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

wise

I've been having 1 or 2x weekly drinks online with btw 5-10 of my oldest/dearest friends...ppl I've known for 25-30 years who are spread around the country.

I'm alone, w/o my kids, for four days every four days. It gets lonely. So I've been apprectiating this, and it's not at all awkward.

I find it exhausting if I hold too many; two weeks I participated in two per night for a couple nights. The constraints of Zoom: the nanosecond pause between speaking and response; the reluctance to step on each other's lines; its sedentary nature. I'm not drinking more, but I end these chats rather wobbly.

thanks for the condolences all.

re: zoom parties: the success of these absolutely depends on the people. we're doing weekly drinks (I don't drink but everyone else does) and pub quizzes with one set of friends and it's been really fun. you can't have more than a certain number of people on though because audio levels do fluctuate depending on how much noise is coming through, some people have latency, etc, so if there are like more than six people calling in it's bound to fail unless everyone mutes themselves when not talking and then it's not very spontaneous or enjoyable.

My mother had her own mask on, surprising and heartening.

moderated calls w/ friends

akm, ugh, I'm sorry! I just read your post.

We did a family zoom with my in-laws recently (parents two bros, bro’s wife and 3 young kids) and it was excruciatingly boring, mostly bc of the kids, who made us play a game where we had to guess the number on a rolled dice.

My partner has a bad case of the dropsky's with her MS and is dropping things every day. Somehow a dropped plastic rinsing cup has smashed a hole in the porcelain in the bathroom sink. There was already a crack in it so it was ready to break but FFS not now of all times. I'm going to have council plumbers in the house tomorrow for hours, which sucks absolute shit.

How big is the hole? I patched a hole in a bathtub once using an epoxy repair kit with plastic mesh... it looked terrible but was watertight. JB Weld might be effective too. Might tide you over for six months or a year (especially if it's the bathroom sink and not the kitchen).

my extended family has weekly zoom calls and i did them twice and there are too fucking many of us. i tried to get together a smaller chat and it happened once, and it was great, and hasn't happened since.

We got dinner delivered last night, and I left specific contact-free instructions for the driver (leave food inside the front door of the building, call or text when you arrive). So imagine my wonder and surprise when the first new human being I've come into close contact with in the past two months is the dumbfuck who I find standing in our lobby (thanks again to the neighbor who unaccountably let him in, top notch, A+ work there) with no mask or gloves and who insists upon handing our food directly to me. And who has, presumably, gone through this same dumbfuck routine with who knows how many other customers. And who has, presumably, missed the news that we're living in one of the hardest hit US counties in the midst of a global pandemic.

Any discussion of things slowly reopening and going back to normal is going to have to take into account the untold multitudes who continue to behave as if nothing about our lives ever changed in the first place.

I've had generally good success with Zoom. I talk to anywhere from 1-3 Toronto friends every Thursday. When I'm with one friend, we go on for 90 minutes; with more than 2 people, we've been cut off at a certain point. We just disconnect and start over. On Sundays, I play checkers with my goddaughter's 6-year-old daughter. That's fun, although it can move slow--the board is on-screen, and I have to verbally guide her as to which of my guys I want moved. I of course try to win, because just like Michael Jordan I'm driven to win. I did a Zoom call last night with a friend in Vancouver I hadn't spoken to in over a decade--that was great.

Talking over each other is sometimes a problem, yes, but not as much as on a phone call (I hate phones)--I can at least see the person and gauge when to talk/listen. I suspect that from a commercial standpoint, they're approaching this the right away. They're keeping everything free, like Facebook, until they reach a point where it's part of life for enough people that they'll cash in.

We got dinner delivered last night, and I left specific contact-free instructions for the driver (leave food inside the front door of the building, call or text when you arrive). So imagine my wonder and surprise when the first new human being I've come into close contact with in the past two months is the dumbfuck who I find standing in our lobby (thanks again to the neighbor who unaccountably let him in, top notch, A+ work there) with no mask or gloves and who insists upon handing our food directly to me. And who has, presumably, gone through this same dumbfuck routine with who knows how many other customers. And who has, presumably, missed the news that we're living in one of the hardest hit US counties in the midst of a global pandemic.

This is a reprehensible post, if you want to blame someone, blame the employer not the people in precarious employment being sent out without adequate provision to deliver you food. For all you know he isn't actually permitted to just leave it inside the front door to your building.

nah i'm with OL on this one

Zoom good here too. Have a couple of weekly quiz/drink sessions (one friends, one family) and my 9 yr old son also now has his weekly Cubs meeting via Zoom. There's about 15 or more of them on the call but it's set up so that only the leaders can speak and all the kids are muted until the last five minutes or so when they can talk to each other. My son really enjoys it as it's one of the only chances he gets to see some of his friends from school.

