Five months after starting this assignment, I finally met (most of) my colleagues at a team picnic. It felt so normal and somehow also very strange.

In video meetings, you only see the front of people’s upper bodies. Of course you make up a mental picture of the rest of them, but seeing them in person nevertheless came with surprises.

The big thing is that on screen you can’t see how tall people are. Some of my teammates were taller than I had thought; some not. Some just didn’t move or sit or stand the way I had expected.

But there were also small surprises that never would have been surprises in a normal year. One turned out to have a tattoo that I hadn’t seen. One had graying hair at the back of their neck.