True Confessions

Human Connection: The Little Things

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This past weekend I finally got the chance to return a holiday gift. With all the pandemics, restricted capacities, and bad weather, it took a while. I hit the bathroom before driving home. On my way out of the restroom, I noticed a woman sitting by the entrance. A pile of shopping bags formed a small arc around her body.

In passing I remarked it looked like she’d had a good day. Perhaps smiles could have been exchanged, had we been unmasked. It was exactly the kind of small, meaningless, yet somehow fulfilling exchange that’s been absent for so many months. I actually hadn’t noticed it was missing until I did it. I walked to my car musing about the many missed random, pleasantries. And how many remain unspoken because people are afraid of spraying aerosols through their masks. Or perhaps people don’t say them as often because we’re all masked and that conceals part of the communication. Plus it’s super hard to understand some people through a mask.

When I lived in NYC, talking was a fine art. Networking meant everything. You never knew who you would meet when, or how a single interaction might impact your life. I could hear a whole life’s story on a long subway ride home. Or hear something funny, strange, bizarre and quintessentially New York, anywhere, at any time.

Coincidentally, I also read an article about the life line group texts/chats had become during the pandemic. I had been part of various group chats throughout the pandemic. But just like in real life, the thread petered out. A new chat started. However, many gaps that normally would have been filled with the occasional in-person outing, were missing. The deficit was too much to satisfy with a string of text and a few uploaded photos. It was something, but it just wasn’t the same.

When we emerge from the heavy part of this pandemic, there will be a new normal. I just hope it still includes these small, random exchanges. I feel starved for them.

Digital Dilemma

Snow Days

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Last week we had a blizzard. It coincided with the first day back for schools to resume in-person learning. Schools had been teaching remotely following the holiday. The day started out stormy with lots of fast-falling snow. The kind that you know is going to last for a while. A few hours later, it was declared a blizzard due to the high winds and white-out conditions.

Some school regions opted for a real snow day. One of those rare, unplanned days off in the winter. I remember those days fondly, waking up early to listen for closures on the radio. Then happily falling back into a cozy slumber before waking up to play in the snow all day. I’m sure my parents did not share my opinion. Though my father was a high school teacher, so maybe he also appreciated the “free” day.

Other school regions, however, opted to keep up the virtual learning for one more day. I felt sad for those students. Denied a “free” day off to be warm and cozy or to play in the fresh snow during daylight hours.

It was the same reality for us in the office. At one meeting someone mentioned the “snow day” for their kids. Somebody joked back, “I wish we had a snow day.” Suddenly a new aspect of working remotely all the time hit me. No snow days. We were like those kids in the unfortunate school regions that decided the students would “go” to school, no matter what.

Almost 20 years ago, when I lived in New York City, I recall struggling to get to work during a terrible snow storm. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it was a snow emergency. I rode the subway and plowed my way to work through drifts of snow up to my thighs at some points. When I arrived, the offices were closed. Nobody told me about the special hotline to call and check for these things. Twenty years ago, things were done differently. But we still got a snow day once in a while.

It seems those days are over. Even if we do return to the office on a more full-time basis, we all know we can switch to remote instantly. And for as long as necessary.

Digital Dilemma, True Confessions

Pandemic Failures: Testing

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Almost two years into the pandemic and testing has failed, as Omicron surges. Where I live, we can’t get tests. This includes PCR and rapid antigen tests. To clarify, testing is available for a limited group of people who meet strict criteria.

For the rest of us, we’ve been told to assume every symptom is covid and to self-isolate for 5 days. This includes headaches, sniffles, runny noses, and more serious symptoms. However, without testing to confirm, how can we know if we’ve actually had covid? If I get a runny nose, or a headache, four times this winter, how can I know if I had covid one of those times? Or maybe none of those times? Or maybe I had it more than once? Each time, I’m assuming and self-isolating, as instructed. What about the people who don’t have jobs where they can work from home?

More importantly, people who have symptoms and don’t have covid, will be delaying treatment. For example, a friend of mine had to keep her kid home from daycare due to an outbreak. After four days her kid still had a temperature. She was finally able to take the kid to the doctor and found out the fever was from an ear infection. Did her kid start out with covid that turned into an ear infection? She’ll never know.

Rapid tests aren’t readily available. If they are, they cost hundreds of times more what they cost to produce (e.g., $40 for one test at the pharmacy). It’s obnoxious to be price gouging for a thing like this during a severe outbreak.

Schools were closed for the first weeks in January. They’re open today, but the province has already declared they won’t be tracking covid outbreaks in schools. Instead they’ll report absences, but without qualifying what the absences are from.

When I blogged about problems with testing last year, it was about the trouble booking them. Now the problem is we can’t get them. Without testing, there’s no tracking. Without tracking, there’s no accurate data to actually know who got infected, or when. It’s all based on assumption. Personally, I’d like to know if the headache and malaise I experienced last week after a known exposure was covid. Maybe I got lucky with mild symptoms. Then again, maybe it was just a headache and pandemic fatigue. I’ll never know.

Uncategorized

The 450th Posting

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It always feels good to hit another milestone with The Deletist. Throughout the pandemic adhering to my three, simple blog rules has felt like a real feat. In other ways it’s been a touchpoint and an anchor for me. We’ve all faced so many life-changing disruptions the past two years. Even so, The Deletist still gets posted every Monday, 400 words or less.

