The Corona Chronicles Part III: Emptiness With a View

Being an introvert doesn’t mean I’m not prone to cabin fever. I like to be out and about just to enjoy the fresh air and get my own distorted thoughts together. All things considered, the form of cabin fever this epidemic has thrown at me hasn’t been that bad. I’ve suffered worse forms of it living in my native city of Buffalo, New York. Buffalo is famous for its gigantic winter storms; a foot of snow is routine there. Storms which drop 18-24 inches of snow will happen five or six times every winter. And there are at least three or four times in my life when the snow piled up to at least five feet. THOSE storms were brutal, because they meant truly being trapped inside for days at a time. Even if you’re the type of person who walks outside multiple times during a winter storm to clear the sidewalk and driveway, there’s still going to be a good two or three day wait for the snow trucks to physically remove the snow and take it somewhere out of the neighborhood. Until then, you’ve got two or three days of doing nothing but drinking beer and watching football.

In the coronavirus pandemic, I can still go outside. Hell, I’ve seen ads promoting social distancing which have been saying we can go outside, so long as we keep to the six-foot rule. I’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather to go out and walk, but the difference between walking after a five-foot snowfall and walking in the coronavirus apocalypse has been rather unsettling. After a hard storm, when enough of the snow was taken away, going back outside was an invitation back to life. The neighbors could usually be seen outside shoveling the front sidewalk and driveway and digging their cars out. With the recession and removal of the snow, you could always see the neighborhood slowly spark its way back to life. Everyone was back on the streets walking their dogs and driving out to the store like every other winter day. The stores opened back up one by one like nothing had happened. This pandemic has shown me the exact opposite. I’m not trapped, but going outside is futile because I’ve been watching a total shutdown right from my first day on furlough. 

In the days before my furlough began, the buses stopped taking fares. Then they started telling riders to get on and off strictly through the back doors. Right on my first day of furlough, I went to the DSHS office to apply for SNAP benefits. The office was pretty barren, but there were people there, and all the agents necessary were there to help. Getting SNAP benefits, though, required signatures from people where I work, and getting those signatures took me a couple of days. Those two days were the window the DSHS office needed to decide having people physically come in was dangerous, so when I returned with the form, they told me to put it in a nearby mailbox. At this point, things didn’t look like they would be so bad. Social distancing was easy because people were staying home, but most of the places I personally enjoyed going were still open, and the buses were still running a full schedule. Within a week, I had visited a mall that was damn near empty, bought a $3 video game I had been interested in, and looked in local stores for a decent book to get through my furlough. I was ALMOST enjoying myself. 

My free explorations around the area, though, proved to be revealing. When I dropped by my workplace to pick up my paycheck and get the signatures I needed for DSHS, tape had been placed on the floor to mark the safe distances between the customers and service reps. A few days after that, my usual grocery store started asking customers to stand in line outside. When protective glass started appearing in stores, I noticed. And those were the best-case places. In my own life, I had a dental appointment to get a botched filling taken care of in early April. That was moved to early May, and I’m pretty sure THAT is also going to get moved. 

Within a couple of weeks, society had fallen to emptiness. My next visit to the local mall ended with me walking off after a sign in the door said they were complying with social distancing. A lot of other places I would have gone just to kill time were also closing up shop. The stores in the cross-street strip mall started reducing their hours before just saying “screw it” and closing up one by one. The Gamestop cut its hours to 12-4 PM or something like that, and only let people in by appointment. Then they closed. Another Castle only let six customers in at a time before closing. The last time I checked my favorite comic store, it was doing streetside pickups two days per week. Half-Price Books jumped straight to closing. My favorite Friday Game Night spot, Otherworlds, was ironically forced into staying open. The place was preparing to close for good in April before the owner apparently decided he could keep it going for one more month so his regulars could say goodbye. Eventually, the bus started running on a part time schedule too. First, the buses started restricting the seats passengers could sit in. Then the service cutbacks started; one bus per hour here and there, then one bus per day in either direction in some places. 

