It’s a real mortality moment when your siblings and close kin start dying off. I went through it with my siblings a few years ago, but this is her first.
There are more and more of those “mortality moments” as we go along. The first ones can definitely be a shock.
They’re finally getting me set up to work from home. They’re also shutting the whole office down almost completely. Both things are difficult due to the generally primitive systems here. I deal with physical paper paperwork and lots of it. I’m being asked to bring home a printer and a bunch of paper and envelopes.
We’ll see how it goes. My wife is already working from home and has commandeered the desk.
Nobody I know personally has tested positive. I haven’t heard any of our clients getting sick yet. (I work for a government aging care agency.) It’s only a matter of time, I think.
My office has suddenly been deemed an essential business, so half of my department (me included) will be headed back to work tomorrow to start working staggered shifts – 5 days in the office, then 5 days working remotely. I’ll have to drag my desktop computer back and forth because there aren’t nearly enough laptops to go around. I do have a somewhat decent monitor at home, so I won’t have to drag that part at least, but unless someone at work can come up with an appropriate cable I’ll have to settle with using a VGA connection (really not that bad on this particular monitor, until you set it next to an iMac).
My state, Vermont, was just put on lockdown although I’ve more or less been on voluntary lockdown anyway for the past week and a half.
Vanderbilt University Library is having almost all staff work from home, now. I haven’t been in the office since Thursday, March 19. I just got an internet connection at home today, and tomorrow I will begin working on the laptop that they provided for me. We’ll see how this goes…
My direct report told me today that his wife might have it and is waiting test results, she is a physical therapist in a nursing home. Now he’s worried and taking care of the baby.
I’m working from home so I’m in my old office surrounded by all the creature comforts of home. It’s nice to take a nap during lunch which helps with back pain. I filled my car up at $149/gallon 2 days ago and it’s now $1.29.
I’ve been through severe unemployment before so I have some idea of what people are going through. I worked all manner of crappy jobs to get by. But in this case there are few crappy jobs to scramble to. The computerized unemployment system in my state has imploded. People are waiting days to get set up.
I’ve been crunching the numbers and it is much worse than originally thought. They were expecting a doubling every 6 days and it looks more like every 3 days. that would be a million dead by the end of April in the US. New York now rivals Iran in deaths per million.
I’m hoping you missed a decimal point. If not, you’re not a good price shopper.
My dialysis clinic has been enacting stringent measures, such as pre-screening clients before they enter the building, requiring masks at all times, and prohibiting visitors. Today, they issued us letters of travel. They give us permission to travel to and from dialysis if the city gets shut down, which it hasn’t so far.
My MIL’s residence is on quarantine. Some residents went out a few weeks ago and intersected someone (outside the facility) who has died of COVID-19.
Might lose my student job soon. I work part-time for the school’s recycling and surplus department. The facility where we sort recyclables is usually filled with about 40 carts’ worth of cans and bottles, with another dozen or so coming in everyday. After today’s shift there were only 7 left, with no new carts coming in. With the student body more-or-less banned from campus and a minimum of faculty present, there are virtually no bottles or cans coming in anymore. The next sorting shift will empty out the building and there will be nothing left to do.
Unemployment Insurance applied for today, won’t take effect until last of PTO is done. What with last paychecks, savings, tax return, possible stimulus check, am in okay financial shape into summer.
Finally worked out how to use a webcam with Facebook Messenger so I can see as well as talk to relatives, helps diminish feelings of isolation.
Well, after a week of agonizing over it, I finally decided to take the unpaid leave offered by my employer. It turns out it may not be eligible for unemployment insurance, after all, which sucks, but I have sufficient emergency savings to go me a while if I need to dip into it, and if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is. We went the longest time with no confirmed cases in my county, and now we have two.
I care for my parents, and they are both in the at risk category due to age and other health problems. Two relatives have been essentially told to self quarantine (along with their entire apartment complex) because they may have been in contact with someone who was in contact with an infected person. Having this affect people that I know personally has made it feel all that much more real. Both of the confirmed cases in my county worked in jobs that involved a lot of contact with the general public. So, because of all that, I told my workplace that I would not be back after the end of this week. It’s to the point where I feel a lot of anxiety even about going in tomorrow for the last day. I think everyone feels a sense of impending doom about the whole situation, and we’re all powerless to do anything about it.
I’ll feel better once I know I can just stay home, which is what we all need to do as much as we can.
I had a big scare this afternoon when I was on my way into a shopping area. When the guard checked my temperature with his digital IR thermometer, the thing started beeping. Turns out that it was not an alarm for high temperature. The alarm was to alert the user that the battery was too low.
So far I’m in pretty good shape. I already worked from home one or two days a week, so moving to fill time at home was just a matter of not going into the office. At some point i assume my employer’s revenue will drop enough that it starts wanting to lay off staff, but I’m sure we have at least several months. But there’s a lot of infected people around here, and I’m worried about catching it.
Also, my social life has been blown up. I used to go out square dancing at least once a week, sometimes a lot more. We’re obviously not doing that. My neighborhood bridge group has moved on line, but dancing on line doesn’t really cut it. Doing a lot of Google Hangouts.
Yesterday the weather finally cleared and it warmed up into the 70’s in Kansas City. People were out in the parks enjoying themselves in the sunshine.
And guess what? Here come the cops to tell people not to do it.LINK
They’ve modified the work schedule yet again because someone decided there were too many engineers in the building…I’m now working from home six days, then going back into the office for three, then working from home six days again. Did I mention that my company doesn’t have nearly enough laptops to go around? That means I have to haul my entire work computer – a small tower and two monitors – back and forth. I think there’s something wrong with the cable linking the two monitors; I had a lot of trouble getting the dual display setup to work properly this morning. There is a way to log in remotely, but this involves the use of Windows Remote Desktop, which is super sluggish compared to logging directly into the server.
On the plus side, most people at work have jumped on board with digital signatures, and a surprising amount of our paperwork has suddenly gone digital (for people in the office, too).
The IT department for my school in Beijing established a VPN so everyone could log into the school’s server directly using our school account credentials from wherever we happen to be. Your company cannot do that?
We in the postal service of course still working but a busybody in mid level management had to justify her job so she went in to the break areas, already small, and took out chairs and rearranged tables so now only 3 of us out of a department of around 30 can use it at a time.
All this in a job which requires us to work in tight quarters bumping into each other and handling mail from all over which they still maintain is safe to handle.