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

the average boss doesn't even want to be a boss. I had a friend who also works with my company, and he was having a rough day, so he went on Skype and was trying to vent to his boss and get help. He expressed frustration, yes, and he was obviously frustrated, but his messages were pretty mild in terms of employee complaints (esp compared with mine).

Her response was "STOP! Why are you like this right now, what's going on with you? I thought we mellowed you out the other day." Like basically tearing him apart for having the audacity to come to her with a problem.

Unsurprising, but once again we seem to refuse to learn anything from the pandemic on any level. I was at baseball practice with my son last night and talking to three other people who had the same experience - their respective companies were all about remote and hybrid working two or three months ago, only to withdraw that and revert back to a 100% back in office plan within the last week or two. It's depressing as fuck, but late stage capitalism wins again.

we got told today, after getting the results of a staff survey where a lot of people said that they quite like working from home more often than not, that they are consolidating our office space, moving us from west london to central london.

given i live closer to the office than i do to the tube station, this is quite annoying *and* will cost me about £142 a month.

(they are planning on sub-letting the building, but there are empty floors in the other buildings on the site AND have spent the last year building more)

i would quit if they made me go back to the office. I do miss pooping at the office though. the restrooms are really clean.

also the snack machines take debit cards so I get fat there

if late stage capitalism was smart it would continue pushing the cost of WiFi, heating, air conditioning and office space onto its employees for the foreseeable future

I'm glad to see that the company I work for has embraced WFH wholeheartedly from the beginning, and doesn't appear to be changing course anytime soon

i work at a university and they are going to make us all go back in september when the students come back, even if we do not have student facing positions. fuck them

^^ yep, that seems to be the case at more and more universities

I work in a university IT department and unless the president herself swoops in to contravene the direction we're going, we're going to be embracing more hybrid and fully remote workers.

Pretty much everything here is ultimately up to individual departments or units though

Our company seems to be following through on a hybrid plan (the only reason I haven't been recalled to the office yet is that I'm waiting to be issued the company-issued laptop that everyone will apparently be working on from here on out) but after a year and a half of pretty smooth WFH I'm pretty much like 'fuck commuting two hours a day' at this point and looking for something closer to home. What's the point of slogging all the way to the office even 2-3 days a week, is what I'm asking myself. Desperately clinging to old and outmoded ways is inefficient and self-defeating afaict.

destroy the laptop the first day imo

Are you all getting any explanations for the return? I'm curious how much of this is anxiety over not being able to directly supervise people or execs kool-aid drunk on the importance of "office culture" or what Tracer said but disguised somehow or something else. I do think universities are a slightly special case as they have to sell students on the benefits of campus life or universally collapse financially (not that that justifies making the entire staff go in)

silby, that's pretty much what happened where I work. afaik a couple departments had fairly fleshed out wfh policies that were moving forward until the highers up changed their minds and nixed those.

rob, we haven't really been giving other explanations yet beyond vague, "conditions have changed" smoke blowing.

xpost In my case, it's pretty much what others itt have said: direct supervisors understand now that WFH is totally workable and they would grant a lot more flexibility but they've ultimately been stripped of all meaningful decision-making ability by the higher-ups. Middle management seems like a nightmare for a multitude of reasons but I think ostensibly being in a leadership position and still not having the power to make any real changes (the latter being a sitch with which I'm all too familiar) would drive me insane.

yeah I moved up one (1) level in my last real job and had to supervise people, and it was the worst job experience of my life, possibly excepting the knock-off chuck e cheese I worked at in high school

I juuuuust this moment ended my first face-to-face class since March 2020. I'm pretty thrilled -- it went great. Half the students unmasked. I did too. I just recited this bit from my syllabus: "If you are fully vaccinated (i.e. two jabs of Pfizer or Moderna + 2 weeks; one jab of Johnson & Johnson + 2 weeks), you may remove your mask in the classroom; if you are not fully vaccinated, we and the CDC strongly recommend you keep wearing a mask. You may keep your mask on if you still feel comfortable wearing one."

of course, I wish they'd all been masked so I wouldn't have to.

Glad it went well, Alfred!

I kept repeating, "This is why we got jabbed, right?"

"Is That All There Is" plays mournfully

Came up in a convo with someone at my favorite store (the wine store) where both the employees and I are still wearing masks: "I guess I got my MMR and tetanus shots like normal, and I don't go through life fearing getting measles, mumps, or rubella." Still wearing masks.

I went into work for the first time yesterday (voluntarily) for something. Wore a mask in the building and whenever I left my office. No one else in the office wore a mask, though there were only a handful of people there. Didn't stop our CEO (who has been coming into the office for at least several months) from coming into my office and talking to me in relatively close quarters for half an hour.

Maybe the weirdest part was the trapped-in-amber quality of finding post-its and notepads with notes of what I was working on in March 2020.

We're having a company-wide zoom meeting tomorrow to discuss the return to the office, which I understand will be 3 days in-office and 2 days wfh starting the week after July 4. That's about as good as I could expect I guess.

