Dear Sam,
I am a Dungeon Master, Teacher, Writer, Nursery Worker,
Atheist. That is in order of importance
to me, but many of them are tied for second place at one time or another. I am not your Number One Fan, but I do listen
to, nay, enjoy listening to your podcast, to the exclusion of all other
podcasts. I like listening to the plight
of Atheists in your country because we are so close to you and yet so far
away. I live in Canada, in Ontario, in
Mississauga, but I have been listening to you from Parry Sound, Toronto, and
Oakville since I started. I feel for you
as I have been perpetually low level depressed from 1979 straight through 2016;
it was a side effect to my version of Autism, but I am much better now. That is not what I wanted to talk about
though. I just wanted to tell you how I
am surviving the Pandemic, as asked.
I have been declared an Essential Worker, paper thin
quasi-legal, if anyone blew on the reason, it would collapse and it would be
gone, but I go to work as required. I do
it because I am recently promoted to be a supervisor and I am charge of the
outside nursery part of the Garden Centre, and I needed to get all the plants
out of hibernation mode and out into the selling place of the Garden Centre and
I am the only person doing that. Then,
they decided to open up the place for curbside pick-up and so my job has been
placed on hold as I do the curbside five days a week and one day a week I do
what I am supposed to be doing, setting up the nursery. If the Social Isolation is ever lifted, I
need to have the place ready to accept customers.
So, in Canada, Social Distancing means approaching no closer
than 2m (6 feet) from every other person except the people that I am living
with. I know, The same thing as in the
US. But we are doing curbside, so that
means there are ten people receiving E-orders and telephone orders, filling the
orders and calling customers to queue at an appropriate time and load their
cars. I am not supposed to touch
customer cars, them, or come within 2m of them, but it does not really
work. People get out of their cars,
People want to go into the Garden Centre, they want to approach us. They speak so quietly that you must lean
closer to hear them, within a meter. They want me to open their trunks. They are young people; they are old people
(mostly older people) and they are other people too. They place their order and rush to get their
product thinking that we can fill it faster than Amazon. People are stupid. Well not Stupid, but oblivious. And . . ..
And, The more that we work together, the ten of us are
getting closer; we are getting to know each other like we never did
pre-pandemic because there were so many other employees, but no I mean we area
actually positionally getting closer.
We, at the start were 2m away at all times, but then there was a narrow
passage between to shelves, there was a counter where two people had to get
something; there were jokes like ‘we held our breath’, but we just
continued. It is not like a grocery
store with wide corridors and a lofty warehouse, well there is a lofty
warehouse, but we area not there. It is
more close. We do our jobs. Our company is giving us Danger Pay, but I am
not sure that that is enough. I am not
sure anyone thinks it is enough, but we go to work. We see 70-80 customers a day, there was
supposed to be a cap of 20, but we have rivals and we have people that just
show up without appointments.
It is not New York City here. It is not Italy. None of our Leaders are remotely as bad as
Donald Trump. The Virus is not in
control: as much as the Provincial Leader wants to promote Business, especially
after two years of slashing health regulations in Long Term Care Facilities and
cutting back on Health Care budgets, but as I said he is not Trump, in the end
although he mirrored Trump in his first years, he has been more solid than
people thought he could be, myself included. He has stated: people before the
economy. But, That is coming to an end,
he is signalling that the Self Isolation is coming to an end.
The numbers: Ontario 11,735 cases, 622 deaths, pop.
13.6M Area 1,076,395 sqkm (415,000 sqmi)
Canada 38,205 cases, 1831 deaths, pop. 37,700,000
I was just giving you a little context for when I am writing
this. Ending the Self Isolation, easing
is a mistake. I do not want this to
continue, but I do not want people to get sick and die. I do not want my parents, who are 73 and 78
to get sick.
How the Nation is doing it.
