Turn and turn and turn again
Mar. 13th, 2020 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: illness, death]
Yesterday's dinner "rush" was slow. More than one of the customers who *were* there were discussing quarantine tactics (the schools were going on break next week anyway; apparently they're going to extend that break). I couldn't make out most of the words on the radio news segments in-between songs, but things I *did* make out include "virus", "two new cases of the novel coronavirus in Waterloo Region", and "the Wal-Mart supercenter in Cambridge is officially out of toilet paper".
In the end, I did not fake illness, nor did I make some vague gesture at "family matter". I simply told the truth. As gently and politely as I could, I told Meta-Boss that I expect business to drop very soon, and explained to him why I am the best choice for whom to cut from the staff roster first in response to that decreased demand.
(I've heard my co-workers talk about living paycheque to paycheque, seen a *full-time* employee trying to snap up abandoned freelance-delivery shifts. It's not just that my housemates are probably in more danger than their housemates; in the short term, I need the money less than they do.)
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Remember how Dad was actively *pushing for* COVID-19 prep two and a half weeks ago? Yeah, I think he was only doing that because it was an unpopular position at the time, and now that worrying about coronavirus is mainstream he can't do it anymore. He has been getting increasingly dismissive of "alarmism" over the past week, with increasingly nonsensical reasons why (Washington State is more susceptible because it's a rainforest??).
"Well," I said to Mom resignedly, "if he dies at least I won't have to listen to him reflexively argue against everything just because it's there anymore."
"Don't even say that!" she said. "He can probably hear us from here," she said.
I sighed.
Yesterday's dinner "rush" was slow. More than one of the customers who *were* there were discussing quarantine tactics (the schools were going on break next week anyway; apparently they're going to extend that break). I couldn't make out most of the words on the radio news segments in-between songs, but things I *did* make out include "virus", "two new cases of the novel coronavirus in Waterloo Region", and "the Wal-Mart supercenter in Cambridge is officially out of toilet paper".
In the end, I did not fake illness, nor did I make some vague gesture at "family matter". I simply told the truth. As gently and politely as I could, I told Meta-Boss that I expect business to drop very soon, and explained to him why I am the best choice for whom to cut from the staff roster first in response to that decreased demand.
(I've heard my co-workers talk about living paycheque to paycheque, seen a *full-time* employee trying to snap up abandoned freelance-delivery shifts. It's not just that my housemates are probably in more danger than their housemates; in the short term, I need the money less than they do.)
---
Remember how Dad was actively *pushing for* COVID-19 prep two and a half weeks ago? Yeah, I think he was only doing that because it was an unpopular position at the time, and now that worrying about coronavirus is mainstream he can't do it anymore. He has been getting increasingly dismissive of "alarmism" over the past week, with increasingly nonsensical reasons why (Washington State is more susceptible because it's a rainforest??).
"Well," I said to Mom resignedly, "if he dies at least I won't have to listen to him reflexively argue against everything just because it's there anymore."
"Don't even say that!" she said. "He can probably hear us from here," she said.
I sighed.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-13 07:12 pm (UTC)He insists that his position is and has always been perfectly coherent: he stocked up to prepare for the possibility of a relevant authority *forcing* him into preemptive quarantine. Under no circumstances will he agree that a preemptive quarantine is *justified*†, only that his government or perhaps employer may make him do it anyway.
I have long known that his approach to disease is to barrel through the world with minimal sanitation, catch everything, acquire antibodies to everything, eventually stop getting sick altogether (except when a new strain pops up) because he's already *had* everything there is to have. Apparently he will not even *consider* the possibility that [he is frail enough now to need to switch tactics] until at least his 65th birthday (he's currently 57).
I wonder what would happen if I took the approach one takes with the young and healthy and uncaring-about-temporary-suffering: "don't do it for yourself, do it to avoid becoming a vector: the more the disease spreads, the more people it encounters who actually *can't* handle it". Probably that if he doesn't take the delivery shift someone else will, so the total number of vectors out there remains the same. (The only reason for *him* to stay home from work is if the person who replaces him is significantly better able to handle the threat than he is, which I expect to be true and he does not.)
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†Him: "yeah, it's 10x more deadly than the flu, but even in heavily affected areas you're 50x more likely to catch the flu, and we don't stay home *every* flu season"
He's so confident in his incredibly round numbers, and yet, *I* don't see 5x the Italian hospital wards dedicated to flu patients as I do dedicated to COVID-19 patients...