It was a pandemic, right? I left the apartment, went straight to the airport, and mailed the apartment key back first chance I got.
I figured it would be fine because I had about an almost 2-month notice period thanks to the bullshit Dutch tendency to use “calendric” months in contracts. (you must give notice before the first of that month, otherwise the notice period is the remainder of the month AND the next month. Second time I’ve been caught out.)
The Australia Post lady said express post might be delayed a couple of weeks because commercial flights are mostly grounded. That turned out to be a bit of an understatement. The package has been sitting at Brisbane Airport, and the tracking website says it hasn’t moved since it got there.
So now my “calendric” month is up, and my landlady is being shitty. Apparently it’s a “very expensive” system to change the lock, and she’s going to get back to me with the price.
The ONE piece of advice I had about living in the Netherlands is to stop paying rent two months before you move out, in order to recoup your two-month security deposit. Alas.
MSI Optix 31.5in Monitor (MAG321CURV) review
Ew. I can not stand this monitor.
The USBC display doesn’t work with my Macbook Pro. The monitor won’t turn on, and the laptop uses more charge than it can draw from the cable.
Reflections from even the slightest light source in the room deliver a different image to each eye, leaving me struggling to focus and causing eyestrain. Further, there’s enough space between pixels you can drive a truck through.
After about 10 minutes using this thing I was feeling nauseous. I turned it off, put it back in the box and submitted a return order. This display should be avoided unless you’re very confident none of these issues will bother you.
★☆☆☆☆
Heading back to Australia in times of Coronavirus
It has been SO hard being in Amsterdam away from my partner, friends, family and all the people I love during the pandemic and I need to fix that. So in some very bittersweet news I am returning to Australia.
As far as I know the only flights to Australia are repatriation flights from Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and London via Qantas. I missed the first round of flights, but another 6 opened up from London and after speaking to work I decided I wanted to be on one.
The TLDR
- 14 day quarantine on arrival into Australia
- Organised on a state by state basis, and rules constantly in flux
- Up to 2 “care packages” can be picked up from within the city by staff. Not all items are allowed.
- Non-perishable grocery deliveries allowed from Woolworths
- Laundry quota twice a week
- Once a week supervised outside exercise allowed
- Free internet access 🎉 as well as movies
I’ve scanned the documents outlining Victoria’s quarantine procedures as of May 23 into a Google Docs folder.
Getting to London
Getting to London was not difficult from Amsterdam because The Netherlands doesn’t have any measures preventing travel.
The UK seems to be accepting folks with the same visa restrictions as before, providing they have a valid onward journey. I couldn’t find this information anywhere online and only found out when I was unable to check-in online.
At the KLM check-in desk I was able to check-in by showing the details for my Australia flight, even though it was on a different day. Others were not so lucky. One man in the queue was advised to “book a train or a bus ticket” before he was allowed to check into the London flight.
On the London side I passed through the automated security check with no hassles at all, and didn’t speak to another human.
Uber in London doesn’t seem to have any real preventative measures in place, but the taxis in the cab rank had sealed partitions between the driver & passenger which made it an easy choice.
Checking into the repatriation flight
Before check-in, Qantas sent a COVID-19 health screen form which could be filled out online at the check-in desk.
In addition to the obvious “do you have COVID-19” question, they also asked:
- Are you diagnosed or suspected to have pneumonia or COVID-19 infection?
- Have you been in contact with someone that is a suspected (being tested) or confirmed a COVID-19 case in the last 14 days?
- Have you been on a cruise ship or in a shared accommodation setting such as a hostel in the last 14 days?
- Do you currently or have you recently felt unwell with any of the following symptoms:
- Feverish, fatigued or aching
- Cold or flu like symptoms such as runny nose, cough or sore throat
- Shortness of breath
I’m not sure what answering yes to any of these would mean because again I couldn’t find info about it online.
