Up until two weeks ago, I worked in the bakery in a large, chain grocery store. Not only did our hours not get cut, we were so busy we had to bring in extra staff. We also got ‘hazard pay’ for about a year. After they stopped the hazard pay, they implemented a 10% off or points option for all staff for all purchases. We recently got a new manager who seems intent on making everybody quit so I decided to look for something else.
In my area, the deadline for all health workers to be vaccinated or lose their jobs was October 26. I decided to apply to the health industry, had an interview and was hired the next day. They are now very short-staffed so getting hired was very easy as I am double vaccinated.
Obviously I am one of the lucky ones during this pandemic. How about you?
Materially, somewhat. I got the stimulus checks, didn’t lose my job (which was remote to begin with), there was some benefit, I got to move into cheaper housing, saved a lot of money, never got Covid, my father’s job also benefited (I think - he does chip/memory-type work), overall I think I got a boost of maybe $10,000 because of Covid.
Relationally, not. The pandemic indirectly wrecked my relationship with my girlfriend (who was more of a fiancee by then) because we were long distance and the distance hampered it all and there was a breakup. Were it not for the pandemic I think we would be married by now.
I’m already retired, so I didn’t have to worry about getting laid off or having to work from home. That was a plus. I got the benefit checks, but I mostly donated the money to the local food bank, so that was neutral.
The few times I drove there was no traffic, and when I walked in the neighborhood it was a lot more quiet than it was now.
I’m the Webmaster of a writers’ group, and we went online thanks to the pandemic. That was kind of a plus, in that we got guest speakers from all over the world who we could never get to come to our meetings, and our members who didn’t like leaving the house - even pre-pandemic - could attend meetings. Our board meetings are going to stay online.
We went to the Tenement Museum in New York before the pandemic, and when the Times said they were in bad shape I became a member. That let us watch all kinds of cool virtual tours.
Jane Cleland, a mystery writer and writing teacher started free webinars once a month, so that’s another plus.
I’ve done video and audio conferencing for a very long time, back when it required special equipment, but it was great to teach some really old people how to use Zoom, which kind of liberated them.
There’s been no shortage of people wanting psychotherapy. If I’d wanted to, I could have had every hour filled (but I’m moving toward retirement, so I didn’t want to).
Started by getting a 2 month vacation after not having taken more than two days off at a time in 7 years, so that was nice. Cleaned up my house, painted it inside and out, relandscaped the whole yard, removing overgrowth that had built up after the best part of a decade of neglect.
I would have been worried about being able to reopen my doors when the lockdown was lifted, but the PPP loan more or less made me whole. I didn’t really come out ahead than I would have been if I had been open, but I did come out ahead in that I really needed a bit of a break. Coming back, myself and my employees all a bit recharged, made a big difference.
A lot of my competition did not reopen, vets mostly stopped grooming dogs, and a bunch of people got dogs. I went from mostly filling out my schedule to being fully booked for a month out. I’ve been able to raise my prices and my wages.
The only hard part is finding good employees, that was rough before COVID, and is still tough now, but, being able to offer a significantly higher starting wages has compensated for that to some extent.
Sometimes I feel a bit like the scene in Forrest Gump, where the storm comes through and wipes everyone else out.
I think it’s kind of a wash. On one hand, I kept my job but got the stimulus checks. On the other the university froze our pay until late January 2022 when we’ll at last get a flat (no merit addition allowed) 1.5% raise after 2 years at our current pay rate. In the long term of future pay growth I think we’ll have lost a lot more money than gained from those few checks.
I’ve wanted to work from home for 10 years. I’m a programmer. There is no point in me going into the office. I have my own office at home. I spent about 2 grand updating my home systems, it needed done anyway. And that has been totally offset by -
Saving at least an hour and a half a day not driving. That saves money too.
It’s safer for me in many ways. I drive over the continental divide. It can get quite dicey even for people that have done it for decades.
I’m much more relaxed. I used to get up at 5:15am on the dot. Now, I start my day sometime between 4:30 and 5:30. Doesn’t really matter. I don’t set an alarm anymore.
Winters at elevation can be very, very hard. I can now plow my driveway, and road to my house at my leisure, and not have to do it in the dark. That’s huge. Really huge. Having to hike up your drive and clean off your plow truck so you can plow in zero degrees kinda sucks. Ya gotta hope it starts.
While I work mostly normal hours, I can jump on the system to do maintenance or whatever when every I want. An hour or two on a Sunday? No problem. When I have a concern about something, it’s very nice to just connect into work and check it out. I sleep better.
