Coronavirus Tales

Massachusetts governor has ordered that restaurants only serve take out, that no gatherings of more than 25 take place, etc. Makes me wonder a few things: what do they expect wait staff at restaurants to do? Survive on gofundme pages? Are they going to suspend rent for places like concert venues?

My wife also mentioned that you can’t evict people right now, so that’s one issue, but my mind kind of spins thinking how the retail and service workers are going to get through this. We are blessed with jobs that are free from concern (fed employee and state school employee) but I worry for a lot of local business.

billt721 wrote:

Tangentially related: my wife was told that she'd be forced back into the ER (she moved to OB about 7 years ago because of persistent back injuries caused by all the lifting they have to do in the ER) when things pick up here. She was told she could refuse, but they'd fire her.

She shouldn’t refuse since she knows she’ll be fired. She should work as safely as possible and at the first sign of reoccurring back problems simply claim an on the job injury. When management refuses to be reasonable they often end up with egg on their faces.

When this all started back in January I started slowly stocking up on canned food, ramen noodles, Gatorade, cough syrup and um...TP. A little bit each payday. So, I was stocked long before the panic started. Less worry over the virus and more usually having 2 weeks food supply on hand and having just cleared out old stuff from the pantry.

But, what makes this all so great is I started a long planned two week vacation the same day my company told everyone to work from home and the State started lock-down procedures. So that trip to Reno is out, visits to my elderly parents are out, the bi-annual Airshow at the local AF base is cancelled, etc. This is shaping up to be the worst vacation of all time.

To pass the time I decided to build a full castle in Conan Exiles from scratch. I got the time!

One local business I quite liked has already closed down partially due to covid-19. Financially they've been doing ok - enough to survive, but not enough to do it stress free. Running for another 3 - ? months with little to no customers is way too much for them, so they're out. We haven't even been hit that badly yet, so I dread to think what's going to happen when things get worse.

Got the official word late last night from my team lead: all employees work from home until further notice. Music to my ears (mostly because I take public transit to go to work, and at this moment this seems like a recipe for disaster).

At this point I can’t predict whether my wife’s quilt shop is going to survive this.

Many of her customers are retired or approaching that age, so are in a high-risk group. Obviously they need to keep themselves healthy, but as a consequence if they curtail their shopping that will likely spell the end.

She did announce curb-side pickup starting this week, but it remains to be seen how successful an alternative that will be, just given the nature of picking out fabric and thread. You can’t really just call up and ask for ‘blue fabric’; there’s generally lots of comparing of exact shades and patterns that is best done in-store.

She has a landlord who is a decent human so making rent *might* not be an issue, but utilities and other overhead are likely to be less flexible if her income falls.

I was at the grocery store and a woman on a cell phone was blocking an aisle I was trying to get through. I politely asked her to move aside, but she deliberately ignored me twice. On the third attempt, I just started coughing. She looked back and realized I was Asian and started away in a panic,

I chased her for 8 aisles.

Paleocon wrote:

I was at the grocery store and a woman on a cell phone was blocking an aisle I was trying to get through. I politely asked her to move aside, but she deliberately ignored me twice. On the third attempt, I just started coughing. She looked back and realized I was Asian and started away in a panic,

I chased her for 8 aisles.

If I was not trying to be responsible with the social distancing thing this would be an internet high five.

Stealthpizza wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

I was at the grocery store and a woman on a cell phone was blocking an aisle I was trying to get through. I politely asked her to move aside, but she deliberately ignored me twice. On the third attempt, I just started coughing. She looked back and realized I was Asian and started away in a panic,

I chased her for 8 aisles.

If I was not trying to be responsible with the social distancing thing this would be an internet high five.

:highfive:

I got you covered

FeralMonkey wrote:

At this point I can’t predict whether my wife’s quilt shop is going to survive this.

No! Not the quilt shop! I come from a family of quilters. Quilt shops tend to inevitably go out of business for one reason or another. We will mourn the loss of a good quilt shop for years on end. I hope your business survives this.

