Pandemic planning (day seven)

Press day! Encouragingly, this has seemed no more stressful than normal and some pages have been quicker and easier because there have been fewer contenders for proof reading and we have been well organised. Plus, we limited ourselves to just four news pages to reduce the load.

This is the last day of our week-long exercise, so tomorrow we’ll have a major debrief in our weekly editorial meeting, congratulate ourselves on what went well and formulate plans to mitigate what went badly, just in case we have to do this for real, whether due to pandemic, terrorist activity in central London or anything else. We’re in what I believe is called the Westminster exclusion zone, which means if something major happens we won’t be allowed in (or out if we’re already in and it involves dirty bombs biological/chemical agents).

“After two days in the office as the only news writer (the rest of the team had swine flu) I am today working from home again (in our scenario I have suffered from travel disruption and can’t get to work). I have been making up pages of The Pharmaceutical Journal from home and, despite my problems with QuarkXPress last week, it appears to have gone smoothly (thanks to Drazen our IT guy sorting things out for me on Monday).

“One problem I have encountered is that my work laptop does not connect to my printer — I need to check with IT whether I can register my home printer on my laptop because we’re not allowed to install anything on our work computers ourselves.

“Webmail is again causing problems — I had a period today when I suspected messages were not coming through and I’ve had a couple of messages from colleagues using webmail where the message is blank or the text they have sent appears in the wrong part of the e-mail — strange! I’m also finding it difficult not being able to file messages using webmail.

“Yesterday, I started work earlier than I would normally through not having to travel into the office — I've been working on a feature article on access to cancer drugs. Not sure if I’m supposed to be pretending to have swine flu, since I am allowed into the office today or tomorrow to work on the notice-board page for The Pharmaceutical Journal.

“Although it can be annoying waiting for people to get back to me, I have nevertheless made some headway with my article, as I’ve been researching articles and reports on the internet and notes from a telephone interview with an oncologist earlier today.

“I have found that I am able to concentrate well with fewer distractions — overall not a bad day. Had a deluge of phone calls right near the end of the day, so plenty to write.”

“I missed most of what has happened during the preparations for our emergency issue because I have been away for a week pretending to have swine flu at the Commonwealth Pharmacists Association conference in Ghana. Luckily, I did not need to contact the office much because internet access only worked for two minutes while I was there. Yesterday, I was in the final stages of my recovery and worked from home.

“Contact with the office was easy, albeit using my own equipment since I do not have an office laptop. Colleagues have been e-mailing me material to proof read. The only difficulty has been my lack of a printer at home. So I have had to read PDFs on screen, make notes on paper and telephone comments and corrections to the office. Until I can get an office laptop, this will be as much as I could ever do during a real pandemic.

“Working at home beats hands down sitting in an office where you can’t open windows and the air conditioning is stifling. I wish I could have swine flu more often.”