Since there’s talk of winding this forum down, I thought this would be a good time to reflect on what’s certainly been the biggest historical event to happen in my lifetime (which includes 9/11 and the fall of the Soviet Union). 2020 was a year like no other, but looking back, it seems that the American people lived through two very different 2020s.
There were those who were ordered to stay home, who worked from home or got furloughed and had to get by on government aid. And there were the essential workers - healthcare, law enforcement, military, transportation, agriculture, grocery, skilled trades, etc. - the people who couldn’t just stay home because the functioning of society demanded that they keep going to work every day and risk exposure in those heady days before there was a vaccine and we were still figuring out just how bad covid was.
Which camp did you fall into? Were you classified as an essential worker?
Not “essential”. I do IT support for government clients, and you could argue that my contribution enabled others who WERE essential to do there jobs, but luckily my job allowed fully remote work.
Well, in practical terms, I’d say I was not an “essential worker,” since I was getting my work done from home just fine, but my boss disagreed and forced me to come into a mostly deserted school so she could see me doing it.
I still mostly worked from home because I could. I live in Victoria, Australia and we endured significant restrictions, and working from home was preferable. The streets were eerie and deserted. Those on our team who lived one town over from me had to navigate roads blocks and show passes in some circumstances just to get to work. I had to fill in a couple of essential worker passes for our people.
My kid’s school bent over backwards to help. My coworker’s kid’s school said since she could work from home, they wouldn’t accept she had the essential worker exemption and wouldn’t take her kids. An essential worker can definitely homeschool two young kids while providing telecommunications support services, mmhmm, for sure.
I work in a grocery store. I was essential. Which came as some surprise to the hordes of panic-shoppers we were faced with in March 2020 - we broke all kinds of sales records the week the state closed down the schools here, and we were getting non-stop phone calls from people who were convinced we were going to be closing indefinitely and wanted to know how long they had before that happened. (We wound up switching from being open 24 hours to closing overnight for about 3-4 months, because we NEEDED to restock without people picking the shelves bare as we went.)
I don’t own a car, which became pretty problematic when the county shut down scheduled bus service from April 2020 through July. They made dial-a-lift available to essential workers, but it had to be scheduled at least 48 hours in advance, so I had to get into the habit of figuring out by Thursday what I needed to do the following week, and then email the bus company my schedule so they could pick me up when I needed to get to work and back or to visit the pharmacy.
Some of my favorite memories from those days are when I had to tell customers we were all out of hand sanitizer/toilet paper/ramen/any of the other things people were hoarding those days, and they’d ask me if I knew if anyone else had them, and I could honestly answer “I haven’t been anywhere but here and home for like six weeks now.”
I’m retired now, but I worked for a medical device manufacturer then. The production line workers, their direct supervisors, and the techs who maintained the tooling (me) were deemed essential. Not much changed at work. The needs of the production lines stayed the same. Before Covid, maybe 5% of my work was assisting Engineering on some project; this part of my workload eased as the engineers were mostly working from home. The afternoon commute was great!
The first on is of the coaching/training type in a specialized field. It came to an immediate and complete stop on March 13th, 2020. My tasks were partially moved online very quickly, but I didn’t start giving full presentations again until late April. 100% online, of course.
The other one is customer-oriented. It was not essential per se, but I had dozens of fully paid backorders that my clients needed to get their hands on… somehow. In the morning of March 16th, 2020 my boss and I agreed that I’d come to work for 3-4 hours once a week to open the shop. Clients were required to make an appointment. Since they were forbidden from entering the premises, they had to call me when they were outside the building. I would then check and prepare their orders, take them outside and ask the clients to stay where they were. I would then put their stuff on the entrance stairs, step back and tell the customers to pick it up.
On a more personal note, the beginning of the pandemic coincided with the beginning of a very intense romantic relationship and I still selfishly look back to those days with nostalgia. Being in confinement with my new flame was… absolutely wonderful, actually. It made the pandemic seem like a minor inconvenience. An afterthought, almost.
Ditto! Education was certainly “essential”, but we were able to switch to a fully remote setting to get it done. I have to wonder what would have happened if the pandemic was even five years earlier. We didn’t then have the capacity or the equipment to do it.
I retired on May 1st 2020. I was an essential worker for a few months as a manufacturing engineer in a factory. I worked on equipment so I had to go in. 70% of the company worked from home but not the workers on the line. Retiring into nothingness was weird.