And THIS is my biggest concern with the ongoing panic. I fear that as a global community we are overreacting. I’m somebody who always tries to err on the side of safety, but not to the point of overkill.

Disneyland and other giant corporations are big enough to sustain a financial crisis like this, but privately owned small businesses will have a much harder time surviving. This time next year, when we have a more complete set of data, I feel that we will look back and realize that we went too far. I fear that the harm caused by the interruption of basic commerce is going to end up being for nothing.

So small positive story from this whole mess. Before we had any confirmed cases in my county, I decided to go and gawk at the grocery store being emptied (I of course bought some stuff, I didn't want to be rude), and on the way there I ran into an old family friend (like one of the first people around my age I met outside of family, and we were catching up and I was reminded she had recently moved just one street over, kind of (bit more complicated but she is technically one street over, in a sense). We talked for about 15 minutes and she invited me over to hang out while she made some pies for her parents. So when I finished gawking at the store (no affordable produce except for one banana that you wouldn't even use for banana bread, no toilet paper or water) I walked over to her house and hung out for a bit. If it weren't for Covid I probably wouldn't have left at that exact moment just to do practically nothing at the store, and it was just a pleasant surprise; got to catch up with a good friend and just hang out outside of the house for a bit.

RawkGWJ wrote:

This time next year, when we have a more complete set of data, I feel that we will look back and realize that we went too far. I fear that the harm caused by the interruption of basic commerce is going to end up being for nothing.

Anecdotal, but the handful of doctors that I know are all on the opposite side and saying that we likely need to go further than we're prepared to. If the social distancing and quarantine restrictions work as intended, I suspect that this time next year we'll look back and have no idea how much worse it could have been.

The worst thing would be if we look back and say "it wasn't so bad, we overreacted" when the reality is that the measures we took, however painful, were the key to this not being a catastrophe.

My shop has done nothing in responsive to this stuff.

We haven't had hot water in the building for ~2 years.

Two of the bathrooms are closed because somebody/bodies took massive dumps and management won't call a plumber.

Trash at my desk hasn't been emptied since Friday.

Work from home option hasn't been mentioned. Even if we could do that, the new VPN has proven to be as temperamental as the one we just replaced.

We had our normal a.m. meeting with everyone sitting around the same germy table as always. Because I'm trying to social distance (and because I despise a fair share of my coworkers) I sat about 8 feet away. Tomorrow I go back to skipping these meetings.

Oh, and we're under new ownership as of this morning. "Business as usual" has been promised and so far followed.

Enix wrote:

My shop has done nothing in responsive to this stuff.

We haven't had hot water in the building for ~2 years.

Two of the bathrooms are closed because somebody/bodies took massive dumps and management won't call a plumber.

Trash at my desk hasn't been emptied since Friday.

Work from home option hasn't been mentioned. Even if we could do that, the new VPN has proven to be as temperamental as the one we just replaced.

We had our normal a.m. meeting with everyone sitting around the same germy table as always. Because I'm trying to social distance (and because I despise a fair share of my coworkers) I sat about 8 feet away. Tomorrow I go back to skipping these meetings.

Oh, and we're under new ownership as of this morning. "Business as usual" has been promised and so far followed.

Gross. Why do you still work there?

What is the target date for when Conservatives blame shadowy groups of Jews or Mexicans of spreading the virus intentionally?

Paleocon wrote:

What is the target date for when Conservatives blame shadowy groups of Jews or Mexicans of spreading the virus intentionally?

You'll need a time machine to project this one. This was after about 2 seconds of searching.

https://www.adl.org/blog/extremists-...

At least some good news for my family today. My sister and her youngest kid, who have been stuck in isolation in a hospital in Thailand for 1½ week, partly due to the hospital thinking they were infected with corona virus (though not the reason they were in the hospital to begin with), are supposedly getting home tomorrow. Considering everyone are closing borders, and airline companies are pretty much closing down, I am happy it didn't take even longer.

