The normal life in the workplace

App-based systems will personalize access, keeping activities touch-free, and eventually integrating with contact-tracing systems.

Ria arrives at her office building after being dropped off by her husband Alfred, who himself is heading off to work. He parks at an open-air car park to leave his car before he walks a few blocks to his office building. They both had started coming to work a few days a week now and it somehow gives them a sense of the familiar.

It’s a beautiful sunny day, and travel was a breeze. There were more people by the driveway than inside the building, Ria notices. And there are Grab and Lalamove riders by the curb side, handing over packages to familiar faces. Those working upstairs came down to fetch deliveries as the building won’t allow guests inside. Ria glances at her watch as she enters—a few minutes early, she thinks to herself. She adjusts the ear loop of her mask and re-aligns her face shield. As usual, the guard is there to zap her forehead with a thermometer and to direct her to the side of the lobby where she should be queuing for her ride.

While walking to the elevator, she pulls out her smart phone and presses a few buttons, calling for the elevator car through this swanky, app-based smart system that the building recently installed. Finally, all the cars are running again, and she saw her ride arrive. It’s four people at a time, the security guard smiles while flashing four fingers, reminding her of the elevator’s limited capacity. But she can only see his eyes looking at her from behind his shiny acetate face shield. Like her, half his face hides behind his mask. She gives him an unseen smile and nods.

Ria walks in, crosses her arms, and finds her place in a corner marked by a sticker on the floor: a full-sized pattern of a man’s pair of shoes, indicating where one should stand and she wondered, what that would look like if it depicted a woman’s pair of high-heeled pumps instead. The doors open and she disembarks at her floor, heading straight for the ladies’ room behind the elevators. Looking ahead, she approaches the door with a swipe of her card, unlocking it, and the door immediately swings open. No knob nor lever handle–just the card reader by the door jamb and that CCTV camera staring at the doorway, keeping tabs on who comes in and out of the ladies’ room.

Ria uses the toilet and washes her hands. The lavatory fittings and toilet flushers have gone from manual to fully automatic and infra-red activated. So were the soap and paper towel dispensers, making the ladies room essentially a worry-free, hands-free zone.

She leaves the same way–with a swipe–exiting hands-free, allowing her to finger comb her hair as she mentally preps for the day. Walking through the hallway, there’s a humming overhead. She glances up against the hallway lights where she can see the tiny specks of dust particles drifting along in the direction of the air that’s coming from those long slats in the ceiling. It’s bringing in air from the outside, forcing the “old air” out for a proper air exchange. She gives out a restrained smile and heads for the office main door.

Her husband Alfred, just arrived at his building too, silently musing over how quickly he managed to park his car. Largely because there were less cars, and also because he subscribed to the new RFID system installed by the carpark operator. Everyone comes through the boom much quicker.

And it’s the same with the turnstiles at the lobby. No long lines, no hassle, he thought. It’s a good day for him, and he’s humming as he disembarks the elevator car to his floor, enjoying the sunlight and the breeze from the opened high windows by the elevator lobby. They’ve finally opened it, he thought to himself, as he quickly glanced at the other end of the hallway where another window that used to be closed is now opened up too. He gets a whiff of the cross breeze, feeling that the “ber” months have actually arrived.

Ria is making quicker strides along the hallway as she realizes that she’s soon supposed to be in a face-to-face meeting, and with yet another swipe of another card, the glass door slides to welcome her in. On their reception counter–now looking like a teller’s counter with a transaction shield–is a poster that reminds her of the entire slew of precautions: stay home if not feeling well, keep your mask on, keep a two-meter distance, and many others. Beside it, the hand pump with disinfectant has become the first point of contact, taking precedence over the thumb-print reading “bundy clock” for “timing-in” (which is the old and now unnecessary protocol) for the new car reader functions as the time-in card too.

She makes a beeline for a wall lined with lockers that were provided to keep things from the outside from coming into the office space. She opens hers, takes a few things, drops her bag in, and switches on that little tube of UVC light that will stay on, then will automatically shut off, a minute or two after she closes the locker door.

She’s hearing some really loud banter, of the LOL levels, at the work area. Co-workers in a conversation but suddenly lost in translation–struggling for clarity for the words that were traversing masks and acrylic separators. Wrongly received messages turned into funny stories as they sat spaced at every other desk.

You see, Ria’s workplace has 50 percent of their staff coming in at any one time, but most of the time, it’s really just 20 percent. So, the two-meter distancing is a breeze. No one gets to sit together, but communication becomes a challenge with these five-foot-tall partitions. And the cleaning lady doesn’t fancy them. She worries about how disinfecting them every day would cloud the material and render them ugly. But she didn’t worry about all the other familiar devices she cleaned at the end of the day. Armed with gloves and disinfectant spray, she meticulously and patiently sprays and wipes keypads, remotes, desk phones, and light switches. Soap and water, with a last swipe of disinfectant for all the other surfaces people touch by hand–whether or not they actually did, and even if everyone who came to work were instructed to clean-as-you-go.

In a few other areas, air purifiers run with UVC light and HEPA-filters, in the context that anything that does not get extracted with the help of the buildings air exchange system, can at least be filtered out of the air by mechanical means. One day, the building may consider changing some of the window panels to operable ones, which on the long term, would be ideal: natural air exchanges and lots of fresh air for everyone.

Ria stayed for the day, took her documents to finish at home, and she’s the last to leave. Alfred is waiting in the car by the driveway. Just like everybody else, there will be no hugging of the kids when they get home. The shower takes precedence, after which the process of disinfecting all the things they wore and took back will have to be the priority. It’s the routine.

It’s been more than 180 days, after all. Yes, this is the normal.