While I did get Starlink for a faster work connection and a Chromecast for TV’s, my Wife and I watch less TV. Instead we play chess, cribbage and other things at night. It’s really good for this brain.
In and odd coincidence, I emailed my boss and my bosses boss and the the entire department that I want to be able to work from home in March 2020. I was a little bit chastised about that. Two days later we where all sent home and started setting up things to be able to do it.
I stopped the social bar scene years and years ago. But I do have empathy for those that miss it. I was there too. And of course empathy for those that have there lives striped away. Jobs lost, loved ones and friends lost.
Physical: with zero business travel and more time at home, I was not eating out as much as I used to, and really drilled down on the nutrition. My local gym loaned out freeweights, so I kept up the 3-or-4 day a week physical workouts, to include some good, long hikes in the local canyons. Net result: I dropped 25 lbs, and got stronger (from zero to fifteen pullups!).
Intellectual: my employer values continuing education, so just prior to the pandemic, I filed for my GI Bill, and started reaccomplishing some pre-requisites for another Engineering degree. With the ‘work from home’ policy, and my company’s focus on education, I was able to knock out some courses to include Calculus II, and some starters in Mechanical Engineering (I’m an Electrical, by paper).
The pandemic has really helped me re-balance the “work vs. life” scales, and made me realize that while I enjoy what I do, it shouldn’t consume me.
Tripler
I set some lifetime records with some powerlifting, too.
Hard to be sure, but probably. Before, I was working as a substitute teacher, averaging about 3-4 days per week. Since the pandemic, I’ve worked steadily (aside from spring 2020, when I got a big pay raise for sitting on my butt), first in a sequence of three long-term positions, and now in a “permanent” position.
Now, I don’t know for sure how much I would have worked without the pandemic, but it’s a pretty good bet that there are more positions open than there would be otherwise, which contributed to me being so busy.
I got furloughed from my airline pilot job along with my girlfriend. I then spent about 6 months working a minimum wage, part time, job where I was literally earning less than what I would get in meal allowances flying planes. She got work with a government department on an 8 month contract earning about a third of her airline salary. That period was a struggle financially. We couldn’t afford to pay rent but had quite a lot of cash in the bank so we bought a house with no mortgage.
Then she got work driving trains and I got a job as a train controller (called a train dispatcher in the US I believe). We are now earning about two thirds of what we used to, but we aren’t paying rent or mortgage so our lifestyle is about what it was before. The house market has gone very well since we bought and we have the option to subdivide the property and so we may come out of it pretty well but by the time we get back to flying we probably would’ve lost several hundred thousand dollars in salary over the next few years. It’s hard to know if any gains we make on our property would offset the loss in earnings.
Positive side is that we both have good longterm jobs in an essential industry. If we never got back to flying we would be comfortable enough where we are.
I had recently started a new, great-paying job at the end of 2019. All the things I was uncomfortable with in the job got eliminated pandemically (weekly lunch meetings became occasional Zoom meetings, no more summer bonding outings, etc). Most other workers are working from home as much as possible. I love working from home, and love working alone in a workspace even more. I got a nice-sized raise. I couldn’t have asked for a better situation.
Unfortunately, my daughters have had everything possible go wrong - loss of income, loss of housing, problems with state unemployment compensation, all sorts of nightmares. So I’ve helped them out considerably, and it’s been a strain. Oh well, they’ll just inherit less one day, I guess.
The end of forced socializing (meetings, huddles (shudder), company get-togethers) has been a huge benefit for me as well. I also love having a legitimate excuse to decline invitations “oh I live with an elderly parent so I can’t really be in large groups”.
Like others, we got the stimulus checks which we used to have the driveway torn up and replaced. I feel like the shutdowns and lack of air travel, etc might have helped my wife find her work-from-home position. And I lost a considerable amount of weight from not eating out or having much stuff delivered (and the walks, etc for lack of anything else to do) though I gained half of that back since so now it’s on me. We avoided any Covid-related tragedy so I suppose it was a net “benefit” though of course I would have rather had no Covid and kept my jacked up patch of asphalt.
No, not at all. Nothing particularly horrible happened - it was all quite survivable. I didn’t lose a job or a relationship or anything. But the only actual positive thing that happened all year was the fact that it got my family into the habit of having weekly Family Zoom. That’s quite nice.
Apart from that - I was forced to work from home which I’ve always hated and still hate, two out of three of my children bombed school due to having to learn from home (okay well - it was the catalyst for getting my daughter her ADHD diagnosis so I guess that’s useful and mildly positive) and my brain’s turned to cream cheese. So … just mildly drearily a bit shit for a year and a half. Not a fan.