RawkGWJ wrote:

This time next year, when we have a more complete set of data, I feel that we will look back and realize that we went too far. I fear that the harm caused by the interruption of basic commerce is going to end up being for nothing.

We already have that data, just look at Italy and Spain right now. They have, respectively, about 3.18 and 2.97 hospital beds per 1000 people, and they're massively overwhelmed and are having to choose who to treat and who to let die. The US has about 2.77 hospital beds per 1000 people - we're gonna be in even worse shape in the near future. We are 100% doing far, far too little.

Shutting things down and forcing social distancing is going to royally suck for the small business owners and their employees, and many businesses may not survive, but we must do what we can to limit the deaths that are to come.

I wouldn't be surprised if the following economic crisis costs more lives than the virus/crash of the health care system. Heck, an economic crisis makes it even less likely, than it already was, that the world will attempt to fight climate change.
But it would be pretty horrible just to let the virus run its course too.
Even if the governments did nothing, the economy would still suffer too, when people themselves decided to stay away from everything, and companies losing everyone for weeks due to sickness.

Shadout wrote:

Heck, an economic crisis makes it even less likely, than it already was, that the world will attempt to fight climate change.

I'd think we were incidentally dropping carbon emissions anyway, same as 2008.

Paleo, Trump blamed Europeans for "seeding" the "foreign virus" on our shores, in his first speech. So you're a bit late to the party.

Starting tomorrow my team is split in two, and we're alternating days we're working to isolate us a bit more. Which is kind of weird because two of us are install techs, one is a logistics manager that does installs, and another is a network engineer that, since me and the other guy got hired, only helps out when we get stuck on something. But the logistics manager and I will be off tomorrow and Thursday, and the other install guy and the network engineer will be off Wednesday and Friday.

The problem is that our jobs are not documented well (potentially not at all, considering what documentation there is was made at the old building), and we're the only 4 people who understand how the entire install process works. The developers understand one part, the engineers another, the NOC another, but none of them could come in and complete an install within any kind of reasonable timeline. So in the event one of us gets sick, splitting us may keep the other team from catching it, assuming outside of work they're also taking precautions.

On the plus side, my wife and I are putting in an offer for a new house, and we're kind of hoping that interest rates drop just a little more in the panic. We're spending a lot of money, it'd be nice to get a really good deal on this property and quickly unload our current town home.

On the negative, we were supposed to go down to Nags Head in a couple weeks for the kids' spring break, but now we're struggling to try to get our money back. My wife's chain of command has cancelled all leave, regardless of what it's for, and is forcing anyone requesting an exception to get a paper chit signed by a bunch of people working from home... My sister and her kids were supposed to meet us down there and she's already pulled out, so at this point we're trying to use the fact that she's military to just get our money back.

Late last week my employer started recommending that people work from home, and this morning they announced that all Canadian offices will be closed until further notice.

Doesn't affect me too much since all my work can be done remotely, but it's been interesting to watch how they went from "we're monitoring the situation but our offices will remain open" to "SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING." in the space of a single week.

I work at an outpatient surgery center. They are debating canceling all elective procedures but hasn't happened yet. They should be canceled now. I canceled several today because they were sick with fevers...

Its normal to get some sick people this time of year, I usually get the upper respiratory infections, etc. But usually no fevers with these. Some reason, there are fevers now.

garion333 wrote:
Enix wrote:

(long rant about my disgusting workplace)

Gross. Why do you still work there?

Mostly because I've never been laid off or offered a buyout and that there seem to be no other viable local options for an old dude who types for a living? Throw in low-grade depression and self-loathing plus a major jones for a breaking news/deadline high and, well, here I be.

In related news, our shop announced today that it's closing to the public and are kind of giving us the option of working from home. One of the nice things about being a failing business in a dying industry is that walk-in traffic has really slowed down in recent years. But I guess the handful of potential germ-carriers who did manage to hobble into the Daily Bugle offices was enough for management.

