Were you an "essential worker" in 2020?

The Quarantine Zone
21

Worked at a grocery store at the very start of the pandemic - I remember all these news stories popping up about some new virus, and thinking, “Huh, that’s weird,” ah, times were simpler then! - and then found a job much closer to my new home at a dispensary (fully weed legal state) which was also deemed essential.

… and boy howdy, was it ever. Good lord, people were bored and anxious.

Yup. When I was at the grocery store, I lost count of the number of people who came in to buy one, single, sole, solitary apple or tomato or whatever.
A few of them even straight-up told me variations of, “I don’t even need/want this thing. I just had to get outta the house/get away from my spouse/roommates!”

To which I always silently thought, “Yeah, they probably needed a break from you, too!”

22

I design industrial controls for a living. Since some of our customers are pharmaceutical companies, and many of those were actually making Covid vaccines and medicines, we were all classified as “essential workers”.

I worked from home almost the entire time. But if for some reason I had to go to a site, being classified as an essential worker meant the difference between me being able to get in through the gate or not. As it turned out, I didn’t have to go on site anywhere during Covid.

23

I had essential worker paperwork to allow me to travel, because I worked in a quasi-government organisation, although 99.9% of the time I worked from home anyway.

24

May I ask what state? I’m shocked because they couldn’t have consulted any medical experts as part of their decision making process, or they would have been told that a true pandemic is a lengthy process.

25

Yes and no. “Yes” because I worked for a government agency and had to physically go into work every day until I retired. “No” because there was no need for me to physically work in person. Pre-pandemic, I managed people in as many as eight different locations. I could only be in one at a time and to the people at the seven other locations, it didn’t matter whether I was in my office or at home or at a resort 400 miles away as long as they could each me by phone. But I had to physically show up because most of the people I managed were essential workers who did have to work in person and it would have looked bad for me to work remotely when they couldn’t. Just like at the beginning some hospitals wouldn’t let back office staff work from home because the nurses and housekeepers couldn’t. Somehow, I managed to avoid COVID until my last week of work in 2022. Or at least I think I did.

26

Same here. We, very quickly, went from struggling mom n pop grocery store to the busiest we’ve been since the 80’s/90’s before there were multiple mega marts (Target, pick n save, meijer , woodmans etc) within blocks of us. The last few years have consistently been our best years ever.

We also do deliveries, mostly of which are into other essential businesses (mainly medical offices) and, oh my god, that was amazing. I believe other delivery people will tell you the same thing. The whole world was like a ghost town for a few months. It was such a strange feeling to deliver something that should have been 45 minutes away and only took 30 minutes to get there, and you’d see only a handful of cars in areas that are normally stop and go traffic.

One of the things that always caught me off guard was how quiet the world was. I never considered how much of the background noise you hear is just traffic.

Also, another little nicety, that’s stuck around in some places WRT these deliveries is that normally we bring all this stuff all the way into their office. Usually that means trying to balance everything in one hand so you have another hand free to open doors, turn on lights etc. But during covid, they didn’t want us back there, hell, they didn’t want us even in the reception area if they could avoid it, meaning, we just dropped everything at the front desk and left. Where a driver might normally be there for 20 minutes, now they’re in and out in 2 minutes. In fact, we still have a few locations that ask us to call when we get there and they’ll send a few people with carts to meet us outside. Works for me.

Having said all that, I always felt odd being called an ‘essential worker’. I mean, I get it, but in my eyes, it was just business as usual.

And, like some of the other grocery store workers here, I also managed to avoid covid. That included being in very close quarters with someone that had it multiple times. That included being in a store full of people that, many of whom likely had it. That included talking to people that suddenly felt the need to cough at me or stand with their face 8 inches from mine to talk to me.
I know I could have had it with no symptoms but I don’t think that was the case. I am curious, however, if I have some natural resistance to it for one reason or another. Statistically, I just assumed I’d get it at some point or another.

27

Ohio. And they obviously didn’t consult medical experts, because at the time they closed all of the schools, the guidance from the medical experts was “Close an individual school for two weeks if there’s a case reported there”, and there were a total of 14 cases reported in the entire state.

28

I worked for a regional airline flying under the United flag at the time. I was a technical writer, so our department could easily (and did) work from home, but on occasion we did have to go into the office for printing runs, shipping manuals to various locations, and the like. Every employee of the airline was considered an “essential worker” and we had a letter stating as such that we were supposed to carry with us when coming into the office, not that anyone ever asked to see it.

29

Local schools here were preparing for a shutdown when New York State closed everything, wham, before they’d finished the preparations. They’d been going to send students home with packs of materials they could work on from home. School personnel wound up driving all around this rural area to drop those packets off at students’ homes – they’d expected to hand them out at school the next day, but the state had already shut them down.