Heathrow was a total clusterfuck. Security took about 30 minutes and it wasn’t possible to social distance because of the layout of the queues winding tightly back on each other. This didn’t stop them from putting up signs advising you to do so, and thankfully almost everyone was wearing masks.
Once cleared, there was a final health check to measure temperature, etc before we were given a little green pass and allowed to board.
Flying to Australia
Upon boarding the flight we were handed a yellow biohazard bag containing spare face masks, hand sanitizer, a pen, an immigration card & several spare bio bags.
Contact was kept to a minimum, and after meals any remaining garbage was only collected in the bio bags.
The flight was a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, which had three groups of three seats per row in economy. People were distanced at one person per three seats, and spaced so that nobody was sitting directly in front or behind anyone in the next row.
We were all required to wear masks, and they say the HEPA filters take out the majority of nasties so it’s about as safe as you can get locked up in an airplane for 22 hours. But of course, nothing’s a given.
I remember being relieved they did anything at all. There was no info on the Qantas website about it so I was preparing for the worst, but it was well implemented. I felt a lot more relaxed on the plane (aside from the woman sitting near me who kept taking her mask off and wearing it on her chin. Some people!)
I got to see both a sunset and a sunrise. Watching the sun come up through the tinted Dreamliner windows was beautiful: a giant purple-red orb rising through the clouds, looking like a fiery gas giant in alien solar system.
Melbourne via Perth
Since the flight to Australia is too long for conventional aircraft, there’s usually a stop-over somewhere in Asia or the Middle East. None of the countries that I know of are allowing transit at the moment. Instead the flight ran directly to Perth to refuel before continuing to Melbourne.
The stop in Perth was brief. We didn’t leave our seats, we just sat waiting for the crew to change over and the refuel to finish. I lost track of the time because I was sleepy, but Flightradar24 says it took about an hour and a half.
The final leg of the trip to Melbourne was fairly uneventful.
The Crown. Or in Spanish, La Corona
What happens when you land in Australia?
The very first thing is another temperature check & health screen. This wasn’t the quickest procedure, so we queued in the aerobridge while this was taking place.
Once cleared we were given a detention notice from the Victorian government, letting us know that we would be quarantined for 14 days which we were required to sign.
A state of emergency exists in Victoria under section 198 of the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 (Vic), because of the serious risk to public health posed by COVID-19.
You must proceed immediately to the vehicle that has been provided to take you to the hotel. Once you arrive at the hotel you must proceed immediately to the room you have been allocated. You must not leave the room in any circumstances
Finally, we were given the information about the hotel we would be staying in. In my case, the Crown Metropol in the center of Melbourne which was cordoned off especially for this.
After that we were herded onto the tarmac and boarded buses directly to our hotel. There was no social distancing on the bus, but we were required to wear our masks through the whole process.
The quarantine
The hotel is a quarantine zone so nobody other than staff and occupants are allowed in.
When the bus arrived we were shepherded off one at a time and given our room number, a care package of various snacks, toiletries & necessities, and many pages of documentation about how things work.
This was the first time I learned anything solid about ANYTHING to do with the quarantine. Before now I’d only heard rumours.
As I understand it’s a rapidly evolving situation, and it’s managed on a state-by-state basis which is possibly why the Federal government has no information for travellers.
I’ve scanned the documents outlining Victoria’s quarantine procedures as of May 23 into a Google Docs folder, which has a lot more info on how everything works.
My experience
Through this time I’ve been an anxious mess but now that I’m in the hotel I’m finally starting to relax.
The hotel room is bigger than my apartment in Amsterdam by a large margin so even though I’m locked in I’m feeling much less cooped up.
The meals so far have been pretty good, all things considered. There’s far too much food provided at any given mealtime, but that leaves plenty of other items for snacks in between.
The hotel, security, and health staff have been absolutely amazing and I’m so grateful to be able to come home. The amount of love and support and human connection I’ve had from everyone while in isolation this past week is truly overwhelming, and I’m beginning to feel that just maybe things are going to be okay <3
Booked the flights. I leave next week. It’s a secret, because work wants to deal with it in increments, but I figure nobody follows me here.
