Trying to Get Back to Normal – Week 116

Are we on track to get back to normal again after more than 24 months of the once in a lifetime pandemic? What is a Normal anyway? Does the Old even exist anymore?

Everyone is trying to figure out how to get back to the previous way of doing things but yet this episode had totally changed our perception of the way things can be done going forward. We are likely to have a WFH hybrid model and business travel just doesn’t make sense anymore with Zoom calls. Why waste hours and days when everything is just a video call away? It boggles the mind to remember how inefficient we were at doing business in those pre-Covid days.

QR codes, contactless payments and contact tracing have accelerated tech adoption in a big way. Even the uncles and aunties have to pick up the skills, or else they cannot utilize the CDC vouchers nor go visit the wet markets anymore. Tech adoption has accelerated tremendously over the last 2 years. I even was impressed about myself being able to finish 2 full time courses (6 and 3 months of classes, project work and tests) totally over Zoom without ever physically meeting my classmates…

Now that Omicron is behind us and that we have a very good chance of getting out of this Covid nightmare, everyone is rapidly trying to get back to a resemblance of the way things used to be. We managed to do a recent trip to New York cautiously as restrictions were relaxed. Now we are told that for those that had the vaccinations with boosters, getting Omicron perhaps will provide the best additional protection from future variants!

I had been a sucker on organizing class reunions for more than 10 years. Somehow I enjoyed the planning process and seeing people getting nostalgic to meet up again after leaving school eons ago. The last one we had for our secondary/junior college (class of 1982/84) was in 2016 and we had a birthday cake to celebrate all our 50th together. We had 128 attendees that day. The thinking was to do another one again in 2021 to celebrate our milestone of being able to withdraw our CPF at 55. But that did not happen, thanks to Delta.

My co-organizer and partner in crime met up recently for breakfast and talked about the possibility of finally being able to do another reunion again. We might call it “The year after CPF withdrawal Reunion” to reflect on our age and nearing retirement. We decided to kickstart by polling our classmates via our FB groups and email. The response was generally positive. So at least it confirms that that everyone is getting more nostalgic with age and are itching to hook up again to talk about the good old days.

Now comes the tricky part for the planning of the logistics. We targeted a mid-Aug date at the earliest. It will also provide sufficient heads up to everyone to lock in the date. But before we officially anounced the date to everyone, we need to check out possible venues and book a location. Post-Covid, this is the toughest thing to do now. Thanks to inflation, prices are higher and there are still some restrictions left for large group gatherings. We decided to asked our classmates for leads and recommendations and a few kind souls have responded.

We may all have to wear masks during the event and have sit down meals instead. We have started contacting some places and asking for quotations. The other issue that pops up: in the unlikely situation that the event has to be cancelled, we might lose our deposit. It happened to another group of friends last year and they had to sell all the T-shirts they had printed for their event to recoup their costs.

We are thinking of perhaps asking for a token booking fee upfront from those that indicated that they are coming. This shows commitment and also reduces our financial planning risk. With epayments like PayNow available, this logistical part could be handled better now. Let’s see how this will evolve as we try to lock down the venue within the next few weeks.

My NUS FinTechSG course finished in early Apr after about 3+ months. It was a good deep dive intro by the School of Computing but a bit too brief and intense at times for a non-IT guy like me. Time to look forward to what I should do next for my lifelong halftime learning journey.

Luckily for me, the government funding for mid-career switchers like me was renewed for this year and most of the new courses will be launched in the May/Jun period. Time to do some homework and attend the briefing sessions to get a sense of what I want to do next. No sound or follow up from the Fintech e-speed interview I went to in mid-Apr though.

While I like to get into the more sexy topics like AI and Cloud Computing, my limited IT knowledge may be a problematic hurdle. I might have to lower my expectations and pitch for those courses and jobs which I can pivot to by leveraging on my past marketing experience. Let’s see how it will turn out. We plan to fail if we fail to plan.