There were no known cases in this county at the time; though NYCity was already in a hell of a mess, a couple of hundred miles away.

– I did a grocery run, right about when things were shutting down. I said to the checkout clerk, “now I’m going to go home and stay there for a while” (I was in my late 60’s with significant heart problems.) Then I saw the look on her face (no masks yet at that point) and rapidly added “Thank you for coming in to work!”; which did seem to help a bit.

I never heard of anybody around here handing out letters certifying who was essential. I don’t know how I’d have gotten one if they had – in areas where that happened, what did they do about self-employed essential people?

30

I got one of those letters. My employer emailed it to me. Self employed essential people who had to travel around may have had to get one from the State. They were never used so it didn’t come up.

31

Nevermind-already posted.

32

I worked from home, mostly.
I have most of the equipment and tools I need at my home shop as well. So things came from the field to the work shop. I would go in and get them. Sort them out at home and deposit them back at the work shop. I did not need to go to the field during that time. But things were in place that I could have if necessary.

It did not slow things down. Few of us got it at that time. I got some milder variant later. No big deal.

33

I worked as a gas station worker and was told I was essential. I got a letter saying I could work in the case I was pulled over. After that I did receptionist work at a nursing home also during covid. <|:D+<

34

Same here. That was our best year in probably 25+ years (back before multiple big box grocery stores showed up), and luckily we’ve continued growing. I noticed a few reasons for it too. The big one being that grocery shopping was one of the few things people could still do. Beyond that, the ‘shop local’ mentality had a bit of an upswing, which helped us and I think we also got a lot of overflow from people that didn’t want to go to the big box stores because they were so crowded.
We had a lot of the ‘I’ve driven past this place thousands of times and never stopped in’ customers, which we always like.

Interestingly, they (I don’t remember who ‘they’ are right now) tried to get grocery store employees classified as first responders. That seemed odd, but my understanding was that if that could be done, it would have meant government subsidies for things like insurance, being first in line (with other first responders) for covid testing, and some other things. IIRC, the thought was that we were putting our lives at risk so the rest of the world could still eat and, at the very least, we should have some protections…or something like that, I don’t think anything ever became of it.

Edit, there’s a bunch of articles about this, but since they all have the same(ish) date so I’m assuming they’re similar. Here’s the first one I saw:

35

My wife and I both started new jobs in just-barely-2020 but prepandemic. We were both classified as essential.

I had just started as an office aide with a county- level division of aging, where I still am today. Technically, I’m a medical-adjacent social worker. Still, they had us all working from home for a while. I returned to 100% in-office quickly. I handle literal paperwork and couldn’t just digitize everything without an act of congress.

My wife does payroll for a medical company. All the truly essential nurses and doctors still need paychecks. But her job could be done 100% remote, and still is.

One other thing I’m truly thankful for is that my then-toddler’s daycare/preschool stayed open the whole time because it was part of a wider nursing home operation where most of the parents worked.

36

I was working at a plumbing supply company so we were arguably more essential than ever. Keeping water and waste systems running, adding hands free delivery systems, and the usual health and safety precautions all applied.

Add to that the huge increase of ppl working from home so demands on residential systems increased with lots more service calls.

I personally stayed home for a couple weeks trying to do as much of my design and specifying part of my job remotely but that didn’t last long and they needed me back.

37

I didn’t retire until last year so I was still working as a police officer. Our area was very hard hit. We of course had to work and often had to go into the houses of the infected sick, dead and dying. The one thing that worried the powers that be was if a whole squad got sick at the same time. They completely revamped our schedule. Fewer people on each shift. More time off in between. No access to the locker rooms. No one allowed in the building unless it was essential. I was a supervisor so it was a huge pain in the ass. No motor vehicle stops and no tickets.

38

Yes, I was an essential worker. My job was never at risk, and I was better off financially, once my 401k rebounded, than at the start (overtime and less opportunity to spend). We only lost one coworker that I knew personally, and she’d chosen not to get vaccinated. I followed the protocols and it was 3 years before I caught it. That was a crappy week, but I shudder to think what it might have been like without the vax.

39

I work(ed) in a gas station/ convince store. We were essential. You can’t expect people to go without liquor, cigarettes, and surely not lottery. Our company put up temporary plastic shields that maskless people would try to lean around. Never ending fun. I imagine our store alone took out aseveral older, unvacced lottery players.

The stories I could tell about unvacced and vaccine deniers. I did get it, though we were all vacciated it was very mild. Mirraculously Hubster didn’t get it even though I was his care giver.

40

I did administrative work for a university. Not essential.