More to the point, can it have been only a year?

China Identifies New Virus Causing Pneumonia-like Illness

New York Times, January 8, 2020

Researchers Are Racing to Make a Coronavirus Vaccine. Will It Help?

New York Times, January 28, 2020

Working From Home: How Coronavirus Could Affect the Workplace

New York Times, March 1, 2020

Coronavirus Has Become a Pandemic, W.H.O. Says

New York Times, March 11, 2020

At Carpenter Group on March 11, 2020—the same day the World Health Organization officially labeled Covid-19 a pandemic—we packed up our office laptops, work files, desktop tchotchkes and pet pictures and entered the uncharted territory of working from home.

This would be a good time to recall all the road bumps and wrong turns that bedeviled us as we learned how to work and collaborate remotely. The Zoom glitches and technology fails. The isolation, frustration and diminished output.

It didn’t happen. Not a bit of it.

In the year of Covid, we were as efficient and productive as we ever were. From the start, we kept in close touch with each other and our clients, stayed focused, met deadlines, maintained our usual exacting standards and delivered quality work. The technology cooperated, mostly. Zoom worked like a charm.

Yes, it’s been a profoundly challenging and painful year in far too many ways to mention, and we’re not through it yet. But now there are glimmers of hope. By the end of May, President Biden says, vaccines will be available to every American adult. We’ll be able to celebrate the Fourth of July with family and friends—and, by year-end, travel across time zones to spend the holidays with loved ones.

Meanwhile, we will continue to maintain a physical presence in the center of the Manhattan financial district, as we have for so many years. The Carpenter Group offices at 75 Broad Street, modernized, sanitized and downsized, are open for business and usable by any of our staff who choose to work there—some of the time, all of the time or hardly at all.

But when the pandemic is declared over and normal life resumes, we’ll be able to look back on this strange time and know that working from home works. Better than we could have ever imagined.