Well, things are getting real now. That’s what I told myself as I waited in a parking lot last week for my turn at the coronavirus test lottery. Positive? Negative? Positively negative?
Mine was a rapid test, so the results came quickly: Negative, but not positively so. Since I had symptoms that could be attributed to COVID-19 – or to seasonal allergies – I was sent home to finish my quarantine.
My, how things have changed in just a few months. Before all this started, my driver-side window was the source of much joy. That’s the portal where nice things like lattes and DQ Blizzards would suddenly appear. On this cold and wet day, the window opened to reveal an other-worldy figure clad in PPE, waiting to poke a stick in my nose.
For which I’m grateful. That’s the lesson we’ve all been learning, sometimes in humbling ways: When to be grateful, when to laugh, when to commiserate, and, hopefully, when to shut the heck up about things we find uncomfortable. It’s just not the time for whining.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for help, or share our feelings. Only that we can’t claim entitlement to special treatment, because none of us is suffering alone. Some people are suffering mightily while others are barely scratched by this situation, but no one has a corner on the misery market right now.
And somehow, that makes me grateful, too. I can’t remember another time when empathy and compassion were so readily at hand. While there are far too many people joining the alarmingly large ranks of homeless, jobless or just plain-less folks who have been impacted by the events of 2020, we seem to be talking about things differently.
News articles, podcasts, radio reports – even reliably bombastic shock jocks have adopted a more generous tone when referring to individuals experiencing hardship. Tugging on one’s own bootstraps is still featured in conversations about personal economic devastation but that’s almost always overlaid with points about the larger picture and systems that aren’t working for people.
Can we bottle this and save it? While more humane discussions don’t solve our problems, it seems like a decent place to start. I’d like to think we could continue on this path, instead of reverting to labeling everyone in a blaming way. In the meantime, and closer to my professional bailiwick, I’m both amused and fascinated by changes wrought by seven months of partial and full quarantine.
My clients tell stories of video interviews with open wine bottles in the frame, or cats coughing up furballs faster than they can hit the mute button. This is just plain funny to me, and something that would never have happened when video processes were more of a special event.
Now, instead of practicing with the setup, and locking out the animals, and sedating the children (just kidding) – now, Zoom-weary candidates iron the front side of a dress shirt and holler “Be quiet” before sitting down wherever the laptop happens to have landed last.
They’re still getting jobs. Not everyone, and not all the time, but it turns out that you can show your human side and still get hired. Who knew?
I’d like to bottle that, too. Interviewers who are less judgmental, candidates who are less anxious, employer expectations that are more human-scale … maybe we could make these qualities take root or spread.
Speaking of human-scale expectations, have you noticed how many people can barely use their technology? Not counting the individuals experiencing the low side of a stubbornly intractable digital gap, I’m astonished to discover accomplished workers struggling with everything from accessing email on their phones to creating pdfs of their resumes to initiating a virtual meeting.
Astonished because a) I’m not the only one and b) somehow the folks in Silicon Valley have made us all feel that way with their relentless upgrades and futuristic advertising. This matters because this cultural ethos influences where employers set the technology bar for job candidates.
Now that virtual-everything is forcing back the curtain, maybe we can recognize that average workers do not come prepackaged with a full range of technology skills. Then we could stop blaming and shaming (ourselves and others) and settle down to solve the problem.
Five more months of semi-lockdown, and we might make some headway there. Or, by default, we could just agree that life’s too short to stress over which version of Microsoft Word you can use.
However things turn out, we’re in this together and I can’t wait to get to the other side of it. When I lower my car window, I want to go back to expecting a treat, not a foot-long Q-Tip headed for my nostril.