My work announced their plan yesterday as well and it’s quite similar. Return date is September 8th; Mondays and Tuesdays will be work from home option for the whole company, Wednesdays through Fridays will be mandatory in-office for the whole company. I think they said we have 87% fully vaccinated at the NYC office.

Israel starting to see new outbreaks: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-seeing-new-covid-19-outbreak-despite-vaccine-success-2021-6

Off topic from vaccines, but seems like my work is following the pattern I'm seeing in far too many places around here in the past few weeks - talking up a big game about continuing some form of remote work and encouraging hybrid options, only to pull the rug out from everyone at the last minute and decide, "nope, after all we do want butts in seats every day, so plan to get back in the office full-time".

The hybrid model of deciding on two or three days / week to be in the office makes little sense to me. I would prefer it to be situational: I will come in for meetings. But just to sit and work? nah, if I can work at home on a Tuesday I can just as well do the same on Wednesday.

I could see being less productive on my WFH days if I had less of them, because of the inclination to cram a week’s worth of home-related stuff into those two or three days. Better to be able to spread that stuff out. I predict hybrid model will fail quickly. All or nothing.

they've confirmed that the office we thought we were eventually going back to is closing and we'll now be based, hundreds of us, in central London offices that were already over-crowded.

2 or 3 days a week in the office is apparently the new normal, which means lugging the laptop backwards and forwards.

Close the border all you want, the shit's going to be the prevalent strain anyway unless (like the US) you get the vaxx-hesitant off the sidelines.

Two weeks before this, the UK had half the number of cases per capita than the US.

https://i.imgur.com/4FAKUyi.jpg

Two weeks later, as the Delta variant has become the dominant strain, .UK infection rates are now five times higher than the US. Hospitalisations have increased 80%.

https://i.imgur.com/BbnoR5F.jpg

Due to vaccination rates, especially among the elderly, deaths are still low, but rising significantly.

https://i.imgur.com/48D8VBD.jpg

the vaxx-hesitant

Rollout was going at about the same pace this year, but the UK has surpassed the US.

https://i.imgur.com/w9L01j1.jpg

scapegoating the border when all that did was let the variant in

obviously we can't draw any conclusions, but my "actively importing the variant might possibly maybe mean people could potentially get infected with the variant" theory may yet stand up.

still, more money for the police ought to solve it, right?

Any other old messages you wanna dig up?

(re: rollout, you're not wrong, but the landmass and population of the US completely dwarf the UK. That said, I'm hardly defending the US - we're under 1 million doses a day right now)

obviously we can't draw any conclusions, but my "actively importing the variant might possibly maybe mean people could potentially get infected with the variant" theory may yet stand up.

still, more money for the police ought to solve it, right?

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic)

no offense, but what's the point of this

discussing and/or venting rational COVID-19 fears and experiences, iirc. sometimes I find it stressful or depressing when governments or heads of state deliberately pursue policies that will immiserate and kill many thousands of ppl

(neando, I didn't quote a name bcz I just wanted to vent/discuss the topic, not call anyone out. but also imo two weeks is not "old," seventy-six weeks into the pandemic!)

sic, US is not going back into lockdown barring some zombie apocalypse situation where covid victims start rising from the dead.

Even then, R governors would probably welcome covid zombies as sign of the final coming of Christ and give them special tax-exempt status.

Good move, this; let’s see more of it

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/This-Bay-Area-county-sorts-COVID-into-vaccinated-16275590.php

(xp) Zombies vrs Anti-vaxxers, I'd play/watch/vote for this

sic, US is not going back into lockdown

have you tried driving to Canada from either the US or the UK lately

driving to Canada from ... the UK

You go first. We'll watch.

I can get the same result by trying the other one.

They're drowning people in their cars now just for trying to cross the US/Canadian border?! Harsh.

Easier to swim from France to Canada

I've had laryngitis since last Tuesday. the cause was fairly non-controversial - I screamed for two hours while watching a soccer game while also drinking and by the time I got home I could barely speak, and I had to train people all week, so it didn't heal.

but because my paranoid ass googled "COVID laryngitis" and learned about COVID voice, I freaked out and got a COVID test (rapid, one of the two rapid tests approved for international travel). it's negative.

i hate how any time you're not 100%,you always have to worry "is this COVID?"

Just spent all weekend chatting with buddies, yelling over one another, trying to be heard over pouring rain, etc., and my voice is so rough and out of practice from lack of group socializing that I barely made it home able to speak. There's your Covid voice.

Adding to my data points, with each state around here I visit for things - first Wisconsin, then Missouri, just now Michigan - the echo of covid gets dimmer and dimmer and fainter and fainter. Michigan was the first trip where I didn't see a single mask anywhere, not at stores, not out and about, nothing.

Horrid

Tbf, the Wisconsin and Michigan destinations were relatively underpopulated.

Depends. I had a similar experience as Josh, down to the rain. Every man and woman at this 12-person party was jabbed.

So vaccination rates of about 14% probably?