Day 39 "Boobies and Zoom"

Today Boobies and Zoom

Day Thirty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.  

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Day 39 Boobies and Zoom

It is day 39 of our Spanish Lockdown, last night brought more custard and more bad dreams.  I seem to keep getting those high anxiety dreams where I am not in control.

 

I have not really had them since I worked at the radio station.  And it was about the radio station last night, I had to engineer a radio show, but I managed to take the radio station off air as I did not recognise the buttons that sent the studio to the transmitters.

 

I imagine that we are all having similar dreams of not being in control, because I think this must be a bit like being in Prison, having decisions taken away from you about where you can go and what you can do.

 

The Spanish Government have back tracked on the decision only to allow children to accompany adults to supermarkets, pharmacies and banks.

 

My next door but two neighbour, Sylvia shouted across from her garden saying even before the “veerus” she would never entertain taking her children to a supermarket as they would run wild and pick up things from the shelves, which would now be dangerous for their health.

 

She said in English.. “I do not have a word for our Government!” Sylvia cleans, she is very good cleaner, before she had her children she was a very good teacher, had passed her exams and taught in a local school.

 

About a year or so ago she decided that she wanted to return to teaching.  Now here in Spain she has to take all her exams again.  Once you leave teaching your professional qualifications are struck off and if you return you have to all the exams again.

 

And you must pass each part of those exams again, if you do the authority will decide where you can go and teach.. and it can be anywhere.  It is a similar situation for the police, there are tough exams and you can posted anywhere.

 

To me it seems really harsh and quite unfair, in contrast my niece Alice had to return back from France when her husband’s work started to be more difficult to find.  She has good qualifications in Geography, so thought she would approach a local school to see if there was work.

 

She got an interview, that went well.  They told her “you can start now.” And they did mean now, that afternoon she found herself teaching in class for the first time with just the National Curriculum guide and a white board for company.  And I bet she is a very good teacher just Sylvia.

 

These are some of the cultural differences you come across when you start to scratch the surface of another country’s way of life.  Britain will allow you to hold your professional qualification and be quite happy to employ you without all the jumping through hoops that Sylvia will need to do.

 

Pilar with the big boobies has set up her own Estate Agent.  We love Pilar she was one of those larger than life personalities that dominated the little village we lived in when we first came to Spain.

 

I can’t think of more crazy time to begin such an enterprise, but she has some very interesting properties on her books.  She had lived in Germany for a while, so saw how business was conducted there and believes that she take that experience and make something for herself.  No need to take all her exams again.

 

I am not sure what will happen to the property market anywhere in the world, let alone Spain, but this is a beautiful part of the world and the weather is mostly glorious, and I can imagine once the hiatus of the virus is over, a vaccine found and slowly we all get vaccinated, life will return to a new normal.

 

Day 39 and it has been a long day, I did my first Zoom directed voiceover.  Back in the UK I had got used to Skype where usually just one person directs you remotely.  Zoom is something else, this time I had five people from the project, quite daunting, and then there was the technology that had to be tamed. I managed to stick some earbuds into one ear, hook the microphone onto the same side and then listen to myself through the actual headphones and record myself and keep notes of the takes and finally read the script.

 

I did it, I was a bit stressed, so were the others at again having to be together remotely.  There was interesting BBC article that people were finding Zoom meetings far more difficult than ordinary face-to-face meetings as you miss the social cues, facial expression.  I had no visual link to the guys directing me as the computer was behind me.  My studio laid out for a singular experience.  I reckon I will need a monitor on the wall in future to get some of those important visual cues that were lacking today.

 

Poor Chris has to spend the time being as quiet as possible.  Although the studio is sound proofed and treated, if you open a door or put the air-conditioning on in the house you do hear it.  Over the years I have got used to working a lot more from home. 

 

I don’t think I would want to go back to my life in the UK, where it took me longer to travel, and cost a fortune in rail fares and finding an overpriced sandwich in London, for the sake of a few hours work.

 

I think a lot of you are thinking just the same, here in Spain where remote working was never a thing… well it is now … and it might just be one of the good things that come out of this pandemic – people get to spend more time with family and the ones they love and can work just as well away from the office.