Quarantine Diary - Sixth Day, August 5th, 2021: A meaningless thought, A well-intended action that is not helpful, the allure of visualizing happy endings, the annoying piece of audio, crises at work

Today is my sixth day in this quarantine facility. I start to settle on a routine, which I hope will be ephemeral. I wake up at 6:30 AM, which is way earlier than I would have at home. Breakfast comes at 7:30 AM. I’d take a shower at 9:00 AM, and then open my laptop and start reading HakoMari.

There are 7 volumes so it should keep me entertained for a while. Yesterday I finished 2 volumes already. I must say, savoring it until now was not a waste of time because reading it again is so much fun. I’m sure I wouldn’t have this kind of fun if I had read it more often.

There was some light rain today, but it soon dried up and the sky was back to normal. I was worried for a second that the clothes I hung out to dry in the shared balcony may get wet, but they turned out to be fine. More accurately, they’re still wet from being washed, so the rain wouldn’t have done anything anyway.

A meaningless thought

Today I thought about a conversation. In that conversation, a girl asked me for something that would ward off her boredom. I gave her the link to HakoMari, which is still my favorite light novel to date. She most likely didn’t read it. But it’s not like the conversation was subliminal thought that more people should read my favorite light novel. I think her presence is only conveniently summoned as we just spoke the other day. Plus, she did ask that question in the past, and I did introduce her to HakoMari - which is what I happen to be reading now. In other words, there was no deeper meaning to such a fleeting image, other than a way that my brain made sense of random information. Not everything has deep meaning, sometimes our brain is just bored and seeks stimulations.

A well-intended action that is not helpful

Today, like yesterday, someone brought me some medicine. I guessed it’s from A friend of my auntie who’s the vice president of this hospital. While I am grateful for these intentions, his actions do not seem helpful to me as I don’t need medicine. I am already at my physical best, and what I need right now is to go home. Damn it. Sorry, I know you mean well, but I am just screaming at the world here.

The allure of visualizing happy endings

I notice this attraction to think about what it feels like when I finally get to go home. Every now and then I’d feel the temptation to visualize it, down to the very moment on the day where I get released.

It’s only been 6 days in here, so this is not a fair comparison, but I imagine that this is a temptation that prisoners (who did not get a life sentence) would also have.

Maybe it’s a bit pretentious to equate my current situation to that of a prisoner, but only in this tendency to visualize the ending that I think there’s any similarity. However, my first instinct upon noticing these mental images is to discard them.

Why? Because I think all they would provide me with is a sense of false hope. Allowing these visualizations to happen tricks my mind into longing for them, despite knowing that they won’t come anytime soon. People tend to become desperate when the things that they long for don’t come.

Desperation captures the mind and fills it with rationalizations as to why our hopes don’t come true. It doesn’t stop with one specific hope either, but the natural tendency of the mind to abstract will soon make it question even the concept of hope itself. Yet, even when the concept of hope is criticized and deconstructed, the misery still won’t be over, as the mind is so primitive that criticizing and rationalizing it won’t make it go away.

What is left now is a type of hope that one doesn’t believe in but nevertheless has to maintain due to necessity. I think such a scenario is, without a doubt, miserable. Therefore, from the very first day, I have tried to prevent myself from thinking too deeply about the end of all this, so as to avoid drowning myself in that false hope. That way, I can wake up to another day in this facility and not feel tremendously and unreasonably let down.

The annoying piece of audio

Did I forget to mention that there’s a piece of audio that gets played every day? It always starts off with a parody of an old, popular song. Then a guy starts to narrate how bad the covid situation is and then goes into some rules and regulations that you should follow to help people who are fighting on the front line. The first few times are fine, but it became annoying when it’s played multiple times a day every day. For the love of God, we all get the message. This is bordering on propaganda. Just give people some flyers and be done with it. Sometimes they mix it up by replacing the male voice with a female voice. What a change, what a twist!

Crises at work

Today I had three crises at work. A developer told me about a bug that was reported on the forum. It seems that users cannot open a test suite created from an earlier version in the current version. The developer told me that likely the user tampered with the file so that the app cannot parse it correctly. When I went into my mail, there was a long-time user who emailed me 2 days ago about a problem she was having. Essentially, she could not load all her test suites properly, and there’s a mismatch in terms of the versions she observes between Chrome and Firefox, which she thinks may be causing an issue. Yet another user emailed me, although this one is less urgent, about an issue with the command-line runner. It seems that the installed ChromeDriver was not matching the actual Chrome browser.

To provide an analysis of the three situations: the reported bug seems like the user’s fault, but it’s also because we introduced a change in the way the app parsed the test suites recently without regard for such possibility. The resolution is to revert back to the last working mechanism. For the long-time user, I replied and asked if, since her last email, her Chrome browser has updated the extension to the latest version and if the situation is resolved because of that. For the user who had troubles with the command-line runner, I suggested uninstalling and re-installing afresh the command-line runner along with the ChromeDriver to see if that helps. All of that happens within 30 minutes. Talk about a crisis.

Previously

https://dafuqis-that.com/2021/08/10/quarantine-diary-fifth-day-august-4th-2021-trying-to-work-and-fail-yesterday-people-at-work-seem-to-think-ill-be-out-of-contact-for-a-while/

Next up

https://dafuqis-that.com/2021/08/10/quarantine-diary-seventh-day-august-6th-2021-getting-retested-thinking-about-risks-a-crisis-at-work-contained-a-nice-doctor-a-good-friend-rightfully-hopeful/