This is absolutely 100% on the delivery services. the continuing independent contractor bullshit means delivery Companies can shirk their responsibilities towards their employees and not provide adequate PPE and training (whist shafting restaurants for 30% of the bill and the customers for whatever delivery charge they can get away with).

"How big is the hole? I patched a hole in a bathtub once using an epoxy repair kit with plastic mesh... it looked terrible but was watertight. JB Weld might be effective too. Might tide you over for six months or a year (especially if it's the bathroom sink and not the kitchen)."

the hole was quite a biggie and beyond repairing I think. I live in social housing so I just click my fingers and say "oi skippy.. new sink ..pronto!" and one comes the next day - that's socialism for you! Love the new sink as well, can't use it till tomorrow and won't be able to sleep tonight!

It isn't especially difficult to imagine why, even in a pandemic, a food delivery guy might be forbidden from just leaving food in the lobby of a shared building. I'm not saying it's ideal approach - we've ordered in at various points during lockdown and had other deliveries and on some occasions they have been required to physically hand them to us. 'Doesn't this dumbfuck know there's a pandemic on?' isn't an especially edifying line to take with people who have to go out there and aren't in a position to kick up a fuss about it.

matt dc otm

Yeah - OL how do you even know your instructions were passed on to him?

Rethink this one big man

Every delivery service we've used is explicitly set up for contact-free delivery at this point. I wouldn't use them otherwise, because I don't want to be exposed unnecessarily and I don't want others exposing themselves unnecessarily. He didn't need to interact with anyone at all. Everyone else who's delivered anything here (on the rare occasion we've had anything delivered here) seems to be onboard and get it. I'm sympathetic to anyone who's having to maneuver through the outside world on a regular basis but it blows my mind that there are still people in that position who are (apparently) taking basically zero precautions. I mean the state has had a face mask mandate since the first of the month, for the love of pete.

Anyway, sorry to mostly apolitically discuss/vent about my rational/irrational fears and experiences in the Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020 thread.

Oh and I missed the news that as of a few days ago I officially live in the county with the highest number of cases in the US, so perhaps you will forgive my heightened state of alert wrt people who are still moving through the world like it's 2019.

if you have extra masks, one could always have them in ziplock baggies when leaving their home to give to people who do not have one.

I think it's condescending to delivery people to suggest they are incapable of common sense. Was this guy prohibited by his boss form wearing a mask and gloves? Or from setting the food down once OL came down to get it and keeping his distance?

zoom theatre including a reunion of the Orphan Black cast that I came across last night by looking at Facebook at the right time & getting apop up reminder.
Quite fun, not sure how interesting it would be to watch it as the recording that is up on their FB page. Couple of episodes and some between cast banter.
THought there might be some talk about it but doesn't seem to be.

xp i dunno are delivery people more capable of common sense than all the dumb motherfuckers out in lake geneva wisconsin this weekend

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/05/16/coronavirus-hundreds-flock-lake-geneva-downtown-most-without-masks/5207663002/

it seems like yesterday when a noticeable enough number of ilxors didn't feel like wearing a facecovering in public.

even actively arguing against the efficacy

I kinda wonder how people in states like WI and AZ are going to feel in a couple months when they find themselves once again stricken by the plague and back in strict lockdown while other states are taking sensible measures to slowly transition into something resembling normalcy. I kinda wonder.

I don't wonder. They're going to blame Obama and Nancy Pelosi and, somehow, Hillary Clinton for not protecting them.

Looks like my employers are building up to getting people to go back to work, got an email from my manager this morning reminding me to keep checking my work email account. Because I don't live too far away (15-30 mins on the bus, 45-60 mins walk) I'm anticipating being one of the ones they ask to come in. Damn it.

feeling generally like shit about my cratered productivity, and the "no one has productivity!" argument doesn't really resonate with me because if anything the career landscape feels more darwinian now, not less

I kinda wonder how people in states like WI and AZ are going to feel in a couple months when they find themselves once again stricken by the plague and back in strict lockdown while other states are taking sensible measures to slowly transition into something resembling normalcy. I kinda wonder.

if it's ever this clear - i'm not sure any of us are going to be able to slowly transition into something resembling normalcy until either vaccination or it just burns through the population.

lol i’m imagining OL remonstrating this delivery guy for not wearing a mask and the guy raising a finger and going “well, actually,”

that actually happened at the post office the other day

I kinda wonder how people in states like WI and AZ are going to feel in a couple months when they find themselves once again stricken by the plague and back in strict lockdown

i fear there's no escape. people will acclimate to the level of slaughter required in order to go to bars and to lakeside bullshit*, our social non-response** will be the 'best you can do with this shit' or even 'awesome,' and the economy will continue to crater and the usa will end. the end.

