For those of us who are office jockeys and able to work from home, Zoom is the new program we are all using. Actually, it isn’t bad as you can have everyone loaded on screen and have a meeting so information does not need to be repeated.

While I have only been involved in a couple of Zoom meeting so far, using the program on my laptop computer was relatively straightforward. So far we haven’t been Zoombombed, then again, the level of meeting I was involved in wouldn’t be up to a hacker’s standard – these meetings were really a waste of time. Major organisations such as Google, NASA, SpaceX and Australian universities and beginning to stop Zoom meetings citing security issues. When you get Zoombombed hackers jump into your meeting and sprout hate speech or post pornographic pictures – I can safely say none of my meetings have been so exciting.

In Western Australia we escaped the bulk of the bushfires, the major cause was the dry conditions caused by the Indian Ocean Dipole and was more severe in Central Australia and the East Coast.

There was still bushfires in Western Australia, it is bushfire season after all and a  fact of life for many of us. The week before Easter saw some great autumn weather, 36 C on good Friday with stunning weather over the Easter break so the fire that raced through our area on the Monday/Tuesday before Easter was a concern.

People were told to pack up and leave immediately, their lives were at risk so we followed the fire via newsfeeds, our block is long and backs out into thick scrub. Only just in 2019 we had a fence put on the back to stop motorbikes riding through our property and a gate was erected. We have kangaroos feeding on the grass at the back, there is possums up in the trees and bandicoots all in the area. When a fire races through, you first think of human life, then your property and then the wildlife in the area.

While it is too early for us to survey the wildlife lost as we are still locked down, it was interesting as the bush at the back of our property was too thick to walk through, the fire took out all the scrub and left the trees. This is a usual occurrence, Australian trees seems to grow better with fire sweeping through. The whole idea of burning off is to remove all the debris, low intensity firs lit under the right conditions remove all the fuel and damage to wildlife is minimal. We were lucky, the fire pretty much burned past our back fence and while it did burn on our property, there was minimal damage with just our wood heap burnt.

For those of us lucky enough, we are now able to work from home, we set up our home offices and we get to work. We save on fuel, avoid traffic and travel time – this will be the new way of working into the future once this social isolation is over.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work from home one day per week as it was, now my full 5 day week is from home so I am loving it. I work from an open plan office so while they try to say it is great for collaboration, it isn’t – it is great for distractions. So, I have YouTube playing all day in a minimised window with music, when they upgraded my computer and I lost my sound then I brought my tablet in and connected to the office WiFi. With my headphones on, I can drown out all the background noise, whining, complaining and useless discussions and just get on with it.

At home I am more productive, you have to be disciplined so I get up at 6 am like normal, as it is now autumn, it isn’t really light early and I go for a 7.5 km run, water the lawn and garden by hand, a quick weights session, shower off and still start before my standard 8 am official start time. You get more done, you set goals, create a tracking sheet to monitor progress and go. I am coordinating others from home so emails, zoom meetings and phone calls are common practice without interfering too much with my personal goals.

You end up working more, that is a given and can end up working well into the evening as the distractions are gone. As businesses see the benefits and increased productivity, there will be more of home offices. For those who lack the personal discipline, they will still have to trundle off to work every morning – for the rest of us, this is a new beginning.

As I am still working, there is no social distancing and no extra cleaning of classrooms or work areas – they don’t clean at all. So I have Pine O Clean disinfectant to clean my desk and the two desks near mine.

I then go up and clean the classroom before class, there should be people cleaning all the door handles, hand-rails and other shared areas. Unfortunately, there wasn’t so I had to do myself during the day. They pretty much aren’t cleaning, the rooms are not even cleaned at night as I notice the students leave their books and papers on their desks overnight and they are in the exact same position in the morning.

Then that all changed, the education unions met with the state government and they called an end to classes in the lead up to Easter and school holidays. This was a good move and not unexpected, hence why I rushed to finish my class early, it was final year apprentices and now they are ready to be signed off as they come out of contract.

