Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

Ha, I do, and that's not a bad comparison actually. He plays golf all the time and has a second house in the SW.

that 2nd house mortgage ain't gonna pay for itself, let's get this thing constructed, jon!!!

Exactly. My family's health and safety is expendable as long as his standard of living isn't impacted.

Sorry to derail today. I get that many are fighting much harder and dealing with much bigger issues right now, it's just been a rough morning. And I had a really long conversation with my wife last night about how thankful I am that we both have jobs and we are both being encouraged to stay home, so it's felt like a bit of a sucker punch to feel kinda thrown to the wolves.

Not at all helpful that my boss has had time to write and respond to seven other emails involving me in the last two hours, but has conveniently ignored the one where I raised my concerns.

If you have any authority over the contractor, such as in approving the work, you should make clear to him that you will be looking at everything with a fine tooth comb, taking every one of your allotted days to approve change orders, not letting him skate on near immaterial variances, etc.

NP, jon. we all get to annoyed by this in our own unique ways.

You have to play up the health an safety angle. I’m sure he wouldn’t allow anyone on site without hi viz, hard hat, safety boots and safety glasses. And I bet he’d throw anyone off the job who violated safe work processes. This is the same thing this is taking an unnecessary risk. This is working on a machine without a full Lock out Tag Out process. If there is no need for you to be onsite to participate in meetings then you are putting yourself, him, his workers, your family, his family and their families in a situation with Unnecessary risk. If he doesn’t get that take this to OSHA

tbc he should be following of all that protocol PPE + Lock Out Tag Out procedure whether there's a pandemic on or not

cough on all of the floorboards

(sorry ed misread what u wrote at first)

This makes me mad. We’ve had a SWMS on workout for weeks now. One of our biggest contractors has isolated their crews, one crew per site l, no mixing between crews and if there is a case the job stops and the whole crew quarantines. Very tight rules about subbies being allowed on site (basically not at all without the crew withdrawing). We can’t even visit our site when the crew is there. Management walks by FaceTime only.

We’re not building a building, to be clear, it’s installing DC fast chargers on petrol station forecourts but you’d be surprised by how many trades that take.

If you can’t keep your people safe you shouldn’t be in business.

Amazon has a ton of listings for surgical masks shipped from overseas with bad reviews, all of which are variations of MADE IN WUHAN, CHINA, AVOID, U RISK INFECTION.

Hmm not sure who wants to be the first to tell these guys that you're just as likely if not more to get a contaminated package if it was made in the US atm and that two or three customers probably sneezed on the groceries you bought before you took them off the shelf.

One of my best friend's mom has been battling cancer for months now. She just learned that her mother is in misery, and has at best two weeks to live. She's being moved to hospice, but because of current rules no more than two people can visit her at a time, and no kids. So my friend and her family can't be with their mom, even though they know the end is coming soon. And my friend can't even have her daughter come say goodbye to her grandmother. No hugs, no collective celebration of her life. And then when it comes to the funeral in days or weeks from now, there's not going to be any of that, either. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

post workout = Corona

Listening in to a call my wife was having with her friends (the same call where we heard the terrible news), I learned that this was the first day she herself was feeling kind of down. I never would have guessed, but it was still sad to learn that's how she felt. I mean, I assume we are all feeling some version of that right now, and it will get worse the more people we know that get sick or succumb. We are all lucky and unlucky in our own personal and specific ways, but we are all equally helpless in the face of this disaster.

Taught my first actual class online tonight. Classes are normally 3h20m (with break) but we only took 10 min break and went 6:30 to 9:40pm. EXHAUSTING. Videochatting and sharing my screen and ON 100% for 3 hours staring at a laptop :-/

Before I used to leave home at ~ 3:40 to avoid traffic, prep for class, and eat my carefully planned homemade dinner. then i would teach for 3 hrs 20 min (with break) and drive home to arrive around 10:20 or so.
Now I get to stay at home and eat my homemade food with my partner and have a few extra hours

I am enjoying the new good times but still wistful for the old times :( i miss having tea with my students and just being in their company

With funerals etc, it must be possible to have a bigger wake/saying goodbye collectively thing at a later date. Must be something significant at another point post pandemic. My family is hoping for my Dad's next birthday as a famiy get together for that purpose.
Having a small ceremony and a burial in his birth village. I was semi surprised they were being allowed to take the body over there during this, it's half way across the country.

sorry Stevo :(

sorry and good luck to everyone else having hard times too

had my first social distancing nightmare last night, kinda funny in retrospect, everyone around me just kept throwing huge GATHERINGS, with BABIES. i yelled at everyone that we were all gonna get sick!