*i went by the local reservoir yesterday (very outdoors and distancy and masked), and the shit was like fucking coney island. cars lined up to drop boats for i'm guessing 30 mins. beaches filled in quite large groups, tho possibly just families, hard to say. bikes and strollers everywhere. no idea the level of actual-elevated-risk, but def not 0.

**my original catastrophic/phobic commentary was too ~political~, so i blamed ~society~

He’s allowed to vent here about the delivery person acting like a fool. I hope OL didn’t actually chew the guy out in person, of course. But also: to work in delivery in 2020 and not be aware of “contactless delivery” (whether trained but employer or not? I see this concept being mentioned *everywhere*) is rather silly. And a reasonable person, if expressly forbidden from drop off, would text or call or speak that while attempting to shove food into their client’s hands.

We have had a few successful drop offs, thankfully we have a front porch and no lobby nonsense to deal with.. but man the old Greek people who live in my neighborhood DNGAF in the grocery store. I pointed out the direction arrows on the floor to an old maskless lady the other day and she said “oh I just look first.” Also she was in front of me in line on the way in and didn’t stand in front of me, but instead stood diagonally to the rest of us, blocking the entire sidewalk for people walking by the grocery store. Stellar.
Of course part of the street is also pylon’d off to allow people to distance from the line to cross by the store.. but no one uses it.

(Wrong thread, I know, but haven't seen Finefinemusic on here in ages...Hope all is well in Toronto--I cleared out in November.)

General observation: at the grocery store, I'm finding men in their 30s to be the least mindful of present conditions. There's this sort of air of invincibility with a lot of them I encounter.

FTR, I didn't chew the delivery guy out at all. My interaction with him was basically 'uh...you can just, like, set that down?...on the ground...y'know, just right in front of you?...oh, okay, you're just going to mutely stare at me until I come directly up to you and take the food out of your unprotected hands, cool, cool, would you also like to give me a warm post-delivery hug while you're at it because why not at this point'.

as a person who gets to stay at home, i'm just really not into being heavily judgmental regarding the actions of people who are still required to go to work. idk what their access to PPE is, idk what information they're hearing, idk if they're thinking that since everything in nyc is gradually reopening that maybe shit's fine now. i've ordered delivery at least once a week and the attention paid to the delivery instructions has been wildly variable, but i'd also say the likelihood of you contracting the virus from someone *handing you a bag* is so low as to make your angst misguided

xp Hello pal! Mostly lurking, occasionally venting! :) Happy you got out. Very good timing in that we bought both a car and then a house last year so we are in a pretty good place for all of this, except for that place is in sometimes-sketchy and very densely packed Broadview North. Fair amount of grocery and drugstore workers getting sick which makes me that much angrier at the seniors shopping without a care in the world.

You shouldn’t order food, probably.

i felt the crushing weight of isolation when i went to trader joe's today
it made me realize how much i enjoy talking with people even when, yes, it's idle jib jab at trader joe's. i missed it. i didn't have to wait in a line around the parking lot to get in, and the whole process was perfectly fine. i just felt so sad for bygone times. i think my mom is having a hard time dealing with this too, as the sole person in the household who finds herself doing the same old errands in a dark new era. i mean it's that + everything else + dnw the rona

How dare you discuss/vent your rational/irrational fears in here of all places.. you monster

You shouldn’t order food, probably.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Monday, May 18, 2020 10:00 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think this conversation has already in this very thread but i find this position completely untenable

If there's anything we've learned, it's that you stand the best shot of contracting the virus if you're in an enclosed interior space with lots of people breathing the same air. I would be a little nervous receiving food from an unmasked or ungloved delivery person, but it would not compare to sitting inside a restaurant, a bus, or in a nursing home. This delivery person would've had to sneeze at exactly the moment when I approach him and walk through his droplets.

yeah I don't get what's wrong with food delivery. It's a beautiful break in routine on weekends. In my county everyone's required to wear masks.

OL's delivery person done fucked up IMO but I wouldn't go shoot him for it. I do think the possibility of infection via something like that is pretty low. At least I need to think that because we get delivery probably twice a week and I frankly have to limit the number of things that freak me out or I'll go nuts.