Or at least, if they do, let’s pretend they didn’t read this.
Anyway, I’m heading back home for the foreseeable future. Work has agreed to let me continue on for the time being, but it’s an awkward position and I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. I was initially hopeful it would work on an ongoing basis, but subsequent conversations make me question that. So we’ll see.
I fly to London on Thursday, then stay the night with Tom and Shashi, then fly to Melbourne via Perth on Friday.
Once I’m in Melbourne there’s a two week quarantine in a corona hotel where hopefully I’ll be able to work as normal and will not come down with the coronavirus. After that I’ll fly to Brisbane (tbd) and probably rent a place for myself.
I’m going to ship my bike and a box of personal belongings back separately. I might send them to Ryan, not sure yet. I requested three separate quotes but nobody has gotten back to me yet so I’ll have to chase them up.
I gave notice on my apartment, cancelled a bunch of services, will return my rental bike tomorrow, and I dunno. It feels like I have very few loose ends over here.
The main problem arrives when I deregister with the Dutch government. That means I lose my bank account, lose my Dutch tax number and lose my paycheck. So work has offered to register me at the office for up to three months, after which at this stage of negotiations I’m going to be out of a job. So that’s fun.
I will send another email tomorrow, probably, and be frank and upfront. Because I would like to keep working for them, but we need to be realistic about what that means.
Shawn is safe in Malta, but
O no
My milk didn’t arrive. It was rejected by DHL and is sitting somewhere in a warehouse and now I’m out.
So I’m gonna head out for a quick walk to the supermarket. Might pick up a tin of Milo. Might not. We’ll see.
On line purchases
Shawn and I made pasta over video for our half year anniversary. I was extremely stressed and anxious about unrelated things, but there must be something cathartic about making a big old mess of flour everywhere because I was feeling pretty good by the time we finished.
No pics cos my raviolis were demented and I forgot to take a photo anyway. But I’ll definitely be doing it again now I know how easy* it is.
Finally pressed the button on a big Amazon order today. I’d been saving up to do it in one go and save on (free) delivery, but my toothpaste is almost empty so that pushed me over the edge. It’s arriving in three separate deliveries anyway, spread throughout the week.
I discovered almost by accident that I can order consumables as well as regular items, so along with a new tube of toothpaste I’ve bought ten litres of UHT milk. The thinking is that now I don’t have to lug the stuff back from the supermarket. I’m trying to keep shopping trips to a minimum, so this will leave more room for other items in my backpack.
This morning I woke up to a gloomy overcast, it seems the sunny weather has gone for the while. It’s nice because the cigarette smoker hasn’t been outside my window as much today.
I think I prefer the rainy days, they’re more cosy, although I realised today that compared to back home the petrichor has a very different, kinda damp smell. It’s not the same.
Why is there so much dust
Right as the old construction site finished, there is a new one starting up across the road (yeah, during the “lockdown”). Even though I have noise cancelling headphones I can still hear it. There is so much dirt in my apartment I am vacuuming thrice a week and my Macbook has dust streaks coming out of the air vents.
I’ve had a mild sinusitis ever since the work-from-home order. My nose is full of crap and my sinuses burn, and it doesn’t help that there’s a dickhead sits outside my window on his Macbook smoking all day. If I catch it in time I can close the windows and keep it out, but once it’s inside there’s nothing I can do. It gets too hot to keep the place closed up in any case.
I’m pretty angry with my living situation at the moment because it’s quite literally toxic and I feel dirty all the time and I am so damn tired, but courtesy of global events there’s nowhere to go. I guess I’ll complain about it on the Internet.
On onboarding and time management
We recently onboarded two new devs on the team (remotely!) and they’ve been fantastic. I was super pleased with how fast they picked up issues and started taking on tasks that would have otherwise bogged me down in minutiae. It was also a great feeling to see all our preparation pay off.
