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DickParasite posted:Covid made me realize there's a 6th stage of grief. Call it the "lol/lmao" stage. It's when you've been at acceptance for a while, but you're surrounded by people still in denial. "Crack........ ping!
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Jul 16, 2023 21:44
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 21:07 |
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I still distinctly remember the moment in April of 2020 when one of the managers rounded up all the student workers and told them "No one is going to lose their job." They all lost their jobs. But the entire student body was ordered off campus and sent home to Zoom University, so it's not like they could keep working even if they wanted to. Us townie scum who just plain work here had a different arrangement. The university administration wanted to lay us all off but the unions reminded them we have a contract and that violating it would probably be a lot more expensive than just keeping us on the payroll for however long this thing was going to last. Made a lot more sense for the groundskeepers, repairmen, maintenance, but for us dining hall cooks it was kind of awkward. They refused to pay us to stay home, so we had to come to work every day, with no customers to serve, and mostly just... sit there. We cleaned the ever-living gently caress out of that kitchen, wrapped everything in plastic, closed our doors, and then went across campus to mostly just sit there at the other dining hall. Since this was technically a large gathering of people, we were required to mask up and stay at least six feet from each other. We spread the dining room tables out so we had plenty of room. Volunteers would make the family meal. Then we'd take off our masks and eat some pretty god drat good Mexican food every single day. I got chubby for the first time in my life. And I was also sitting there thinking "The six feet rule is actually based on nonsense, we know transmission can go much further than that, and we've all taken our masks off for an hour to eat and yell at each other. This is kind of dumb." I found some nice hiding spots to eat by myself. After a couple weeks of this, I decided to go for a walk. There was literally nothing now for me to do at the dining hall, so I thought I'd explore campus. I slipped out unnoticed and only came back to eat lunch or clock out. The school was a ghost town. Various species had begun claiming the abandoned architecture. The art building in particular had been absolutely overtaken by a massive flock of some kind of noisy bird. I climbed every publicly accessible staircase on campus. I enjoyed this week and a half, all alone, getting paid to walk around in the sun and appreciate the different decades of architecture. The 70's were so weird. There's stuff from World War 2. Somebody ratted me out. My chef gave me the third degree. "THIS... THIS IS A WORKPLACE!" But at the end of it, he leveled with me and basically said look, we don't know what the hell's gonna happen, we don't know how long this bizarre situation will last, and we just wanna see that everybody is okay and employed, so please just come in, follow the rules, do nothing, and clock out at the end of the day like we're all doing. My little adventure did give him the idea that the guys should probably go outside and get some fresh air though, as long as they're accompanied by a manager. Crews started going on guided tours around campus and even down to the beach. One day in the winter me and five or six other cooks were strolling along the beach. Heavy fog rolled in. I couldn't see ten feet in front of me. Maybe five. I was at the back of the pack, walking slowly, letting the rest of them move away. I thought to myself, "What if this is it? What if I just silently have a heart attack right here? They won't even notice. They'll be back to the building before they realize I'm missing. They won't find my body on the beach with this fog, the tide will come up and take me out." I don't know why I thought that. I guess that since so many other people were fading away, maybe I should too. One day our managers' manager came by to let us all know the plan. There was no plan. He had no idea what was going to happen next and nobody above him had answers. He later spent some insane percentage of our total budget on takeout containers and was yelled at until he quit. But we probably have one of the largest stockpiles of compostable takeout containers in the world now, so... That's nice. One of our cooks died of Covid. The guy who was taking the least precautions before the vaccines were available. Rest in peace, Martin, you racist rear end in a top hat. Eventually, our absolute mensch of a boss hatched a scheme to save all our jobs. An anonymous wealthy benefactor had donated a food budget to us, you see, so that we could cook some really nice meals for several local charities. Those of us with CDL's would deliver them. I forget the exact number of meals we were producing per day but it was a pretty big operation. And I know that it was reaching people because my daily bike commute took me by one of the local parks that had become a tent city. People were eating the stuff we made. That tent city would later be rapidly and violently cleared out by the police so that the parents of the returning frat boys wouldn't have to see poverty while helping their kids move Ikea couches into their apartments. Anyway... I'm almost certain it was our mensch of a boss who donated the food budget himself. He's the university's executive chef now. After America got vaccinated everybody came back to campus, we re-opened our operation for service, masks were mandatory for a little while, we had an app you had to use every morning to say you didn't have symptoms, blah blah blah, life returned to something resembling normal. Our staffing level never quite got back to where it should be. Some people retired or quit and didn't get replaced. Back when we were doing nothing, I began bringing my laptop to work and keeping a journal. I'll look through it and see if there was anything that might amuse this thread.
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Jul 17, 2023 00:50
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That was a good read thank you for sharing. Could you bring books to work when nothing was happening? Seems like an idea kindle situation especially if the university wifi was available. I'd be lying if I said I caught up on my reading backlog. Mostly browsed these forums. Other guys were on their phones, a few books were read.
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Jul 17, 2023 17:48
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Rad-daddio posted:...I wonder where she is now. I remember a news report from April 2020 showing loads of panicked people in a grocery store stocking up, thinking they'd be locked in their homes for months. One large old graybeard had affixed pool floaty tubes to his head, pointing outwards in all directions, yelling, "I'm immunocompromised! Please stay six feet from me!" Not a mask in sight because they generally weren't widely commercially available, the government had forgotten to replenish the emergency stockpile years before, and the official line at that moment was "You don't even need a mask, in fact they'd be bad for you because they'd cause you to touch your face, which is how we're saying you catch Covid right now." Trump complained that he missed touching his face. An NFL team owner clandestinely flew in a supply of masks while dodging government agents who were trying to corner the market at the behest of the president's son-in-law. It was all so insane. And the average person has completely forgotten it. All that chaos and the result was a pile of dead people and an increase in police funding. Back To Normal.
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Jul 21, 2023 18:32
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I've become a worse driver, personally. So... sorry. I'm one of those people.
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Jul 22, 2023 23:58
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redshirt posted:Worse like slower, or faster? Just making stupid common sense failures that I never made before.
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Jul 23, 2023 04:24
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SulfurMonoxideCute posted:"well, your body can fix itself if you will it to" "Cure the mind, cure the body" was supposed to be a political metaphor! 
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Jul 24, 2023 01:10
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Disrobing? Flair?
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Jul 27, 2023 01:20
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 21:07 |
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Tellaris posted:Also making the same drive most days for the last 15 years and I've gone from seeing a flabbergasting maneuver from someone maybe once a week to several a day. In the last month I have experienced two people driving on the wrong side of the road, one guy driving through a red light (swerving through cross traffic), and one person plowing into a bunch of construction cones that were blocking off one lane on a straight road with no visual blockers. Also a LOT more super aggro drivers, tailgating and swerving through traffic at high speeds. We're going to have the zombie apocalypse but instead of slow or fast zombies, they'll be rear end in a top hat zombies.
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Aug 5, 2023 02:38
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