Hi everyone.
I’m on my work computer on the perennially terrible Lebanese internet, in a relatively safe town. I’m talking about some stupid client KPIs in a meeting with a bunch of people around the world. An “important” meeting. The clients assume I’m in Dubai or somewhere like that, and I don’t correct them.
I’ll get asked “How are things in Lebanon?” by some coworker in Dubai or Europe after the call and I’ll say the classic “Alhamdulillah, my family and I are okay.” And we’re safe, we haven’t been bombed, not personally. I am lucky to work with decent people, but how could they understand. Will HR give me shit if they learn how much time I’ve spent out and about helping move essentials to shelters in the “dangerous outside world” instead of just burying myself at home “until it’s over”? Maybe I can get fired for putting myself in danger. Or maybe they give me leeway as a relatively senior person with the best English in my team who they get to pay less than everyone else because I don’t have a French passport - what a steal! (They pay me okay, and quite well compared to others around me, but we all know what this arrangement really is)
But corporate work, in normal times, rots the soul from the inside out. This is worse. I have to stare at the bad screen for hours while the EMTs dig people from under their homes. I have a duty to at least try to help my people, but I can’t. If I quit my job, my family loses this home and this security, and we have no place to go now that our original town is being bombed. I don’t come from money. I can’t just move or buy a house abroad or even a plane ticket (Lebanese people with no other nationality can’t go many places without a long visa process). I can’t “just move to Europe bro”, I can’t “just move to Dubai bro”. I have responsibilities. I’d love to move, but I can’t. Maybe I should.
Naturally, even nice coworkers cannot comprehend this. Besides, they need my input on the KPIs. This client is very important and number must go up after all. I hear another thud in the distance, through the crickets, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Not close enough to threaten my life, but close enough to understand I might be next and that no area is truly safe.
This isn’t a woe is me post and I don’t want people in the comments feeling too sorry for my situation yeah. I still have my family, four limbs and two eyes, my home, a source of income in actual usable currency. Save your real sorrow for the people who have lost more both here and in the occupied territories. It could have been me in Gaza, it could have been you.
Please donate to the Lebanese Red Cross if you have the ability. Our people in the orange jumpsuits are our pride and they need everything they can get, especially now that they’re being hit as well. Relatively transparent and reputable org with boots on the ground and a functional donation platform, please consider helping.
I definitely sympathize with your plight. WFH definitely provides a distance where we do forget what others are going through. Currently at work, I have a coworker who bitches about how he has to spend more time to pirate Nintendo games, while another coworker is wondering if his wife will survive surgery.
And here, I’m too busy worried about my cat’s vomit, and all I can do is shrug at my coworker’s Nintendo problem and my other coworker’s family surgery. Don’t take it the wrong way - both suck, as do your plight.
So don’t take it as people don’t care. And it’s not a boring dystopia - we are more connected then ever (which is a good thing), but we as humans only have finite mental energy and I can’t care about everything equally.
It sucks what you’re going through. It sucks that you as a human have to look at KPIs and how to increase it by 0.0001% while wondering if tomorrow is the day when you have to flee your home.
I went on vacation a few months ago and on the map, it showed me I was flying near a area in severe poverty, next to a pretty damn wealthy city. I kind of cried a bit on the flight thinking how unfair it was that I get to spend thousands of dollars to enjoy a vacation while literally a hundred miles away, some family drinks filthy water. And yet, it’s all the same dirt underneath us.
I hope you and your family health and safety.