The irony in this, of course, is that with all of the usual crowds out of the way, the infrastructure itself was revealed for the mess that it is. If there’s a telecommuting infrastructure in place which enables a very significant number of tech workers to keep home offices, it’s going to raise a few questions: WHY would someone sit for an hour on the I-5 to fight traffic on the way to an office? Why are eight-hour workdays insisted upon when a lot of workers don’t have eight hours of work to do? If buses can take passengers places without fares, why aren’t they doing that more often, and why are poor people ticketed and arrested for not being able to pay? And for that matter, there are a lot of OTHER questions worth thinking over as well: Why would anyone want a health plan which tied to an employer that could lay them off and deny them coverage in the middle of a time when they would NEED that coverage? Why are workers who are considered essential denied sick pay so they’re forced to work and possibly make customers sick? Why is it that we find ourselves suddenly having a hard time finding supplies in the vaunted land of plenty? Yeah, this pandemic has made the mighty invisible hand visible. Turns out the hand is a rotten zombie hand which is trying to choke everyone to death. 

The one place I’ve seen everything slowly coming back to life is in the grocery stores, and most of them still aren’t heavy on essential supplies. It took me two weeks to get my hands on the vitamin C supply I needed. As for the infamous toilet paper stocking fiasco, people seem to have finally woken up to the fact that a tool shed of TP is probably not the first thing they should concern themselves with buying for an apocalypse. I should note, though, that grocery stores aren’t facing their usual crowds, either. And even they have their own restrictions to deal with: Standing spots in the checkout lines are marked by tape, and don’t expect to take advantage of any free samples. 

Seattle itself looks like a setup shot from The Walking Dead. I sometimes like to hop the bus and drop in just to see how everything is holding up. And, well, everything is still there. I watch the skateboarders at Westlake Park; it’s not like anyone can climb around on the little playground rides, since they’re all blocked off by Police tape. There are occasional cafes – mostly the independent places that can’t afford to close – offering takeout food. On a recent stroll I saw a couple of bicycle messengers walk in and out of King County Courthouse. Seattle City Hall is apparently open, but inaccessible by the general public. There are plenty of people out on daily walks, but the hollow appearance of Seattle’s business and commercial districts is revealing a lot of the people and things that Seattle’s One Percenters prefer not to think about. The tent villages near Pioneer Square and the International District still exist, and any random passerby is prone to ask for a handout. God forbid you should be on a walk and find yourself in need of a bathroom. Seattle’s lack of public restrooms was a problem before, but getting that takeout coffee now is a bad idea unless you’re rushing straight home.

I’m hard pressed to think of anyone fortifying their homes to prepare for a zombie horde, even though fortifying a home would be a decent way to pass the time. Hopefully, though, it won’t get to that point. I personally still have a sizable collection of video games to beat and movies and TV shows to watch before I start pouring a concrete bunker. 

The Corona Chronicles Part II: Paper Labyrinth

When the coronavirus started really making the rounds in early March, none of my coworkers thought anything of it. We played and joked the way we usually did. The idea that a virus was going to cause some giant standstill was absurd – we had seen how far older viruses like SARS and Ebola had gotten, after all, and that wasn’t very far. So the collective mood around work after the first week was that this whole thing was gonna blow over and be forgotten like all the rest of them. Management seemed to be taking it a bit more seriously, though, and in the space of two weeks, there had been two meetings about it within my department to give the employees new directives about how to act and what to do to avoid spreading the virus and becoming infected. 

While my coworkers weren’t concerning themselves over the coronavirus, though, all of us noticed that our lack of concern didn’t translate to our customers lacking concern. The people of Seattle had gotten an early start shutting themselves in. While that cut our commute times by over half, it also meant the customers were slowing to a trickle. That, in turn, meant the employees were coming in for nothing, which suddenly meant cutbacks in hours. Our amusement over the coronavirus turned into fear upon realizing that work could simply stop for several of us. And in the second half of March, I was pulled aside and told I was being put on standby. Now let me be clear: I still have my job. I still have access to all the benefits that go with it. But they’re not going to be able to let me work until there’s, you know, real work for me to do, which means I’m not going to be able to go in and earn money. My paid time off was enough to cover a couple of weeks, but that’s not what you would call consistent. So a few days after my furlough began, three of the company higher-ups called me personally and said I should take an unemployment claim so I could wait this thing out. 

