混迹尸城（不再）

The first day was mostly spent in sleeping; the whole waiting process the previous day made me tired. That didn’t dissuade me from trying to get out of this quarantine early though, I believed that I was inoculated, therefore, i posed minimum threat to the public health. So I should try to find out whether that was permitted.

On the second day I made a bunch of phones calls. First I found the nurse in the hotel, who gave me a cold face and recited the policy. Of course, she’s not in a position to offer any alternative. I decided to call the person higher in the hierarchy. I tried the community worker’s number first, who said basically the same thing and asked me to check with the disease control headquarter for the district, which I did. The man that picked up my call was certainly not very smart, if not an idiot. He’s not sure about some simple policy. In the end I tried the headquarter at the city level. The lady who answered the phone was noticeably more sensible. She gave reasons such as there are still cases of covid-19 after vaccination. Apparently there’s more information available at the higher level of the government. In the end I figured that the government still considered the risk to be too much to bear, and eventually decided to complete the 14-day quarantine.

The third day was a Monday and I was expecting to begin the enrolling process to my new job. To my little surprise that I was told the original schedule needed to be postponed until Thursday, because they didn’t prepare for it. Oh well, I sort of expected this saggy way of work, and I guess I’ll just have to relax for a few more days. However, I still spent some time reading the contract.

On the fourth day I mostly worked on my own projects, and in the afternoon I read the contract again. The fifth day was mostly the same, but I finally signed the contract electronically online, that finished my part of the enrollment process.

The sixth day I started working officially, albeit remotely. I had not received my work laptop so I didn’t do much I think. I had to chase for my laptop to be delivered though because somehow this requirement is not made clear to the people who’s working on the enrollment. Well, saggy style again.

On day seven I received the laptop and mostly I was in this online on-boarding training, AKA, brainwash sessions, there’s all the crap about ‘company culture’, all kinds of garbage talks given before by the higher management that made no sense. Some of the claims were even contradict themselves. I guess not many people think before talk anyway, other people would just apply to themselves a strong self-assertion that this guy must be right because he’s of such and such status. So I tried not to pay attention.

The laptop is, to my surprise, a M1 Macbook Pro. Of course, it turned out to be a disaster to use to develop stuff locally because all kinds of dependencies are broken or missing. However, there’s a server allocated for my group so I was not bothered to do any serious development on the Mac. It’s served mainly as a remote terminal to the server and email client.

Day eight was a Saturday so I was reading. It’s pretty nice to be able to read for a prolonged period of time. I had not done that in a long while since most of the text I read are from online. And that kind of reading is not capable to sustain a sufficient amount of brain activity for a substantial amount of time.

Day nine was a working day because the Labor Day holiday caused the weekends to shift around. It’s annoying and I forgot to get up. This kind of stuff is one of the source of the annoyance in my previous job. In that job the company mandated that one weekend day must be a work day once a month. And there are these wired weekends that get pushed around by the wired national holiday schedules, in a hope to ‘boost local consumption’. But seriously, if the government really wants people to spend, make it so that people has got more money and more free time. Instead of straining everyone out of the survival instinct. This is called herding that applies to live stock, not ruling people.

Day ten was a working day. I was asked about where I would go after the quarantine ends. Besides that I was preparing slides for the training that I promised to the team. Day eleven was about the same, preparing slides and setting up the laptop mostly.

The rest of the days were mostly spent in the same way, I got up in the morning, finish the breakfast that I ordered the previous day, log into the laptop and work on stuff. Have lunch and dinner and go sleep.

Finally it was time to end the quarantine. This process was full of frustration and annoyance. It’s the same kind of sloppiness and irresponsibility that one would expect from the officials on subjects that are not watched closely by their bosses. The government tracks everyone that came out of the quarantine by assigning each a QR code that’s yellow, this code turns green after seven days. When the code is yellow, the individual is supposed not to move around very much, e.g. not allowed to use public transportation. However, this yellow code was not updated somehow and I couldn’t book cars to take me away from the designated quarantine place. I tried waiting for a taxi outside the hotel but there was barely any, the quarantine location is remote and it’s almost the end of a day. I had to walk back to the nurse’s office and check what was wrong. After they fixed the code, the car booking app that I used mainly was still not working because apparently it thought I was just not allowed to book a car. However, the map app thought it was OK. So I was finally able to go home, after dragging my suitcase back and forth a few times before the gate of the hotel premise and the nurse office deep inside, annoying. The driver of the car was definitely in trouble because he’s talking to some kind of guy about paying up debts and he almost fell asleep waiting for the traffic light. I got off earlier just to escape.

