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redbeardace · 4 years

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Quarantine 4: Stay Home

[This is a post for the May Carnival of Aces.]

So much is different now.

So much is the same.

I have been very fortunate so far. The disease hasn’t touched me or anyone close to me yet. I still have a job and am working full time. The biggest practical impact on my life is that I no longer have a daily commute.

I see other people talking about their experiences and they’re so... strange?

Someone remarked on my “8 days without human contact” sign, shocked that I hadn’t needed to go shopping in 8 days, that I must have really stocked up. But I routinely go two weeks without shopping, 8 days is nothing. I’m going on my 23rd day on this cycle and the only reason I’ll have to go shopping now is that I’m out of milk. I still have plenty of everything else.

It’s weird to me that people seem to think that having more than three days of groceries is prepper level stockpiling. And watching everyone make a run on the stores and seeing what they were grabbing was just baffling. When Cascadia puts on its big show, what are these people planning to do?

People talk about how little gas they’ve been buying lately. Welcome to my life. I have a mostly electric car and go months between fill ups.

I am truly concerned about the number of people posting “My kids are making me drink haha” jokes. Sure, maybe it’s funny for the first few days, but if you’re still saying that on day 57, I think you seriously need to step back and look at yourself and consider if maybe you have a drinking problem. Because you’ve spent two months talking about how you routinely drink in order to cope with the stress of your children, and that seems like you might have a problem.

Anyone know how to tell a bunch of my coworkers that they may be alcoholics in a tactful way...?

I’ve been telling a daily WFH joke on the company chat system. I can’t keep it up anymore. It’s gone on too long.

I’ve been making masks.

I’ve been putting hats on scarecrow owls.

I’ve been making subtle changes to the backdrop of the daily video calls for work. Yesterday it was an vintage photo of an old man, a middle aged woman, and a teenage girl who might be a timelord, standing in a field. Tomorrow it will be a jazzy picture of a roll of toilet paper with a face drawn on it.

It is named Sir Roland of Charmaine.

I ordered pizza delivery for the first time ever today. I like pizza and hate people, so how come I’ve never done this before.

I haven’t had a nasty headache in weeks.

I haven’t put on any weight.

I live alone. If I get sick, I’m going to have to take care of myself somehow. I don’t know if I’d be able to do that. There won’t be anyone to leave dinner at the top of the stairs. There won’t be anyone to take me to the hospital if things get bad.

Stuff is piling up. Like literal stuff in literal piles. My stairs are on the verge of becoming hazardous. I’m not sure where all this stuff has come from.

I’m now treating my mail as hazardous material.

If I ever had to deal with actual hazardous material, I probably wouldn’t survive.

I see all these people talking about how much time they have now. I have no extra time. I’m feeling like I’m being an unproductive loser because I’m not going to come out of this knowing how to play the mandolin in Romanian or whatever, but I don’t have newfound free time. Even the time gained back from the commute has vanished somewhere.

I have to have a timer at my desk so that I’ll stop working after 8-ish hours.

They’ve been giving me plastic bags at the grocery store because they refuse to use the reusable ones. Reminds me just how much I hate plastic bags.

I have to get my house painted. I’m kinda digging this no contact thing. I need to take advantage of it more while it lasts.

The president is still a fascist, there’s gun-toting nutjobs on the loose who aim to kill us all one way or another, and the MURDER HORNETS ARE HERE.

Seriously. The Murder Hornets are here. WTF.

I’ve mostly been in good shape. Two incidents threw me off balance.

I lost a notecard of WFH jokes. That was kind of a last straw situation, where I had to shuffle and strain to try to make a usable workspace and nothing was going right and even after a best attempt, the chair didn’t fit and I didn’t fit because I never fit and now there’s all sorts of stuff in my hallway that doesn’t belong there and what am I going to do with it all and I didn’t want to do any of this and NOW WHERE IN THE HELL IS MY NOTE CARD BECAUSE IT WAS RIGHT HERE AND I WAS CAREFUL WITH IT AND WHERE DID IT GO AND HOW DID I LOSE IT IT LITERALLY WENT SEVEN FEET AT MOST AND I’VE SEARCHED THE WHOLE AREA A DOZEN TIMES AND HOW COULD IT JUST DISAPPEAR LIKE THAT.

The latest Stay At Home order extension. I knew it was coming, but just running the calendar out based on the dates they were saying and extrapolating for the dates they weren’t saying, and coming up with the middle of July at the earliest and just...

Somehow, the loss of the Pride Parade didn’t hit me that hard. It should have.

Quarantine beards. I don’t get it. I mean, I’m lazy about shaving, but this I don’t understand. Also, I’m pretty much incapable of growing a proper quarantine beard. I grow in a month what others do in a few days.

I cut my own hair. I’ve got electric clippers. It’s really not that hard and it doesn’t involve potentially giving the plague to any barbers or pretending that democracy is threatened by my bangs getting a bit too long. Of course, I only do it about once a year. This is around the time of year that I do it, though.

I’ve worn pants every day. Regular pants. Not PJs or sweat pants. But pants pants. You all really not wearing pants? Maybe I’ll wear a skirt one day to mix things up.

I have been routinely testing my sense of smell. Haven’t lost it yet.

There’s stuff I want to do, but I don’t feel like doing any of it. There are time-sensitive projects I want to do, but I don’t really want to sit in front of the computer for the time it would take to make it happen. Because I sit in front a computer in my house all day for work now and there’s no energy left for anything more. Not that there was energy for that stuff before.

Am I supposed to support the economy by ordering from local businesses online or save the lives of delivery workers by only ordering essential things? And how come when I ordered a bunch of stuff from a place that claims they’re prioritizing essential items, the one thing that I ordered that could be considered essential was the last thing they shipped?

I had a Nigerian organized crime ring file for unemployment in my name. The state’s apparently lost millions in this scheme. I don’t understand how that can be. It seems like “Don’t Send Money To Nigeria” would be a pretty straightforward check in the system.

Oh. Wait. I’m a software engineer who’s spent my time on the quality and reliability side of the house. I can totally see something like that getting deprioritized and won’t-do’d.

Also had my credit card number stolen and used on a wild shopping spree. Not sure if that’s ‘rona-related. It’s the credit card I use for all my online shopping. So that’s all on hold at the moment.

My car battery died. I had to use a battery pack to jump it. Fun fact: I drive a plug-in hybrid, which had been plugged in this whole time. Apparently the 12v battery doesn’t get charged by the wall plug. Which seems really weird to me.

I see lots of people complaining about how they can’t have sex right now or how dating is weird. So not a problem for me.

#carnival of aces #overreactions from the outbreak

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