We have a Social Safety Net. When
we lose out job, we can claim Employment Insurance (50-55%) of our wage with a
ceiling of about $1200/month. With the
Virus the Prime Minister has said that for the next 4 months anyone* that is
out of work due to the virus can collect $2000/month. And the roll out has been swift as he
promised and everyone, I heard applied got money within a day and it keeps
coming. Win!! Companies that lose more than 25% due to the
virus can apply to the government and the government will reimburse 75% of the
payroll. So they don’t need to lay
anyone off. Things are good that
way. Teachers, who had been fighting the
provincial government for months in contract talks continued to talk and the
province in the face of the pandemic seemed to come to their senses about
increasing classroom sizes and quietly settled and worked out a deal so they
could concentrate on the big problems.
School has been out since our March break start on
My partner has two children, they are 13 and 16. They are coping well. The boy plays computer games all day and
hopefully does his Grade 8 online work.
The older one does her online work just before it is due at 11:59pm
every day and reads the rest of the day.
She is not allowed to see her Girlfriend at all. This she does not like very much at all, but
you cannot tell. Their father lives here
too, he works for a company based in New York and they implemented lock down
procedures much earlier. He cannot date,
because of social distancing. The best
he got was a social distance date/walk and Zoom Dates.
My partner works from home and can treat her clients with
Zoom meetings. She misses seeing her
friends face to face at her BNI meetings.
Her business is suffering as her clients are tightening their belts as they
are reducing their hours and income. Too
bad, she treats people’s stresses and anxieties. A few people are suffering more these days
because of having to live in proximity with their spouse 24/7. She is building an online course that she can
make a little more money and help others out also, all her trade shows that she
had spent money on have been cancelled.
She keeping busy, though.
I am building a data base so that I can see all the products
that are available at a moments glance for the nursery. I am busyish.
I wish I were playing more Dungeons and Dragons. I had three games going on in my life, but no
one wants to play online, they only want to meet in person. One includes a couple of ADHD people, and one
is something I threw together to keep people in touch over the Winter. The Last one is a more recent gaming group, a
bunch of people that are older than me who have been playing since the early
1980s. It is the human element that
people like from games like D&D. That
is what is missing in these days, the Human Element.
Oh, I am riding my Bike to work most days now. It eats up time and I get some good exercise,
also it means that my partner is not driving me there and coming in the evening
to get me, four trips. The buses are
practicing social distancing too, rear boarding and thus free trips. It is funny, right now transit is the price
that it should be. but no one uses it for fear or because they are not
working. Oh, I should add
Environmentalist right before Dungeon Master.
People are driving too much these days because they are bored, but
pollution is down everywhere, and the price of gasoline is lower than it has
been in decades. Pollution down is what
I am happy most about. It is time that
we make permanent changes to society. Flatten
the curve on CO2 production!!
I want this to be over.
But I do not want this to be over before it is over for good. Working with the public as I am, I feel that
every little ache and pain, headache, muscle tension, sniffle is a sign that I
am sick and a carrier of the virus. I know
that before, back in the before times, that this was part of being alive, but
right now I am hypervigilant to the contact that I have with people. I see the coffee shop person press the lid of
my tea with his hand and in my head I ask, “When was the Last time that he
washed his hands, when was the last time that he touched his face,” My lips then brush the place where his hand
just was and I drink from my tea. The
Cashier at the convenience store, that has been deemed essential because it has
food in it. She is Chinese, she is
wearing a mask. I ask her how she is
doing? I bought a snickers bar and a
lottery ticket, but that was the excuse, so that I could ask how she was
doing. Her smile touched her eyes above
her mask. I chatted so very briefly at
the coffee shop to the man who pressed his hands down on the lid where my lips
would brush. I think of it not as buying
a tea but saying hi to another human and touching their mind.
Hi Sam. How are you
doing? I love listening to what is
happening In the Seattle Region, in the Obtuse Triangle, with those silly
people who seem to want to spread this virus around. I hope You and Becky are safe and well. Have a good evening.
from the Internet.
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