Best wishes, etc., for those of you who actually do have to work around significant number of other potentially sick humans. You're all heroes. Stay safe.

Kids out of school until 4/6 at earliest. Woof.

My company is working quite hard, since we are an IT reseller to the Feds (Alaska Native Corporation). Everything has gone into high gear as organizations try to get the gear they need to adapt in the shortest time possible.

(And for the skeptics, no, we're not taking any more margin than usual, which is in usually in low single digits or less for the type of stuff going out the door now.)

I've been hanging out with friends online (via Zoom, Slack, Discord...). Some network issues aside, it's helped a lot.

15 years ago when I started at my current job I thought it was pretty cool we all just had laptops and all our servers were hosted in data centers far away. Today that "culture" couldn't be more valuable. Having been acquired by a huge company and receiving many corporate emails and questions around how many laptops and how many people I could have working from home it was nice to say "everyone can work from home and we don't need anything".

The issue for me has been kids out of school. My desk is in a nook in the basement as we don't have a den or office to block the kids out. Luckily I still had a small desk packed away in the very furthest and most challenging place in our crawlspace forcing me to almost remove everything to get to it. I set it up in the master bedroom and that worked well today. It's also nice to have a completely fenced in yard so the kids can get out.

Prederick wrote:

I work in Manhattan, and as cool as seeing the city 75% emptied out has been, I am increasingly annoyed that my employer apparently hasn't even begun to discuss the possibility of having employees work from home if possible, while NYC officials are increasingly calling for a city-wide shutdown.

Home at the moment for my usual days off, spending them self-quarantining after the NYC Department of Health basically said "If you've been in New York City, assume you've been exposed to the virus."

We finally got an email from station management today, basically, all non-essential personnel have been sent home, but as a member of the web team, we are "essential" to the station's day-to-day operation, especially in a time of crisis. Which I'm not fond of, but I still understand. A large chunk of our viewers engage with our content on the web, not via TV, and while some 75% of our work can be done from home, the last 25% can only be done from the office, and is fairly important.

It's weird, because on the one hand, that's part of the reason why I'm happy to be in this business: To be helping people and giving them good information in a crisis.

On the other hand, I have two elderly parents, one of whom has diabetes, the other of whom has diabetes, high blood pressure, and is immuno-compromised due to treatment for multiple myelosis (blood cancer). So I had to inform them on the way home Sunday night that I, as someone who works in New York City, have to assume I've been exposed to COVID-19 and will not be so much as setting foot on their porch for the next month, at a minimum (I live just a few minutes away).

I spent a couple hours talking with my best friend Monday, shooting the sh*t about video games, the virus, the world we've suddenly been thrust into, and it's just a lot. It's just so surreal. In a week, I've been thrust into a movie, and I can't get out, and it's going to be this way for weeks. Months.

I've spent every day since Saturday, when I was in the office, vacillating between terror and hope that we're all just overreacting and everything will be fine.

I'm back in the office on Wednesday. Back in New York City, back sitting on a bus, back taking the subway, back in an office. And I want to help, but at the exact same time, honestly, I'm scared to sh*t.

Our county has shut down restaurants, bars, malls, libraries, schools and so forth for at least a week, and will re-evaluate next week. They will probably extend. Only carry-out and pick-up at external windows are allowed for restaurants. Most stores are allowed to open but there's a limit of 50 people on gatherings, so I suspect that applies. Schools are closed through the end of the month, pretty much, including the local community college.

People are panic-buying, of course. That will settle down as they realize the stores will remain open, but the panic buying is itself creating shortages that would not otherwise exist.

As an introvert, I can't say my life is terribly different from before, at this early stage. Thankfully I still have you all for my social life. A friend invited me to a Seder, but I said we can't, and advised him to skip it this year. Dunno if he'll listen. He seemed to think that as long as no one was coughing, it would be safe...