This is bad. I’ve never seen anything have such an effect on literally everything around the entire globe as this pandemic has. All Restaurants, Bars, parks, and even many stores have closed to try to help control the spread, but it continues. All public gatherings — meetings, concerts, or literally anything where 10 or more people might gather together for any reason — have been cancelled. Everyone is instructed to stay at least 4 feet from anyone else at all times. Millions of workers have been asked to either work from home or are getting laid off indefinitely.
No one knows how long this might last either. Weeks? Months? There’s no telling. Symptoms present much like the flu, but the disease is not. There is no cure. They say they’re “working on it” and hope to have a cure within a year. Meanwhile society starts to panic. There are mass shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of all things, probably having to do mainly with a few people who decide they’re going to try to make some money by hoarding and re-selling these things for a huge mark-up. It’s funny to see the stories in the news of people who end up stuck with thousands of cases of hand sanitizer and/or toilet paper, now unable to sell the items because online retailers recognize the scam and block them from selling it on their site.
That was last week. I held off on publishing the above, thinking I would finish it later that day or at least in the next day or two. Now it’s a week later. The hoarders have been pushed out of the news and there’s an abundance of toilet paper again. Sanitizer, well that’s another story entirely. But the pandemic continues to spread despite stricter and stricter rules being places on the public. I think it may have slowed, but we’re current approaching 700,000 infected worldwide and the US surpassed China (where it originated) in confirmed infected two days ago. Everyone, for the most part, is on lockdown. Authorities insisting we remain in our homes, in isolation–no visitors, no groups of more than two people now. Everyone’s looking for ways to entertain, occupy and educate their kids while in isolation.
Personally, since I work for a hospital in IT, we’re working from home too, but our on-call tech has to go on-site twice a week for issues that can only be handled in-person. Last week was my on-call week so I had the pleasure of going on-site twice last week. We scheduled on-site visits for 4 hours, but Friday’s visit was so busy with so many issues, I ended up working my entire 8-hour shift on-site. The scariest departments to visit for issues are the ICU and the Emergency Department, both most likely containing infected patients. I just stay clear of everyone, work on the necessary equipment and get my butt out of there as soon as possible. For issues that can be done in the IT Department, I move the hardware there, which is fairly isolated, repair it as needed, then deploy it back to the department it came from. I’m glad my on-call week is over tomorrow. The other two techs we have will rotate the on-call for two weeks now, then it’s back to me again. So we’ll see if things are better or worse on-site in two weeks.
At home we’re hanging in there. The puppies are doing well too, but we’ve noticed several of their toys no longer squeak because they like to attack and chew on them trying to squeak them, then play tug-of-war with them until the squeakers get punctured and no longer squeak. So I looked up toy squeakers on Amazon and bought a 50-pack for a few dollars. Sandy then performed surgery on a bunch of their toys using a seam-ripper tool and replaced them all with new squeakers. The dogs are once again happily attacking and fighting over their favorite toys again.
We’ve been video chatting with the grand-kids, Matt and Anna to keep in touch and make sure everyone’s doing ok, and we run out for the occasional meal (curbside pickup only, there’s no more dining out now) or grocery items as needed, but otherwise trying hard to just stay put, stay sane, and somehow keep active in both mind and body. Here’s a good dashboard of the pandemic. I keep one screen in my home office up with this page constantly, and I set it to auto-refresh every five minutes:
So at this point it’s the little things. Just doing everything we can to keep it together and maintain our sanity through this and try not to get infected ourselves. It a few days the number of infected with surpass one million people. The idea is to slow down the infection rate as much as possible as doctors work to develop a treatment that will work. One or more trials are already in progress, but there’s no word yet on their effectiveness, if there is any at all.
Many have lost their jobs, either permanently or temporarily, and the economy is taking a severe hit, obviously. This pandemic will clearly change the world. What it looks like afterward and how we move on if anyone’s guess.
At least we have some decent technology to deal with the situation a little better. As I work from home, we have a meeting every few days using Zoom – a nice meeting app that allows hundreds of people to meet using video and audio. For us it’s only five people, so it’s pretty easy to manage. My phone at work is forwarded to my cell phone, so I still get all of my work calls as I normally would, and the Help Desk line that us three techs manage goes directly to voicemail and the three of us rotate who constantly checks and responds to the voicemails. In addition to that we have a ticket system we also rotate responsibilities for. With everything still ramping up and more and more of our users needing to be setup to work remotely, the past couple weeks have been pretty hectic. But it certainly passes the time quickly.
Let’s see what the next week brings.
JimTrottier.com 