To a seafarer the concept of working-from-home is, quite obviously, totally foreign. Even office work, arriving and leaving at a set time, is hard for mariners to grasp. But, on land, we live in a time of radical change where even 9-5ers have had to rethink how they go about doing their duties.
Lene Bjerg Bové hasn’t had to alter her routines to fit in with the post Covid revolution – in fact she could probably do a masterclass on how to effectively work from home. Not that she has the time.
As one of the pilot dispatching team for the Danish Pilot Service, Lene’s role is quite hard to envisage for those who report to the bridge for a watch, or whose first anxiety of the day is the length of the coffee queue. Perhaps a flash image would be of wartime operations room with people shifting vessels and planes about on a huge, mapped table. But that conveys an out-of-date scenario. Lene’s world is on a computer and phone and it stretches from the Skagerrak between Denmark and Sweden southward to the vast Baltic. Here she constantly responds to requests for pilots to navigate the Tango Route, north and south.
(right: Computers, phones, notepads and cherry blossom, that's Lene's office)