I have no issues with working through the coronavirus pandemic. All I ask is the management procure the required safety equipment, create proper procedures for running classes and ensure the required products like hand sanitiser is available to everyone. Don’t forget the cleaning, that means getting out of their offices and walking around to see how everything is working. This is the role of management, they cannot offload their responsibilities anymore.

The Australian National Cabinet is a governing body devised at federal level to provide bipartisan leadership to address the national emergency of COVID-19 consisting of the seven state Premiers, two territory Chief Ministers and Prime Minister as chairman.

There is a saying I have just learnt working for a Chinese company, never trust the Chinese and based upon my personal experiences, I have to agree. I would like to add to that definition, the Chinese are devoid of ethics, values and integrity.

You only have to look at their trademark infringements, counterfeiting of products, theft of intellectual property, currency manipulation, forced transfer of technology, lack of access to Chinese markets and lack of safety standards for counterfeit products. So where does this leave me? I have Chinese friends so I can’t be accused of hating on Chinese, I certainly distrust Chinese corporations and Chinese managers in general. When it comes to Chinese corporate ethics, I have no respect for Chinese corporations and the people in charge of them.

It’s hard for me to purchase TWG Tea in Perth, usually my best option is to make my acquisition at Singapore’s Changi Airport where I was a frequent traveler, they have boutiques in Terminals 1, 2 and 3.

I am able to purchase a narrow selection of TWG Tea from the David Jones department store in the city, although this is a fairly expensive way to purchase an expensive product. This doesn’t mean it will break the bank, I just don’t like paying way over the expected retail price for what is basically a cup of tea. I was able to purchase TWG Tea from David Jones at Karrinyup shopping centre, whilst that was a limited range it was convenient. That all changed when they took the product off the shelf and I was left with going to the city as my only option.

Due to their limited range I had to try Red Balloon tea, not a first choice for me but since Red of Africa and Eternal Summer tea was not available I wasn’t left with too many choices. Red Balloon comes in a rather strange container, a light blue box with of course a red balloon as the design feature. Red Balloon tea is made from red rooibos tea, an African tea blended with blueberry, you can actually see the blue pieces in the mix. Naturally, this accounts for the blue container although I am a little unsure where the balloon comes from but is pretty good for a change.

I had heard rumours on Chinese social media that they were holding the US responsible for the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan a number of weeks before the story broke. The story goes that a US military team spread the virus during the Military World Games in Wuhan in September 2019.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General Zhao Lijian had tweeted an article authored by Canadian writer Larry Romanoff that the Americans were responsible, so this sparked my interest, I now follow him on Twitter.

The Montreal based group named Global Research claims to be a think tank, but appears to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory webside. Based on some basic internet research, Romanoff appears to not be as well credentialed as he claims to be. No long after, The New York Times ran an article co-authored by Julian E. Barnes, Matthew Rosenburg and Edward Wong regarding Chinese and Russian disinformation. Rosenburg had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, Wong was awarded a Livingstone Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, so they are all well credentialed journalists.

I read an article on Singapore’s The Straights Times that the residents of Wuhan were starting to emerge from lockdown and the general feeling was happiness. They have endured a long two months; however, their attitude seems very blasé and indifferent about the effects of this disease on the rest of the world. So I decided to comment on the article, I had planned to write a post about this very issue and the replies (if any) would form part of my response. Boy, did my comment cause some aggressive replies, whilst I wanted to gauge responses, this was certainly an eye opener.

As a duty of disclosure so people can form their own opinions, my initial comment was “Pride? That’s a new take on national pride… Pride that they infected the whole world with the coronavirus from their unsanitary wet markets but they are doing ok now because Italy and Spain are losing lives on an unprecedented scale.”  I responded to the first comments with this response before shutting down the notifications. “There are horrible rates of infection and death in developed nations. What is looking likely will be truly horrific rates in the undeveloped areas of Africa, Central Asia and South America.”

