My work-from-home officemates are terrible.

Instead of asking relevant questions during their daily 8 a.m. video meetings, they talk about zombies. Sometimes they don’t even know what day of the week it is. And they cry when their screens freeze like it’s a personal affront and not a bandwidth issue.

Despite my repeated requests that they follow our processes, they refuse to submit help-desk tickets and instead call me over for IT help, which makes it difficult to get my work done.

I have caught them playing with Legos and watching Minecraft YouTube videos instead of staying on task.

And they always leave dirty dishes in the sink.

My officemates are my 6-year-old twin boys who last month started first grade. But like schools across the United States, their's is entirely virtual and will be until at least January because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so like parents across the country, I am mom, school principal, tutor, IT desk, cafeteria lady, and janitor, in addition to my full-time job here at SDxCentral.

There is nothing unique about my situation, and at the same time it’s nothing that any of us would have imagined back in January. The pandemic upended all of our lives, and while my family is extremely fortunate to have our health, jobs, and network connectivity during this time, it’s still hard as hell on a daily basis.

COVID-19 changed the way we work and learn, and it blurred the lines between our home and professional lives. Sometimes this is bad, like when it leads to working longer hours and employee burnout.

However, some of this blurring is good. It forces us to recognize others’ humanity — quite literally when kids or significant others Zoom bomb a virtual conference, or an executive’s dog snores during an earnings call. I’ve noticed that all of my calls over the past six months begin with a genuine “how are you doing,” and usually involve a few minutes of discussion about working from home, kids, and virtual school. And when we say “stay safe” and “take care” at the end of these calls, we actually mean it.

For this Deep Dive editorial series, we wanted to take a closer look at the human element of the pandemic and how COVID-19 has affected the people behind the technology that we cover. Because, as Editor-in-Chief Dan Meyer reminds us in his piece about the cloud native ecosystem, “software developers are people, too.”

I spoke with security professionals working overtime to protect companies and communities from cybercriminals while dealing with profound losses from COVID-19.

Matt Kapko interviewed the CIO of the city of Los Angeles, who spoke about the importance of empathy in running a 465-person technology department.

Tobias Mann found success stories in how networking and security vendors kept the newly remote workforce connected and secure at their branch-of-one offices. “Home is where the WAN is,” Mist’s Jeff Aaron told him.

And as companies settle into extended work- and school-from-home deployments — aka the new normal — these cloud-based software tools provided as managed services will play an increasingly important role, writes Sydney Sawaya.

These stories resonated with us as we’ve worked hard to cover the effects of COVID-19 on the tech industry over the past six months. We hope they resonate with you, our readers, too. They also serve as reminders that we really all are in this chaotic boat together even when we feel isolated and lonely. Let us know what you think of these stories, and don’t hesitate to share your own — we’d love to hear them.

And in the meantime, stay safe and take care.