Month: May 2020

My employer had its first all-remote global town hall last week. Normally, all the execs have a global town hall four times a year to give us a chance to discuss the company’s business and for us to ask questions to key leaders. The execs usually are on stage together in an auditorium.

This latest global town hall obviously could not be in that fashion. So, it was done over Zoom. Other than that, it was pretty much the same format. A lot of the discussion centered around the work from home situation. With the exception of the Shanghai studio, all employees in the rest of our locations world-wide are working from home. We were informed that even as local jurisdictions in many places in the world were loosening regulations, the company is holding steady in a conservative approach to allowing employees to return to work. We were told that for most employees, we should not expect to come back to work until closer to the end of the year. That means that everyone will pretty much need to work from home for the whole summer and well into the fall.

I’m ok with that and I’m extremely pleased that company leadership is valuing safety above all else. In many of our studios, space is at a premium and many employees work less than 2m away from at least one other co-worker. If we returned to work this month, it would be impossible to be socially distanced from your fellow employees. The company will need to invest in time and money to alter work locations to assist in keeping everyone safe.

It’s looking like I’ll probably be working from home at least six months out of this year. That will mean I’ll continue to save money. No need for a transit pass. I’ll save money on food instead of spending it at the cafeteria. Again, with many things in life, I’ll take it day by day, month by month but I’ll be ok with work. Many others don’t have that luxury.

Now that we’ve been working at home for several months, I have made the determination that pretty much all of my co-workers live in homes more beautiful, clean, and well decorated than mine. From the many Zoom calls I’ve been on and pictures from Slack, everyone has a cleaner and more organized home than mine. Not once did I see a home where I thought it was messy or poorly organized.

It’s a good thing I don’t have my camera on when I go on Zoom because all they would see is a massive mess in my apartment. When this is all over, I need to toss out a whole bunch of crap in my place. I’m not sure if I wrote about this but before all of this went down, I was in the process of getting a baseboard heater installed. I had a few quotes and was about to go ahead with it. That was supposed to be step one of a few home improvement projects, culminating in the largest wall in my apartment being painted a different colour. I still want to do all of this, just need things to get to the new normal.

This weekend was a warm and unseasonably hot one for the greater Vancouver area. In fact, the temperatures broke records for several places as some residents had to deal with heat that approached 30 degrees. We’re not even in the middle of May and it felt like summer already. I was outside on Saturday and it didn’t take me long to sweat.

Normally, I wouldn’t complain about such good weather but we live in unique times right now. For the most part, we’re still living under some form of quarantine conditions. When my own quarantine started in mid-March, the weather was still quite cool, cold even. If you stepped outside, you needed a jacket for sure. Jackets have sleeves and in those heady and chaotic first days of the quarantine, it was easy to shield yourself from having to touch door handles, elevator buttons, or basically anything you didn’t want to make contact with bare skin. You just pulled your sleeve down a bit and used it between your hand whatever you needed to touch. I cannot understate how important my North Face jacket and a blue hoodie was in terms of providing me with my own PPE during the majority of this quarantine. It saved me from having to touch countless door handles and elevator buttons.

The pandemic, however, has now lasted long enough that the weather has turned from chilly to warm and sunny. It’s now t-shirt and shorts weather. All my t-shirts are short sleeves. If I wear those, I no longer have my trusty long sleeves to save me from having to touch things. So, I face a dilemma now. How do I dress for the warm weather but still have some level of protection?

The only compromise that I’ve come up with is to wear long-sleeved, button-up shirts, like an oxford. I can roll up the sleeves to handle the weather and then roll them down when I need to touch a surface. Not a great solution but perhaps a workable compromise.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the release of Skate 3. It is the most recent game in the Skate series and quite possibly the last, seeing as how there has been a decade between the release and present day.

As with all the games in the series, I remain proud to have worked on Skate 3. For a game that is now ten years old, it is still played quite a bit by our players and it is frequently mentioned in social media. There is a vocal group on said social media that is clamouring for a sequel but I believe some of them are just doing it for attention and wouldn’t actually buy a new game. It would be pretty cool though if we did try to make another one but the development would be fraught with danger. The industry is quite different than it was back in the heady days of 2010.