I had read that Chinese trolls were attacking individuals commenting about China’s culpability in regards to the coronavirus outbreak, subsequent mismanagement and poorly executed cover-up, so I decided to see for myself. Known as the 50 cent party, as it is claimed these online trolls are paid fifty cents for each online comment. There is also chatter they are just government employees seeking to gain influence within their department for promotion.

I am glad I take these responders as fools, these responses are certainly acidic using fake accounts and personal attacks to push their agenda. Fortunately they don’t bother me, I could well understand why a person who is a little fragile could really come apart with disastrous consequences. After an hour or so, I had turned off the notices linked to this article, I wasn’t engaging these angry, nasty people although I wanted to read their responses at a later date. The individuals interviewed were proud of their country and how their superior system was better than the west.

Responding to these people is like stepping in dog shit, you can choose to walk around or you can step right in it. They are all angry and bothered and I am laughing at them, they provide some of the research to the theories I am following up. So the early responses were along the lines of these countries should have followed WHO advice so they will get what they deserve. The Italians were the source of the virus and brought it to China, Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi states he was misquoted in a textbook example of propaganda.

When they worked out I was from Australia, they started on the indigenous angle not knowing my personal background. What these idiots clearly do not know is indigenous communities in central Australia are being heavily locked down to protect these vulnerable people, they are at greater risk than mainstream Australia and this virus could devastate these communities.

There was of course the race based comments, there is no such thing as reverse racism, this will be the topic of a later post. After my initial scan of the comment section, there were no comments about being an ang mo – let’s see if this changed when I check on the weekend. I need a good laugh and the angrier these fools get the better.

People are dying in Italy and Spain, the UK is looking in serious trouble along with France and Germany. The rest of Europe is the new epicentre of the virus outbreak and the US could eclipse them all. How could they be so callous, instead inciting national pride in a disaster of their creation, at time of publishing, there are more than 1 million infections and 50,000 deaths.

I worked in Africa in 2019 so I feel some affinity with the plight of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is a harsh life for these people. My concern is the medical systems of developed countries can’t cope with the sheer number of patients, people living in developing countries. This time last year I was riding my mountain bike through their villages so I have a bit of an idea of what life is like for them there, these people were my colleagues and friends. Fortunately I am able to keep in contact with them on Linkedin.

Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party is a nasty piece of work. I cannot believe the bullshit he tried to pull at the G20 meeting, give it a rest dickhead – you caused this mess.

China is not the world power they proclaim to be, this pandemic sweeping the world is a result of lax standards, poor hygiene and a totalitarian society that cannot even enforce their own markets. This is not the first time the deplorable conditions of Chinese wet markets have spurred toxic diseases, this is a common occurrence. What a bunch of losers, they are either a mob of incompetent idiots unable to run their own country or they are so corrupt they only survive due to their insistence on the reprehensible behaviour they encourage.

Had China been proactive instead of implementing their usual pathetic communist policies of secrecy and denial, this world pandemic would not have occurred. Don’t you ever lecture us on how this pandemic could be contained, Xi Jinping and his bunch of bumbling incompetent fools are the cause of this mess – this is on Xi Jinping.

There is no shut down for me yet, we are one of the areas required to stay open and I am ok with that. Within our office, the complaining is incredible, I wished the volume control on my computer was working so I can drown out the whining by putting on headphones – my attitude is just get on with it. I wish they had the same idea, the volume is starting to make my ears ring.

At this point, it is all about personal leadership so I clean my own desk with disinfectant that I brought in from home, I clean the desks of the guys close to me and then I move to the tutorial room I am using. My employer states there is hand sanitiser for people to use – there isn’t. The storeman is playing around mixing methylated spirits with moisturiser for hand sanitiser, this isn’t a winning formula but at least he is giving it a crack. Due to poor planning, we did not order hand sanitiser when we should of, the people responsible for ordering felt we didn’t need any more – difficult to fathom.

Despite what they publish, there is no extra cleaning of areas like hand-rails, door handles or anything. I clean the students desks for them as I noticed in the mornings, if they left their books on the desks the night before, they were unmoved. I clean the door handles, light switch and fan control every morning with spray cleaner.