As a result of this in a place where I’m spending a lot more time doing philosophical work, either being asked how to solve a problem, or given a solution that causes more issues than it fixes. In these cases I can either propose a workable solution, or ignore the issues and do the bare minimum to get the change out the door. The third and more depressing state is when we literally can’t fix the problem because it is stuck in a tech debt dependency hell: something that is impossible to fix now without taking on the larger structural problems which we don’t have time to fix yet either. Business loves quick fixes, developers love abstracting problems away, but everybody hates being deadlocked by tech debt.
At the moment I’m struggling because I’m spending a lot of my time supporting the team and keeping a lid on our issues, while at the same time trying to manage a regular ticket workload. Obviously the latter is suffering, and I’m feeling anxious about that, even though I know these are unreasonable expectations to have for myself.
I suppose it takes some getting used to, and I’m sure as the new starters get up to speed it’ll be less of an issue. But it’s made me realise that my “architectural” role at a previous company really left me with some anxiety about the knowledge component in knowledge work, after 90% of our time was spent in planning and 0% of the work ever made it to production.
I should really write a post mortem on that.
On the way excitement fades
I remember the first time I blogged with WordPress. It seemed so magical, but at the same time it was this discrete entity under my control. I owned the server and the database and could do with it whatever I pleased with not a care in the world. Occasionally someone would read my posts and occasionally they were immature, and I still regret some of the things I said. But it was exciting having my own little space in the world to make words.
Contrast that with now and this blog is just another amorphous cloudy glorb with secret inner workings that I don’t care to understand let alone do anything with. The magic has been lost amongst the noise and ads and monthly subscription charges. And that’s part of how we’ve gone months between posts, dear diary.
I’m thinking now the world’s changed I should write more. The closest I’ve come to keeping a diary is my alt Twitter, locked away for nobody but myself. But that tends to capture the worst of me for no real reason other than the convenience of shouting into the void. I sometimes miss composing the odd paragraph or two for the screaming abyss. So, I suppose, that’s this.
I also remember the first time I composed a blog post on my phone, the little T9 keyboard of my Nokia 6120c worn bare from the exuberance of modern technology. Now it seems so normal to lay in bed unable to sleep and swipe out a wanky obituary to good times past. I’m sure someday I’ll fondly remember these with the same tint.
Tilt train to Maryborough & what I miss about Australia
I’m on the train to Maryborough now. At the last minute I decided to get the tilt train straight to Maryborough West rather than the slower, cheaper Gympie North train then drive the extra 45 minutes north.
I’ve spent the past week camping on Ben’s floor and as much as I love and appreciate that man, I’m ready for… camping on my parents floor. Okay, not much has changed there, but I’ll have a room to myself and I won’t be in the way all the time.
Living out of a suitcase is hard y’all! I wasn’t expecting it to be amazing, but after three weeks now I’m just about ready to head back to Amsterdam. I’m leaving on Sunday and I’m sure I’ll have changed my mind by then.
I’m of two minds about heading back to Amsterdam. On one hand it’s where my home is, but on the other I’ve lately not been enjoying my time there for reasons I can’t really put my finger on. I think the thing I miss the most is being able to roam anywhere and do as I please; in the Netherlands it’s either too cold or too crowded for outdoor activities. The second the sun comes out the entire country is out in force to sunbathe in city parks and dine crammed together on narrow city streets.
The other thing I’ve really missed is the food. I had a nightmare the other night that I went to a Dutch restaurant and they served croquette on mashed potato, the whole speaking indecipherable Dutch. I miss pub food, Asian cuisines, fresh vegetables. Arnott’s Shapes ffs. The only thing interesting about the food in Amsterdam is how expensive it is.
That’s not to say I’m not enjoying my time in Europe, but you know. I don’t think I’m going to stay there forever. I just don’t know where forever is going to be (or how long, given our current climate).
Yeah, I’m being a bit of a downer. I’m just exhausted at the moment, so hopefully a few nights with my parents should cheer me up.