Reflecting on my posts over the past year, a few distinct themes emerged. Not surprisingly, many blogs focused on technology and the new ways it’s consuming our lives due to lockdowns, distancing, and isolation protocols. Interestingly, it seemed for every way technology is helping us through this tough time, it’s also hindering us. Read more about this in Bad Tech vs. Bad with Tech or The Infodemic vs. the Pandemic. Almost two years into Covid, the disinformation and misinformation is at least as dangerous as the disease itself. Social media exacerbates the situation, combined with the mob mentality.

Naturally, there have been a lot of disappointments with how poor some tech still remains, such as my experience getting my driver’s license renewed or filling out online forms.

And of course, who could overlook the advances made with all the realities: augmented, virtual, and meta. Last year I attended my first VR Conference, complete with an avatar and my first augmented reality art show. This inspired a new segment of the Technombie series about a first grader attending virtual school. Mommy Marsupial features its own brand of altered reality by exploring the wonderful world of gene editing, a continuation of last year’s post, Mommy Three Arm.

The pandemic has separated us and brought us together in ways we never expected. All of a sudden, Lunching with friends feels both ordinary and exotic. Or the Exhilaration of re-experiencing something again after so many months of lockdown. Or read my thoughts on how we thrive in Adaptation: Clever Like the Fox.

If you’ve had enough tech to last you a lifetime, change the pace and call someone. Relive the joy of Phone Calls: The Old-Fashioned Way of communicating with someone. Or marvel in The Universality of the Junk Drawer. That’s probably the most low tech thing I can think of.

Junk Drawer

Enjoy!

Human Archives

Reclamation

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Pelican Flying

Like many people, my life was hit hard by the pandemic. My two decades-long hobbies halted abruptly. Swimming and playing in orchestra are my two life lines, both regular fixtures in my life for over twenty years.

I began lap swimming in the 1990’s to rehabilitate my leg after an accident. Instead of physiotherapy, I used to swim three times a week. After two years my leg was healed and I had a new routine. When the pandemic hit, followed by waves of severe lock downs, it was impossible to find an open pool. After avoiding pools, and public places in general, I finally dusted off my swim cap. I found a few public pools with lap hours that fit my schedule. I made a plan to go once a week, starting slow at first. Then Omicron.

I started ensemble playing practically the same week I started playing bassoon in the 1980’s. The two are inseparable in my mind. Practicing by myself is lonely without the thought that orchestra would be a possibility again. I reached out to a local orchestra and discovered there might be an opening for me starting this year. Then Omicron. Now I’m not sure if there will be more delays.

The constant starting and stopping of my beloved routines has been disruptive. When the pandemic started, it was hard to not to fixate on all the things I couldn’t do. Things I loved so dearly. Slowly, over time, without realizing, I found new ways to reclaim the missing parts of my life. It happened quietly and with an imperceptible detection. In fact, I didn’t realize what had happened until I was preparing holiday gifts for my friends.

This year I made homemade granola for everyone. Some even had raisins I made myself in my dehydrator. All of a sudden I realized my new hobby, and passion, had become food preservation. I’ve always hated food waste. I suppose since we started bulk buying groceries to avoid frequent trips to the grocery store, we were no longer able to finish everything before it went bad. My first project was learning how to dehydrate fruit. Now I’m about to expand production to homemade yogurt.

In this small way, I’ve been able to reclaim some of the many things lost, or missing, due to the pandemic.

Digital Dilemma, True Confessions

It’s Just Math

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Against my better judgement, I went to a store on Christmas Eve to buy something. It wasn’t a gift, but something I wanted to start using over the extended break. When I entered the store, a worker informed me the computers were down. She explained I could either put my items on hold and pick them up later, when the machines were working. Or go through the manual process.

I think I was the first sale of the day. I placed my items on the counter amidst a flurry of activity. Someone whipped out a paper receipt pad. Another person started muttering about the back-up manual. I didn’t think too much of it, until I saw the cashier. I don’t want to seem ageist, but this particular cashier was from a generation where kids are no longer taught the basics and fine art of math. Smart phone out, she looked ready. Luckily, a more senior cashier stepped in. The first cashier didn’t even know how to figure out sales tax.

To add to the complication, there were two separate tax charges. A lower tax (5%) for the clothing and a higher one (13%) for the other item. Through my mask and the heavy, plexi-glass partition, I told the younger cashier she could add 13% right on her calculator to figure out the sales tax. The other cashier was using a different method (amount x 1.13), from an earlier era when we had to do math in our head and knew how to make change without using a machine. Either way, it should have worked.

I checked the receipt. The 13% tax was wrong. I mentioned the tax was lower than it should have been. In the background I could hear the other workers discussing they should just close for the day. The senior cashier was saying one thing (the right total) and writing another (the wrong tax). With the confusion sorted out, she walked away as I paid. I pointed out that while charged the correct amount, this was not reflected on the receipt and could the cashier please fix it.

Instead of adjusting the receipt, the cashier carefully and painstakingly copied by hand the barcode numbers, amounts, different taxes, etc. onto a new receipt. The result: right total, wrong tax. Again! I collected my purchases and the freshly, written receipt and walked out, remaining silent beneath my mask.