bottled water before her. (Interestingly, when I flew out of Changi in December last year, it was the opposite.  None of the pubs were open, and I had to skip my recent habit of getting a beer before boarding to take the edge off the endless sequence of waiting at the start of the flight.  Priorities, eh?)

Covid has changed how we do things, not least in how often we do things.  As any sportsperson will tell you, any time you stop training or competing with the intensity that you used to have your performance levels drop off.  But as we head towards a post-Covid normalcy, we need to think afresh about what we used to do that made sense (packing a set of clothes in hand luggage for instance) and assess to what extent it still makes sense.  In particular, one aspect of the post-Covid situation at the workplace I've wondered about is the clamour to continue to work from home.  It is true that when Covid happened, many organisations had to pivot to working from home in a matter of just days, and this proved that a lot of work could still get done from everyone's varied living rooms.  But just because something can get done in a certain way doesn't mean that is the best way to do it.  Particularly for those who are young in their careers, every opportunity to work from the office should be seized, because that is where one can learn all of the less tangible skills that can turbo-charge one's careers - everything from the transfer of experience from more senior members of the organisation through to cultivating relationships with those around you.  There's no way you can collaborate more than superficially if you're only doing so over VC.  Or as Rich Handler says, “If you want a job, stay remote all the time and be efficient in a very limited way.  If you want a career, engage with the rest of us in the office and use wfh only when smart, flexibility is essential, mental health calls, and life balance needs help.”  Or in other words there is a logic to the old ways of doing things, such as packing a spare set of clothes in one's hand luggage.

By the by, this editorial could have been about Liz Truss.  And lettuce.  And staying in the office, so to speak.  But it felt too much like kicking the UK when it's down.

Anyway, it's a wonder that I managed to get everything done on time (if only just), what with an exceptionally busy October at work, featuring at one point the need to write six substantive policy/strategy papers in two weeks.  It helped that the material was there.  We had one of our largest crops of poetry in a while, and the quality was high too, so the challenge was more in trying to decide what had to be left out to keep a proportionate selection.  Similarly, the short stories were both strong on quantity and quality, and Shu Hoong continues to do magic with the Criticism section.  On the whole (this last-min cobble-together aside), I have to say the issue is a delightful one.  Now if only I can decide travel plans for the year.

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