I was retired, but my eldest son was essential as his company’s IT. He could work mostly from home, but occasionally had to go in to set up conferences.
I’m a farmer – fresh produce, mostly direct market. That’s essential work; but most of my work is done on the farm, that is, at home. And I didn’t have any employees that year anyway. So I was doing most of my essential work in full isolation.
Customers could come to the farm, but I took orders by email or phone, packed the orders, and set them outside on a table for customers to pick up. If I went to talk to them (which I often did), we stayed about ten feet apart, outside, and masked. I had to write up a plan for all this and for sanitizing, though nobody ever asked to see it once written.
The farmers’ markets I sell at were declared essential services; but we had to work through all sorts of hoops and bells and whistles in order to be able to open – unusually wide spacing of stalls, hand sanitizers all over the place, customers limited to certain areas of the market and supposed to stay distanced from each other, customers weren’t supposed to touch the produce, etc. One of the markets got moved to a different location to better allow distancing (and we’re still there.) The markets also had to have their own plans written up, and the villages they were set up in did check them. But the markets were mostly where I saw people, in 2020. Running the stand is retail work – but retail work in which I’m the boss, and IME few people try to give you a hard time at farmers’ market, anyway; though that might depend on where you are.
I can tell you that setting up and taking down a stand on a hot humid day while wearing a mask is no fun at all.
Yup, teachers were considered essential, but still had to stay home. Except around here, that was without regard for how well we were managing going remote. The official guidance from the state at the start of lockdown was “Just treat it like a longer spring break”. And a lot of schools did just that. Then as May and June were rolling around with the lockdown still in place, the official guidance was “Wow, that went so great, we’re never going to have to re-open the schools!”.
Fortunately, many schools ignored the initial advice from the state, and did their best to continue. And fortunately also, there was enough backlash against the “let’s keep the schools closed forever” line that most schools did open back up (in at least some limited way) in the fall. But there were still a lot of students who got left behind.
Oh, and to @thorny_locust ‘s point about farmers’ markets, I don’t know if they were considered “essential” around here, but they were allowed. My mom sells crafts at a local farmers’ market. And I can say that business that year was absolutely booming. We think it’s because it was one of the very few outlets people had: You can’t do anything else, but you can go to the market.
In retrospect, allowing farmers’ markets (with some minor restrictions like masking) was definitely the right decision, with what we know now about how the virus spreads so much less in open outdoors spaces. I’m not sure how much of that they knew at the time, though.
Essential – my job was and is cleaning, disinfecting, and/or sterilizing delicate surgical instruments (endoscopes mostly, but also ophthalmological stuff). However, with the pause on elective surgeries at that time, I could have easily been laid off and (hopefully) rehired with no risk to patient safety. Fortunately, my hospital was able to avoid that.
What we were originally told was essential was just the farm stalls selling food – at first our crafters and flower vendors were told they wouldn’t be allowed to set up; but they changed that before our markets opened. I think some of the early starting or all-year markets were affected, though.
We didn’t really have booming business, though we did have customers. Some of our business is usually lake people, and a lot of them I think stayed home. And the market that got moved over was in a less obvious location; plus which IME it doesn’t matter how much advertising you do (we’ve had to move more than once), it will take some customers months or years or until never to realize that you moved instead of closing.
Another grocery store employee here. I worked in our curbside pickup department, shopping for people’s groceries. So my job involved a lot of training of new people who told me some form of “School closed and Mom and Dad said “you are not spending all your time playing video games, go see if the grocery store is hiring””
never got Covid at work, was thrilled to be vaccinated and quit feeling “contaminated” all the time. (The number of doctor’s appointments that I said I hadn’t knowingly been exposed to Covid at . . . )
Oh, yes. I always had to add in “I work in a grocery store and I come in contact with thousands of people a day” - not an exaggeration, because my store is VERY busy and on a typical day we do somewhere between 3-5k transactions.
Both times I got covid during the pandemic the State called wanting to attempt infection tracking. Both times when I mentioned I worked at the store the person on the other end of the phone did the nervous laughter thing. We got more exposure to people than the medical folks did, with less control over the idiots spewing viruses everywhere.
Of course I was exposed to covid. I was probably exposed every freakin’ day.