[vmlinuz]

I started a 6 month contract at A Large Enterprise about 7 weeks ago and it's been intensely wierd. My team is split over two sites (same timezone, different countries) and every single member of the team - including someone who started after me at the other site - is working at home. Except me.

I have not met any of my team face-to-face, but they have also not embraced what I would consider modern temote-working tools. We don't have Slack (see above, 'Large Enterprise') but we do have Teams - except nobody uses it. We have a team email alias - except nobody responds to it. The only communication appears to be Skype for Business (i.e. Lync) calls - notwithstanding that some cow-orkers are in noisy environments, one regularly has unreliable enough Internet that he can't connect, and one has mic problems which means we hear about half of what she says. It also took a week and a half after I started for me to get my corporate approval to use Skype for anything but text, which meant we had to abandon my arranged first-week 'meet the team' session because I couldn't hear or speak.

I'm working in (approximately) devops, and things are, let's say, not well automated here, so they're justifiably terrified that if one or two people get infected, and others get quarantined, it could have a significant material effect on the company - so not only are people working from home, they are banned from entering the office. Except me, for some reason I haven't managed to ascertain...