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, April 1, 2020 5:19 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This past week I've dreamt something distancing related every night. And I swear, like Groundhog Day, every fucking morning the first thing stuck in my head is "I used to dream about Corona" (from Heather Nova's "I used to dream about Verona"). They're not nightmares per se, but it's an always present dread. Could do with at the very least the night being corona-free tbh.

Sorry Stevo, Jon, and everyone dealing with a lot right now. Best to ye <3

THanks, hope everybody is going to come through this ok. & there sin't another unforeseen coming straight after it.

Would be great if it was able to be taken as a time to rethink not prompting a scramble for more and more austerity and right wing takeovers.

My dad had been in ill health and had to be rushed to hospital. Not sure how things would have panned out if he hadn't died suddenly this is a trying time for everyone .

Taught my first actual class online tonight. Classes are normally 3h20m (with break) but we only took 10 min break and went 6:30 to 9:40pm. EXHAUSTING. Videochatting and sharing my screen and ON 100% for 3 hours staring at a laptop :-/

I sympathize. Tuesday and Wednesday have been exhausting: from recording lectures to answering the endless emails.

ffs one of the other 2 devs and one of the 2 product managers are being furloughed. I am definitely not being furloughed. lucky bastards. they get paid the same and they don't have to work :( meanwhile I will probably have to work harder to cover for them

thinking of everyone at this time who has been hit with the worst.

spain........ wyd

Followed government advice and went out for my first bit of exercise - walking is exercise enough for me. Probably not a good idea to go out in the afternoon as it was no quieter than a reasonably quiet Sunday. I thought I'd go to a nice leafy middle class bit of the neighbourhood for a walk, rather than try to navigate the clueless goons who seem to populate my area. Anyway, I was almost trampled to death by joggers - most of whom make no effort whatsoever to avoid anyone else - and then had a close encounter with a taxi driver who purposefully drove to the centre of the road to intimidate me when I was crossing because I assume he thought I wasn't crossing the road quickly enough. Lovely people, taxi drivers.

I'm so glad we have a treadmill in the apartment. So, so glad.

Taught my first actual class online tonight. Classes are normally 3h20m (with break) but we only took 10 min break and went 6:30 to 9:40pm. EXHAUSTING. Videochatting and sharing my screen and ON 100% for 3 hours staring at a laptop :-/

I sympathize. Tuesday and Wednesday have been exhausting: from recording lectures to answering the endless emails.

I’ve been teaching (tweens) remotely for two weeks now. Video conferences are exhausting Really painful. So much of working with young students is relational, and few of them have social pragmatics in person, let alone on a shared Google Meets Hangout screen with ~ 20 peers they haven’t talked to in weeks.

My day is: wake up, record horrible embarrassing video/screencast, update website, attend various department planning meetings virtually, respond to student emails, develop my curriculum, design and post new supplemental materials based on student need, read and prioritize and respond to emails from parents, special educators, and administrators who are not involved in helping me (but have strong and arbitrary opinions on how I should be doing things), eat lunch, hold virtual office hours for kids, work on next week’s lessons, etc.

My district has decided (and it is a brave and good decision) that we should plan weekly lessons per subject that can be accomplished AWAY from the computer, are non-sequential in case kids miss weeks of school due to family illness, do not widen the equity gap re. technology, and deepen academic skills w/o attempting to shuttle new content into environments we cannot influence. We are not able to enforce or hold students to any deadlines - and one/one conferences are discouraged. And administering classes in a way that honors special education needs is ... very difficult.

For me, the biggest difficulty at the moments is that I’ve just fully contact with some (adored) students. They don’t respond to emails, log into school software, and neither do their parents. They’re often vulnerable kids I mentor, with whom I have formed a 1:1 relationship over the course of many careful years. My only recourse is to turn their names over to a sometimes ham-fisted administration, which I’d prudent but feels like a betrayal.