Thus began my journey through the magical world of bureaucratic paper trails! When I received my standby notice, people everywhere were coming to the realization that this virus was going to slow things down for awhile and applying for their benefits en masse. Not only that, but the government workers who work the front lines of the welfare system were already staying home. I was stuck doing everything online, which meant I couldn’t turn to the worker in front of me and ask if I would be considered a laborer or a materials handler. The day my standby began, I was down at the DSHS office to apply for EBT benefits. The agent who helped me fill out the form said he needed me to get some information from my workplace. It took me two days to get it, and when I returned to the DSHS office to return the form, I was directed to the mailbox. DSHS was closed. But at least they had an agent sitting outside their closed office to dispense information, which was more than I found in the unemployment office. The unemployment office just had a couple of signs in its windows. A passerby could have spotted it and thought it was moving. 

With no recourse, I filled out my unemployment forms online. It was fairly straightforward, although it did leave me with a few questions. With the unemployment numbers taking off like a rocket, though, calling the service line turned out to be a dead end. I made two calls to the unemployment office. The first time, I was put on hold for over an hour and a half! The only reason that call ended was because I hung up after the office’s closing time rolled around. The next day, I called again. That call at least went quickly. After receiving two hold messages about how busy the lines were, I was booted outright. I’m sure that in 99 other dimensions, I’m still on hold. After that, I resorted to trying to fill out the forms myself. When I got to the trick spots, I made a call to one of my bosses, who seemed to know his way around the forms. The unemployment office says anyone who needs to fill out the forms online should set aside a half hour to an hour to do so, but if I had known what I was doing, I probably could have finished it in 15 minutes. After that, it was hit send and wait. 

So wait I did! I waited for a couple of days before getting a surprise message from the unemployment office. They said they suspected I had been available to work during the time period between March 15-28 and sent me some extra paperwork for me to explain myself. Now, this HAD to be a result of the logjam at the main office. I WAS available for that entire period and, in fact, had worked on March 16 and 17, which had been a Monday and a Tuesday. My first day on standby had been March 18. What’s more, these papers had been sent to me over an online PDF a solid four days before March 28! That meant I had to either download and edit them, attach them to my original document, and send them electronically or print them up before faxing and mailing them. Filing them electronically was out of the question, since my computer is a dingbat with no editing program, and it doesn’t properly download PDF files half the time anyway. So what I usually do when I have to print up a PDF document is email it to myself and print it at a library. That method was also out, since the libraries were all closed. 

Since I needed to get this thing done and out of the way as soon as possible, I figured I had one final option: Pay the money to get the paper printed up at the local FedEx shop. First, props to them for being open. Unfortunately, though, this method meant lugging my computer to the shop and hoping their printers used a remote connection. My heart sank a little bit after learning that wasn’t going to happen. But one of the employees suggested that I send the PDF link to the shop by email, and they could print it up that way. Again, my computer is a dingbat, and it took around a half hour to establish a secure connection to the shop’s wifi. Then it felt like denying me a download to the PDF until it suddenly didn’t. It took nearly an hour of fiddling and fighting, but I finally managed to get a PDF downloaded and emailed to the store and printed. (Major props to the employees there for their saintlike patience in helping me.) 

I rushed home with the forms and filled them out, explaining where the unemployment office had managed to confuse itself. To return them to the unemployment office, I chose a fax machine over the post office because I wasn’t sure how the post office was going to act by that point. Even faxing the forms to the unemployment office, though, would require a wait until the next day because the FedEx store was operating on reduced hours. So I returned to the FedEx store the next day. That visit was quicker, but it still took nearly 20 minutes because the unemployment office’s fax lines were logjammed. It took six tries before they were clear enough for my papers to get through. 

At this stage, everything seems to have gotten through just fine. What’s left now is to set a new daily routine as I wait for the call to return to work.