On the First Day of Work after Shutdown

It’s the first day at work and we’re feeling just fi—
We’re freezing, okay? We’re freezing. It’s colder in Malta right now than in Iceland (seriously), and given that Mriehel exists simultaneously as the hottest place on earth and a Cryogenics chamber, the cold is amplified.
As Astrid, master of planning, stated: “can we just fast-forward to April and be done with it?”
Unfortunately, a time travel machine is not yet on the list of things that Mike has built, but no doubt after Christmas he’ll get back to bending the boundaries of space and time and gift us one just in time for summer shutdown.
The result of the coldest day of the year coinciding on the day we get back from work: everyone is bundled up around the office like this:

(Just pretend the penguin is Pablo, okay?)
And trying to get the heating to blast out more hot air than it is physically capable of blasting out. Work is slow, largely due to the fact that the Maltese humidity has resulted in frozen keyboards and quite a bit of complaining from the computers, who have spent ten days on holiday and don’t want to get back to the nitty gritty of Getting Stuff Done.

Getting Stuff Done

The Office is also in the process of Getting Stuff Done, albeit Getting Stuff Done in scarves, hats, three layers of sweaters, and multiple cups of tea. Emails have been answered, clients have been contacted, and the crucial ‘Out of Office signatures’ have been removed as Switch Digital and Brand gears up for a 2019 bigger and better than 2018. We have new people starting at the company, new projects to fine-tune and work on, and a heap of new restaurants to try out for office lunches.
You might think ten days away from the office would stagnate the flow of things, even slightly, but walking into the office feels like coming home. The coffee machine gets plugged in, the air conditioners are switched on and set to warm (even Andrea, legendary Source of All Known Heat, felt the chill this morning), coffee is made, tea is made, the table in the middle of the kitchen has enough sweets and Christmas log and biscuits to last us until next Christmas (yeah right), and when the computers stop whirring sulkily through updates, the inbox is opened.
Switch picks up right where it left off.

It’s like nobody ever left the office. The beauty of social media and living on an island the size of a postage stamp meant that nearly everyone kept up with, met up with, and heard about what everyone else was doing.

Like we never left

Underneath all the padding and the cold and the 5:30PM rush-hour woes, it’s good to be back in the office, good to be dusting off the keyboard, good to be getting back to stories. We’ve got a lot planned for you this year, and we’re going to tell you all about it, starting from what we did for Secret Santa, to what we’re going to work on going forward into 2019. If you haven’t followed our blog yet, now is definitely the time to do so – new year, new sources of readable entertainment, right?
Sit down, settle in, and subscribe; we’re just getting started.

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