Alas, it’s better to reflect on the things we able to accomplish and that is making a third game in a beloved series. The team that made all three games remain the best team I’ve ever worked with by a country mile. It was like winning a Stanley Cup in my second year of being in the big show. I lucked out early and big with my dear co-workers.

Ten years! Where did all the time go!

For as long as this pandemic has kept me home is about the same time that my main desktop computer has been broken. It has been months. I’ve written about this many times now but I keep writing about it because it’s still broken. My computer refuses to boot into Windows properly, so I have to put it to sleep instead of shutting it down.

I’m going to try one last ditch effort this weekend to fix it and if that fails, I’m going to take it to a shop. I can’t have it running like this indefinitely. There will be a time in the near future where I need to reboot this computer and that won’t be possible anymore. I wonder how many people had to endure this quarantine with faulty electronics and computers that were critical to their well-being or employment. They have my sympathy!

Today the government of British Columbia presented their plan to move the province forward, in careful stages, into what will be a post-pandemic future for all of us. I have always felt lucky to be a Canadian living in Canada and especially one that lives in British Columbia. The citizens of this province have done remarkably well in heeding the call to stay home, stay distanced, and stay smart. As other parts of the world continue to struggle with containing the virus (I won’t name a certain country), our diligence has led us to the point where our provincial government felt it was possible to chart a course forward.

It feels almost unreal that I could go to a restaurant in June, sit down, order a meal, and enjoy my unlimited bread sticks. The question though that surfaces for me is even if restaurants or other services are allowed to open back up, is that a guarantee that people will partake in them as before? I can easily see people staying away from eating out, getting a message, or getting a manicure, just because it’s not 100% completely safe right now. The premier of this province, John Horgan, even said in his press conference today that a lot of this will be up to a person’s risk tolerance. I think that’s a fair statement and gives everyone a choice. The choice is up to you.

Personally, I don’t think I’d be too scared of going to a restaurant. The places I used to frequent mostly have big dining rooms and I don’t remember being crammed in there like cattle. I am sure with new safety measures in place, it will be an acceptable risk. What gives me definite pause is public transit. If you’ve ever commuted during rush hour in any major city, you know public transit can be an exercise in being sandwiched next to someone in close proximity, making contact with their body, faces with less than a foot apart. This happens if you’re on a train or on the bus. Also, don’t get me started on how many people I’ve had the pleasure of standing or sitting next to in the past, who were sniffling and coughing. It used to be that maybe that person would give you a cold or worse yet, the flu. Now, that might mean something much worse. I just don’t see myself getting on public transit in mid-May to go to work. I understand I have a car but my car is old and unreliable. It’s not in a condition to be driven to work and back everyday. So, where does that leave me? I guess I’ll need to work from home until the situation stabilizes a bit further. My employer has sorta given a few indications that they won’t force anyone to come back to the studio if they don’t feel like it, so I’ll probably be ok there.

It’s going to be an interesting summer.

Many of us have done or seen new things during the last few weeks. Some of us have re-discovered people, procedures, and places. For me, I have been reminded that bananas make for a delicious snack. I know, what a moronic statement to make. I didn’t say that all my revelations here would be groundbreaking.

For weeks now, I’ve been buying more groceries than ever before. You can easily get tired of buying the same fruits over and over again. So, about a month and a half ago, I decided to buy a bunch of bananas. They’re easy to store, come in their own carrying case, and don’t require refrigeration. I had forgotten perhaps how delicious they are just on their own. They don’t need to be put in ice cream or seared in flames, though those two ways of eating bananas is pretty tasty too.

They are a convenient snack, healthy, and works well if you’re needing to stay in your home for days at a time. When all of this is over, there are a few pandemic habits that I hope to carry over, and buying bananas is one of them, even it’s a totally mundane habit to have.

This was a random monologue from Conan from a few weeks ago. It’s short and amusing. The last joke is the best one.