Finally, I was home.

A week ago, I entered China through the Hangzhou airport on a flight from Singapore. I was on a long-awaited trip to Singapore to see my girlfriend, who have been strangled in the same place for more than an entire year since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Before I left for the trip I managed to get myself vaccinated. Although in China the COVID-19 is completely under control, the rest of the world is still struggling to tame the virus. I figured it would be wise to take on an additional layer of protection for the benefit of my girlfriend and myself.

The fact that I was vaccinated indeed offered a sense of security when I was in Singapore because I could largely ignore the tight mask rule and social distancing rule psychologically (I still complied physically.). However, it did not offer any convenience with regard to obeying the the government quarantine policy when crossing national boarders. I made a few attempts to make clear to the various personnel that I was vaccinated and produced the vaccination certificate given to me, however, I was still told that I needed to go through the 14-day mandatory quarantine in a hotel on my own expense.

The process at the boarder is efficient, but not necessarily fast. After the plane come to a full stop, the passengers needed to wait until the customs allowed the them to deplane. I waited maybe an hour before I could leave the plane, and I was told that was because the customs only allows the passengers from one plane to come into the medical test hall to avoid crowding of people, which makes sense. I walked off the staircases and entered the area for the swab test. In that area there are signs that says things along the lines that ‘welcome home, a strong mother-nation offers firm support for you’, which sounds assuring. I produced my documents and waited briefly before I entered a room to have the swab done. I tried to ask a doctor in a full isolation suit about whether it makes a difference that I’ve already vaccinated, the answer was no. She said something like vaccine does not provide 100% percent protection.

After the swab test, I came to an area where the customs staff checks the various test results that are required to enter the boarder. I made my second attempt and showed my vaccination certification to the lady. That made no difference. Apparently her job was just to categorize the passengers. The category I was assigned was literally translated as ‘asymptomatic, but still count as patient in an epidemiological sense’. This didn’t make sense to me after I read it. But it did make the sense that I was going to be quarantined after I was told so. The categories on that piece of paper only contained four, three of which I remembered as: patient, in close contact with patient, and the one I was assigned. None of them says OK you are allowed to go home.

Then there was the usual process of going through customs, claiming luggage and leaving the airport. Since we are going to be quarantined, we boarded a bus that was designated to take us to the hotel. After arrival at the hotel, a group of fully protected medical staff sprayed the outside of our bus, pulled all of our luggage out from the bus and sprayed them. All the passengers were asked to leave the bus and walk through a tent which was sprayed with disinfectant the air and finally assigned rooms to each one. All this is reminiscent of the movie series Resident Evil, which I don’t recommend because the plots suck in all of them, unless you really wanna see Milla Jovovich. I showed the vaccination certificate to the staff again, no difference.

The hotel room is a standard two-bed room. I was led to my room around midnight after all the procedure. I was tired and hungry because the flight didn’t offer much food. I couldn’t order food on our phones at that point of time because the food delivery to the hotel rooms is tightly scheduled and only occur at meal times. However, the quarantine staff was kind enough to give each of us a bowl of instant noodle, that saved the day.

Then there came the first day of the quarantine period. I woke up late and started to figure out the rules. The hotel room is priced at its usual rate, no intentional mark-up. Food delivery is scheduled. It’s okay to order stuff online and have them delivered to the hotel, however, the staff would only send the stuff to the rooms along with food. Meals are provided but need to be paid separately, the price is insane but the portion is big, more on that later. There is no way to wash clothes; I prepared plenty. There is a eye-catching bright yellow bio-hazard trash bin outside each quarantine room, where we are supposed to dump our trash. There is a nurse who comes twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, to take our body temperatures. There is pretty fast Internet connection. And on the last day, there will be another medical check.

As a computer guy this does not create too much trouble. However, I still called a few places to inquire about any policy about people who are already vaccinated. I ended the process after contacted the city-level office for disease control. The lady told me that the policy is still very conservative due to the fact that vaccine does not offer one hundred percent protection and there had been cases of re-infection after vaccination. I understand the need to cautious, in the end I still prefer some kind of option for self-declared tests to prove that I’m healthy. However, maybe this virus is so new that the professionals have not come up with some kind of tests that they are confident of being able to reliably detect any virus including all the variants. I decided to complete the 14-day quarantine.