20th of May blogpost

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Not much going on around. I spent 1.5 months on home office, first time in life, like many of us. Big exchange of advantages and disadvantages if you ask me. Advantage – you don’t waste time and money on transport, food’s in right time, you calmly eat your breakfast, and don’t worry about hygene at work in times of the pandemic. Disadvantage is that you can’t focus nowhere near enough and mixing home and work means you don’t really have either, which isn’t fun since I like to get things done with both, but separately. Now I’m back in office, and we do monthly rotations to decrease the number of people at work at one time.

Poland itself is doing okay*. You see an asterisk here. That asterisk is Silesia. As it is hard to enforce ‘social distancing’ in coal mines, the virus spreads there fast. Other regions, including mine, seem to be much better, and so a number of restrictions were lifted. We can go to parks and forests, we can go to museums, to a barber, soon some borders will be opened, in shopping malls stores can now be open. Some opened. Some won’t anymore. Some reap the results of decreased competition, others went home and contributed to the spike of unemployment.

Most people, me included, do not want to spend money. Seeing grim news about global, regional and local economies, we grab our money and inflate our savings. Those savings are good on one hand. On the other hand, one person’s spending is another person’s income. If people don’t buy, we have an economic problem. I predict it to be the most visible in some 2-3 months, when the period between being handed the paper and actual end of work concludes for many people.

If they open borders and we have money to travel, where would we go? Somewhere far would require a plane. There is hardly any business as endangered as airlines now. With up to 90% decreased income, but retained gigantic fixed costs such as hangar rent, aircraft maintenance and salaries, it is no wonder many are going bust. Safest way seems to be railways on mid distance – especially state railway companies.

Time flies fast now and days are similar one to another. Normally I would have a whole file of plans at this point, with excitement awaiting August to go somewhere to make the year… first half of this year certainly was a surprise, and second one is likely to be just as tough. Is it our first crisis, though? Our first rodeo, like Americans say? Not at all. What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger. 2020 might be wasted, but time does not stop there. Perhaps the savings, as long as they’re there, can be piled up to make 2021 the year of the decade.

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