I'm planning on my kids not having school (at school, at least) for the rest of the year, that's the way things seem to be going. My daughter asked me how they're going to handle grades, given the official policy is that the school work they are doing is not being graded. I have no idea! I guess it depends how things play out.

I'm going to donate blood in a little bit, wish me luck. Life, or at least parts of it, must go on.

we're doing their school's zoom classes and trying to get them to do their assignments but our strategy is just to make sure they're reading a lot and improving in their reading and assuming they can grow in that area i'll consider our corona homeschooling a success.

The test prep/tutoring school I work for has been on online lessons only since February and I just don't think I'm ever gonna like teaching them. I guess 1-on-1 tutoring is not so bad, and I've figured out the best ways to screen share and show explanations, but classes feel like I'm talking into a wall. But it's ok, my school is quickly hemorrhaging students so I don't expect to have a job much longer

For my son, online learning requires our full participation - he tends to wander away, collapse, scream, put yogurt on the screen, etc. - so it is really no different from homeschooling. He really does need to be walked through each assignment. At school, he has an aide for that. Here, it's 100% us.

So sorry Stevolende

Seems my household's quick covid experience was indeed too good to be true - wife still had a mild cough but then caught a regular cold (worse for her than most, she can't sleep when she gets a runny nose) which worsened the cough and for the past few days she's been really coughing her lungs out, it's hurting her and she's having trouble sleeping again. Really frustrating as I can't even run out to get her some syrup (we're still in quarantine).

Blood donation fail: even though neither of the FAQs I looked at, including a new one for the covid era, said I *needed* to make an appointment, it appears they are not accepting walk-ins. But then when you go online to schedule, it lists all the "unavailable" slots and a few slots that don't say anything, but those are *also* apparently unavailable. I told them if the slots that are unavailable say "unavailable" and the slots that don't say "unavailable" are *also* unavailable, then those other slots should really say "unavailable" as well. Anyway, on the plus side, if they didn't have any availabilities that means the drive is going well.

I miss stuff in this thread--condolences/best wishes to various people.

I'm finding Chris Cuomo continuing to do his CNN show every night reassuring. He's not mawkish at all--he strikes just the right balance of humour, daily information on what he's experiencing, and calling out Trump.

my mom's symptoms have thankfully subsided, she had chills and headache for two days but evidently no fever and we are all breathing a deep sigh of relief

thank you for thoughts upthread

“You’re hurting old people like me. Well, not me... I’ll never see you.”

Larry David wants everyone to stay home to protect older Californians from #COVID19!
He does not do these things.
Listen to Larry.#StayHomeSaveLiveshttps://t.co/snYe5v55Rw pic.twitter.com/C5cKOaAufE

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 31, 2020

I just gave myself my first haircut. Successfully, I might add! Considering there isn't much I can do with it in the first place, and there's not much to do it to, has my haircutter been ethically suspect by not just telling me I could easily do it myself? (#larrydavid)

my partner has had three nights in a row of trapped-in-confined-spaces-with-people dreams

Meanwhile, i got this in the mail randomly today.

In the words of Julius Caesar, "oh come on, what the fuck"

https://i.ibb.co/Hn1w4R7/IMG-20200402-130315.jpg

seems legit

Doctor Jones, Jones,
Calling Doctor Jones
Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones,
Get up now

No doubt Dr. Shallenberger's book is bursting with sure-fire recommendations, fully backed by anecdotal evidence.

I didn't read it, come now

Judging from the cover, whatever he is selling, it destroys your knees and elbows.

Solidarity to soda & Alfred & all other ILX educators in the new hellscape

recording lectures without students is even weirder than performing music to an empty room. I have done both and vastly prefer playing music to a pretend audience to trying to cajole invisible people into learning. Teaching my music class was a little easier because it's content, but teaching ESL online has to be one of the more excruciating professional tasks I've attempted. I hope I get better at it!!

At the very least I am happy to brag that I had perfect attendance in both classes. I also had to call every student from my personal phone to get them to show up but it worked!!

yeah I've been teaching ESL over zoom for a couple weeks and it is pretty torturous. my shorter class has had good attendance and I find using the breakout rooms to facilitate conversation works pretty well, but my longer class has only had one or two students which is a huge pain to lesson plan for.

my teacher talking time is way too high lol. but the second week has been better than the first.