The Coronavirus Complexities

OK, coronavirus is affecting my life.

 

No, I’m not sick and no one I know personally is sick.


However, the virus is here in North Carolina with at least two cases about 30 miles from the Fortress of Ineptitude.


Nope, check that. First case of Covid19 here in the same county, an employee at a company located maybe 8 miles from here.


The circle draws in tighter still. 

 

Meanwhile, I am on mandated work from home. I’ve been set up to work from home for some time and having been doing so about 2 or 3 days a week.


Now, it’s all week and will be for who knows how long.

 

My company issued lap tops for those who can work from home. This makes the process of working in the office or working from home fairly flexible. I can just unhook my lap top from it’s docking station in my office at work and I can then work from anywhere.

 

My wife’s work is looking for volunteers to work from home. Her employer is less prepared for that sort of initiative. Each desk is still hooked up to a CPU. To work from home, a tech person has to break down her computer then come into our home to set it up again. It is not very flexible and seems to me as a very unwieldy process. It’s like a You Tuber doing their thing on a cable access channel. 

 

Andrea really doesn’t want to work from home. Besides, I’m already using the best available space in our home for working from home.


OK, scratch that. Andrea is being told to she has to work from home. Better find some more room in the ol' Fortress.

 

Randie’s spring break from college has been extended to March 23. Once that’s over she’ll be learning from home with classes resuming as best they can online.

And we just got word that Randie needs to move her stuff out of the residence hall by next week. Her college is shutting down dorms and residential services for the rest of the semester.


So that's a thing we have to deal with now. 


All three of us will be in the house the whole damned day.

 

Randie and I do abscond from the Fortress Of Ineptitude for lunch. But we’re not eating out. Various establishments in and about the area have stopped inside dining with only take out and drive thru options available.


Yesterday, the governor made it official: North Carolina restaurants are closed for inside dining but can be open for take out and drive thru.

 
Our family may have eaten out for the last time for awhile. We went out for a late lunch on Sunday. The restaurant had patrons dispersed far apart from each other. And I observed staff in a continual state of wiping down surfaces.

 

Our church suspended services and other gatherings for two weeks.

 

So I am being told to stay home and not interact with other people? Hell, I was already doing that.

 

The most annoying impact of the current coronavirus crisis has been panic buying.

 

It’s all over the news and on social media. Shelves where toilet paper should be are laid bare.

 

Ditto for paper towels.

 

And bottled water.

 

And bread. Our local grocery store ran out of bread two days ago. I’m hoping by the time this posts, they will have restocked their shelves. Because we are out of bread. We have NO bread. We need bread. People who have stocked up their pantries with bread they don’t need have the bread.

 

Even rye bread was gone. How bad are things that someone actually bought rye bread? Really?

 

And milk. I haven’t seen milk so picked over since the last time there was a prediction that it could possibly might maybe snow. We do have milk but we had to resort to 1% milk which is what Randi and I call “milk water”. I know, I know, how we do suffer so.

 

Anyway, that’s life here at the Fortress of Ineptitude in this, the time of coronavirus.

 

Outside our environs, life goes on but it’s all crazy. The stock market keeps crashing.

 

And Donald Trump still doesn’t have a clue. He’s calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” because he’s a racist fat fuck.  And he gives himself a 10 out of 10 for how he’s handling the coronavirus crisis even as the availability of tests for the population remains woefully inadequate. 

 

These days, sometimes life feels surreal. This can’t be possibly happening.

 

Other times, it feels almost apocalyptic, like things can only get worse and they will.

 

Seriously, we have no idea how things will turn out. We can only try as best we can to cope with the here and now, taking each day as it comes.

 

In the meantime, all we can do, the best we can do, is to try and be good to one another.