Happy anniversary
I have been a full-time telecommuter for five years now. You know why. March 12 was a Thursday that year. Over at the office, we hadn’t been ordered to relocate to home yet but there was a lot of talk about whether to come in to the office the next morning. People were nervously “happy birthday” washing their hands and Clorox wiping down communications equipment in conference rooms.
I stopped at the liqwaaaar store on the way home. When I *got* home, I had a text from Amazon Woman saying not to come in to the office the next day. Our team made a smooth transition. We had all been able to work from home forever. Some people had been full-time telecommuters for years and we have co-workers in India. And we are a “mature” team. So we all just jumped online as usual, just that nobody was congregated in a conference room.
By July, the company announced our building would be closed. I read that message while telecommuting from the moomincabin deck. Our office building had always been underutilized and I guess the company figgered why pay rent? I returned to the office three times after that. Once within a couple weeks for I fergit what. Maybe to retrieve whatever “essentials” I had left there? Once to drop off an old sewing musheen to be hauled somewhere Building Mom had arranged for stuff from the building and anything else anybody had hanging around in their dungeon to be dropped off. And once to do a final clean out. I put virtually everything that had any potential “value” to anyone into the “garage sale” on the tables in the lunchroom and trashed the rest. I did NOT keep much in my cube but Brooosie had given me a few of his thrift shop finds over the years.
The photo is one I took at the Saline Road Meijer seven days earlier. I can’t remember if I bought any cleaning wipes that day or not. I suspect not. I didn’t panic-buy toilet paper either. My mouse was a grocery worker and I knew if we needed something, she would be able to watch for deliveries and snatch some for us. I made a couple other mini grock runs after this. For the first time in my life I wiped down my grocery cart with disinfectant. No masks for most of us unwashed masses. Then my mouse became my main shopper and deliverer for a while until stores got it together to do contact free pickup. Small local businesses were the first to figure it out. Sparrow (meat/grocks), seafood market, liqwire store.
I was a covid coward for longer than most people but I am pretty cavalier about it now. But unlike a lot of other people I do not pooh-pooh it. We need to remember that covid killed a lot of people and although it maybe favored the “elderly” and some other vulnerable groups, others died too. A bit randomly like the polio epidemics I heard about growing up but don’t remember (not alive/born yet and then too young). (I do know that polio is a totally different virus.)
And guess what? Covid isn’t over yet. A co-worker is recovering from it as I write this. She’s fine but it’s her first case and she is vaxxed (and vaxxed and vaxxed and vaxxed). Seems like we still don’t know exactly how this virus works…
March 12th, 2025 at 8:28 pm
I would like to avoid any more Covid because we really don’t know that much about its long-term effects. (and may never if the idiots in charge of our government have their way)
March 13th, 2025 at 8:19 am
I guess we’ll all have March 11-12-13, 2020 memories forever, like 9/11 memories. On Friday 3/13/20 I worked at the library, my usual 2-hour shift, but when I left that day I waved goodbye to my coworkers and said see you in a couple of weeks, or somesuch. Little did I know that I wouldn’t see those folks again for at least 6 months. The library closed for just 2-3 weeks as I recall. After that brief break the librarians had to return to work but pages (lowly employees like me, who just shelve the books) didn’t return until November. They were SO grateful when the pages finally returned b/c the professional staff had to shelve all the returned books and deal with everything else going on — remote pickup of books for example. Meanwhile, the Meals on Wheels program I’m involved with never missed a beat. We delivered meals that Friday and again on Monday March 16 and every day since then. I’m pretty pleased about that!
I think the vaccines are still so misunderstood and still being used dishonestly by MAGAts to malign NIH, CDC, Fauci, etc. The vaccines were never expected to STOP covid. They were expected to reduce the severity of covid. Sorry for lecture. It’s just so painful to watch my beloved employer for 40+ years, NIH, being torn apart. I can get very defensive about how the medical profession handled the pandemic. What I’ll (we’ll) never know is how bad it would have been if we hadn’t told people to stay home. The new current NIH Director was one of those rare experts who didn’t agree with the shutdown. Logic tells me that NYC at least would have had thousands more deaths if we hadn’t told people to stay home. Since most of those deaths would have been old people maybe the lockdown-skeptics would say “oh well, we lost a few unproductive members of society but we saved the economy.” After all, haven’t we become the country that cares only about how rich we (some of us) are?