Traditionally for Mother’s Day I take my Mom and Dad out for dinner. We usually go out to a Chinese restaurant for lobster and some other delicious dishes. My mother enjoys a good meal, so this is the best way for me celebrate that day. We also usually go a week before the actual Mother’s Day. If you’re keeping count, Mother’s Day is next Sunday, so we would have normally gone out for dinner today. It may not come as a surprise to you but we did not go out for dinner today because no restaurants are open in our area for sit-down service.

How do you celebrate Mother’s Day during a global pandemic? One could say that we’ll just celebrate once restrictions are lifted enough to allow for people to sit down at restaurants again. For the province of British Columbia, we are tracking to probably allow that before the end of the summer. I feel though, I could probably do something for my mother before that though. Initially, I thought about getting my mother flowers but that’s kinda stupid. Like I mentioned above, my Mom likes a good meal, so getting flowers is nice but food is better.

I think I’ll try to get some food delivered to my parents this week. I’m not talking Skip The Dishes or Uber Eats, I mean some premium meats and/or seafood. Something that will allow them to make a nice meal and also prevents them from having to go out and get more groceries.

I wish I didn’t have to do this. It would be much better if we could just have dinner together again but I understand we all need to do our part. There will be a time when everyone reminisces about that one Mother’s Day where no one could go out for brunch or dinner. I hope that day comes soon.

April was the first full month of the quarantine for me, where I mostly stayed home for an entire cycle of bills. I was curious to see if my spending would be less given that I didn’t go out to any restaurants, couldn’t do much shopping outside of groceries, and in general wasn’t able to partake in commerce in a traditional sense.

As it is now May, I am now able to see how I spent my money for April. The easiest indicators to look at at my credit card bills. I basically use two different credit cards. Both are reward cards, one I use for restaurants, fast food, and recurring monthly bills. The other I use for groceries and anything else I need to buy that doesn’t fit the categories I’ve already mentioned. The first card usually hovers above $1,000 month, it’s usually not less than that. The second card can vary, depending on if I get a bit adventurous with online shopping or if general, I just wind up buying more stuff that month. I’ve had some months where that card comes in below $1,000, eg. $800 but some months it’s above $1,000. For simplicity sake, let’s say both cards average around $1,000 a month.

For April, the first card came to $292 worth of charges. The second card tallied up to $700 for the month. I saved a considerable amount of money this month, most of it coming from the lack of buying on the first card. The bulk of my savings came from not going out to eat or buying food to go. I last sat at a table in a restaurant in the first week of March. That card is also the one I use to pay for my overpriced lunches at work. Conservatively, I probably spend $50 a week on food at work, so that’s about $200 saved there alone. I also didn’t have to pay for a transit pass, so that’s about $100 saved too.

Now spending on the second card was down too but not as much as the first. There’s a few reasons for that. First, my grocery bills went up compared to a regular month, so that offset some of the savings. Still, I came out ahead. It’s not out of the ordinary for me to spend $50 at dinner sometimes, whereas $50 at Safeway this month allows me to eat almost the entire week. It’s a shame it took a global pandemic to show me the stark reality of the math but it’s true. You save so much money by eating at home. My savings would have been more had I not bought a new monitor this month. EA is reimbursing employees for “work at home” expenses and monitors were included in those expenses. I bought a really nice gaming monitor where EA chipped in $290 and my portion was about $300. Had I not bought that monitor (which was a great deal because of EA’s partial reimbursement), I would have only spent $400 with my second credit card.

This global pandemic has allowed many new perspectives to be gained and I certainly have been surprised by what I see here. At least for me, it appears that I can save an incredible amount of money by essentially eating all my meals at home, limiting your buying to mainly just groceries, not driving or taking transit, and spending all your time at home. Imagine how much money I could save if I did this every single month for at least a year. Now, you could ask the question of how enjoyable would life be if I lived the quarantine life year around, even in non-pandemic times. Well yeah, it probably suck after a two months. Some things, like not driving or taking transit, probably isn’t practical. So, maybe the answer is everything in moderation, like only allowing myself to get takeout or going to a restaurant once a month.

Whenever we get back to whatever semblance of normal existence we will have, I think I’ll need to examine what aspects of quarantine life I can still bring forward with me, even in moderated doses, to help me save money.