Hello, Goodbye, COVID
The following article was written in March of 2021. It describes how I was feeling about COVID at the time.
Welcome to the new normal everyone. More than a year into the global pandemic where time stopped and we were asked to stay home and stay in place unless your job was deemed essential.
Working from home for a global ice cream brand with cartoon cows and bold statements about dismantling white supremacy left me with a lot of questions and few clear answers. Why did I feel so much pressure and demand to respond, react, and be online tethered to my laptop, and multiple screens, in order to make sure people could find ice cream on the internet during a global pandemic? A year into this more than 2.5 million people have died. It felt like work was always a bit of burning fire and during the first few weeks of March into April last year we poured gasoline onto our inboxes, Microsoft Teams chats, and outlook calendars, and for what reason?
Last I checked we’re not doctors or nurses. We do not manufacture PPE. We make ice cream with chocolate peace signs and support issues like marriage equality, and immigration reform.
“We offer a premium product at a price point our fans love” said the CMO during one of our many back-to-back video calls. “We’ve survived recessions before, but we don’t know if we’re pandemic proof.”
Despite COVID shutting down nearly all retail scoop shop locations for most of the year, grocery stores, especially grocery stores in America where people went out and bought a month’s worth of food in a day, turned out pretty good for premium ice cream from New England. Sports were canceled and people couldn’t find toilet paper on shelves in the supermarket or online.
“When’s this going to be over?” I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but I recall a version of the question being raised repeatedly during every global monthly town hall meeting of the past 12 months.
In my mind the question was hilarious for two reasons:
First, if anyone knew the answer to “when is this going to end”, would it be someone working on ice cream or for a global consumer packaged goods company? And yet someone always posed this query and it often was thumb’s upped to the top of the Q&A list.
Remember America, we don’t value folks like infectious disease experts, not in our capitalist center or in the midst of a global pandemic. In America viruses are treated more like a political and ideological topics to be debated rather than worthy of professionals whose life’s work is dedicated to eradicating disease.
Second, while part of me wants to hold space for the brave soul who asks each meeting when’s the pandemic going to be over, it reminds me of the child in the car who asks every 30 seconds into a 12-hour road trip if we’re there yet? While looking out the car window reveals we’re still stuck in traffic on the turnpike. These are adults and the answer is obvious. No one knows when the pandemic will be over and we can all go back to normal.
Also, we’re not ever going back.
Remember bagel Friday’s at the comfy couches Rusty asked during one of our daily 9:30 AM video conference calls.
Rusty has been working from home for more than a year with his wife Samantha and their four children. Two teenaged boys and two young girls who are not yet school aged. His daughter shares drawings of Disney princesses she’s made during some of our video calls.
Is it better or worse to be working from home for a year with two kids who are not old enough to be tethered to a laptop for “school”? School in quotes is appropriate in this case because science has said no one is learning anything in “school” at this time.
Rusty continued, “Yeah, remember you’d walk over to the pile of bagels, like bobbing for apples out of the large brown paper bags and reach into one of them with your dirty mits to cut it in half. Then chuck the other half back on the pile for someone else to pick up with their bare hands.”
Can you imagine? A time when we’re all back at the office, eating bagels in front of the big windows sitting at the comfy couches? Me either.
Burned toaster bagels aside, the pandemic directed a spotlight on a whole bunch of things I was doing, that lead me to question, what am I doing?
Hello 40 and goodbye 30s. Ryan and I planned a July 4th-dieth joint birthday party that was cancelled in the turmoil and disruption of COVID. Who cares about birthday parties when 2.5 million people have died? Also, we know how to mitigate the risks if we chose to and are permitted the time and space to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe.
I signed Ryan and I up for Meals on Wheels delivery in October of last year at the encouragement from work to give back during this time of great need. Vermont is old and there are many seniors living here isolated and disconnected especially during the pandemic. Each week I have the pleasure of masking up and delivering a meal, a milk and a brown or a white bag (brown for heart healthy, white for diabetic) to 15 or so neighbors. Believe me they look and sound better after holidays or visits from loved ones and neighbors and look less well in the weeks in between annual celebrations.
We’ve cleared ramps of snow and filled humidifiers to combat Vermont’s dry heat.
These interactions included us in the first round of vaccine distribution as a result of volunteering with 94 year old Vermonters who live alone. A few weeks ago ahead of the one year anniversary Ryan and I are fully vaccinated and continue to volunteer each week with peace of mind knowing we are safer at this time and our neighbors are too.
