Covid adventures

It remains remarkable how quickly changes can occur and how swiftly we adapt to and even become accustomed to them. Remote work, or ‘working from home,’ is a good example of this. Before the coronavirus crisis, working from home seemed like a privilege that was sparingly granted to employees. Now, it has become a widely accepted phenomenon. Some corporate companies even require their employees to continue working from home until the end of 2020.

The time-consuming commuting and daily traffic jams can suddenly be replaced in an efficient way. Why has no one thought of this solution to the traffic problem before? Is it the synergy between people, working harmoniously and as a team in a shared workplace to achieve common goals? Or is it perhaps a hallmark of a healthy organization and therefore a goal in itself?

Traveling is another example of our rapid adaptability. My own weekly commuting between Romania and the Netherlands was abruptly interrupted by corona. Every time I arrive in Romania, a mandatory quarantine/home isolation period of 2 weeks is required. This is taken very seriously in Romania, but more on that later. During the peak of the crisis, I worked from home in Breda, just like everyone else (and 290 of our 350 employees).

Air travel came to a halt, so the only way to reach Romania was the old-fashioned way: by car. It was quite an adventure to cross the Dutch-German, German-Austrian, Austrian-Hungarian, and finally the Hungarian-Romanian borders with my whole family. Especially because each of those countries had their own rules for cross-border travel, which were sometimes adjusted daily, causing a lot of confusion and uncertainty.

In the end, the journey went surprisingly well. There were no delays at the border crossings, except for the last one, where we faced a 23-kilometer traffic jam with a waiting time of 20 hours—oops… The delay at the border was partly caused by strict medical checks and forms that everyone had to fill out. Romania is among the European countries with the strictest COVID-19 measures. Compliance with these rules is also enforced, which is not always the case in Romania. Some (traffic) rules there sometimes seem to exist only for show. Once we arrived in Craiova, a police car drove by every day to check whether we were truly staying at home.

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