I have a mundane job. I started it six months ago, and after about three I realized that I had a mundane job. Don’t get me wrong – my coworkers are great, and the work our office does makes a huge impact. But my day-to-day? Monotonous, boring, and uninteresting. I spend my hours sifting through spreadsheets, sending mail, and organizing the calendars (and the occasional desk space) of other grown adults. One of my colleagues that is in a similar role likes to say that we stretch eight hours of work across 40 hours a week, and I think that’s fairly accurate.
Now that I’m working from home, not much has changed. Still glazing over spreadsheets, sending emails, and scheduling meetings. Only now, I’m faced with the constant temptation of taking a nap, smoking a joint, or jumping from our second story window just for the thrill. I know I’ve got it easier than a lot of people. I’m incredibly thankful to be collecting a paycheck for minimal effort, and continue to put food on the table. However, there’s something to be said for the people stuck at home pretending to work. I can only take my dog on so many walks before even he’s sick of hanging out with me – a threshold which my girlfriend has almost certainly reached by this point.
Out of all of my family, I think my mom’s got it the worst right now. A daughter back home from college, a 14-year old son glued to his various screens, and a husband who – for some godforsaken reason – is still being called on to work every day, including the occasional Saturday, for a managerial retail auto parts job. She texts me every day with a random fact, or a picture of my siblings, or an inquisition on my opinions about how long we’ll be quarantined because she thinks my two years of Public Health studies makes me an expert (I wish it did). I think about her a lot.
I’ve been trying to FaceTime a different friend each day for the last week or so. It was going well, but I started to notice that all of our conversations were the same.
Friend 1: “How are things for you?”
Friend 2: “Oh ya know, hangin’ in there. You?”
Friend 1: “Same here, just trying not to go crazy. Is it just me or are you drinking more too?”
Friend 2: *holds up their drink to the camera* “Yeah man, not shit else to do.”
It’s been great to see faces, but the scripted chats have worn me down a bit… So I bought an XBOX.
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This morning, my girlfriend went to the grocery store at about 10 o’clock. When she got back, she asked if I could use the Clorox wipes and wipe down all of the boxes and bags while she cleaned the vegetables with some sort of oil and vinegar concoction. I chuckled and said sure, but she could sense in my voice that I didn’t exactly share the same level of concern as she did. This led quickly to an argument about how I wasn’t taking these circumstances seriously enough, and that she didn’t care what I thought, the groceries were getting cleaned. Which then led to an hour or so of silent contemplation.
I know this pandemic is serious. It’s already taken a lot of lives, and will eventually take many more. If you have any sense of humanity, that is a sobering thing to say. But until this moment, it still didn’t feel personal. I do my part – I stay home, save for the occasional grocery store trip and daily dog walk. I wash my hands. I keep my distance from strangers whenever I see them. But I’d been able to dodge the fear and anxiety that many people were facing. This was the moment when I realized the tangible effect that these circumstances were having on the people around me. My confidence was coming off as flippancy.
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I’ve never been so grateful to not have kids. I see my coworkers on Zoom calls constantly shooing their children out of the room, just for them to wriggle into the view of the camera from under the table three minutes later. What would I tell my kids during a global pandemic? How would I explain why I’m home all the time? How would I explain that, even though I’m home all the time, I can’t give them my undivided attention all the time? I can just ignore my dog and eventually he’ll stop whining, because that’s what the internet says to do, but you can’t just ignore your kid, can you?
I have friends filing for unemployment. 22-year-olds with University of Michigan degrees getting laid off, or unable to find work to begin with. One of my coworkers got fired about a week before we got sent to work from home. I know people who lost their opportunity to experience high school and college graduations. I know people worried that their parents and grandparents won’t abide by the shelter-in-place order. I have friends still going to work at hospitals as nurses or medical students (students), risking infection to help save lives.
And here I am, complaining about using Clorox wipes to sanitize my groceries.
Anonymous|| Michigan || April 11, 2020