Day #226 of Corona Virus Diaries
Oct. 13th, 2020 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatRained most of the day. I watched a big cat wander about in it. It was a different than the usual cats - this one was black and brown. At least I think it was a cat. It was mainly mist or drizzle, so the cat wasn't getting soaking wet or anything.
In the delivery business - LL Bean is fast. I ordered new sweat pants and boots last week, and they came today. Pottery Barn however - is not fast, but admittedly the coffee table is coming from California and it's a coffee table. I ordered the coffee table way back in September, it's supposed to arrive anywhere between Oct 9 and Oct 23, how much you want to bet it gets here sometime around Oct 23?
Meanwhile..Crazy Workplace never fails to amuse. Remember that email problem I was telling you all about some weeks back? And yesterday? Well...
What happened is - new organization within crazy org's human resources department set up "a group email" in Microsoft Teams, which is also a group Teams category. This is to send out HR notices about the Telework from Home Assignments, Filing paperwork for Telework From Home, and meetings etc regarding the Telework From Home. But mainly it's just there for people to upload their telework from home forms for audit purposes.
Well, people are using this group "email" tag which contains the emails of over 1000 people throughout the org, as a shortcut to set up a meeting in teams. They click on Teams, click on the group, put in the people required, and send the meeting notice.
And...instead of just going to the five or six people who need to be at the meeting - the meeting notice goes to a thousand people who have nothing to do with it.
Now, logic would dictate that someone in charge would send a follow up email just to the individual who screwed up, stating - oops, you accidentally sent this meeting notice to 1000 recipients, please cancel, take out the teams tag, and resend just to the people in the meeting. Also post an apology, BCC the teams, ensuring that respondents can't hit reply all and send their complaints to everyone.
Did that happen? No. Of course not.
Instead..
J: What is this meeting about?
P: I have nothing to do with this - why did you send it to me?
L: Stop sending me meeting notices.
K: THIS IS BEYOND RUDE, NEVER SEND ME MEETING NOTICES AGAIN!
M: Take me off of this email list.
H: Cancelling meeting.
X: STOP SENDING ME EMAILS, TAKE ME OFF THIS THREAD.
HR: A gentle reminder to stop using the group email tag to set up meetings and send out emails - this is only for uploading the work logs.
E: Take me off of the email list.
B: There's some confusion here. Please stop responding, and just delete the emails that don't concern you, so that it can get cleared up.
And I'm laughing my head off. This did happen a while back with my current agency - where a group of people decided to have a chat and send it to everyone in the organization. After being told repeatedly to either use BCC for group emails, and not hit reply all, and only put the person it pertains to in the line - they were finally informed by the IT department and HR that if they couldn't figure out how to use email in a professional and appropriate manner - it would be taken away from them.
I'm waiting for new merged agency group to figure that out and impose the same restrictions.
Also spoke to Jay for a bit, mainly about business stuff. She did tell me about her son, who is an airline steward. He's been flying again. And while they do have restrictions in place there are some, ahem, challenges.
The airline's rule is as follows: You are given two warnings to put on a mask, if you refuse on the third try, you are handed a card that states you will be put on the No Fly List. Then the steward has to take back the card (why, Jay had no clue). This poses some challenges for the Stewards. One of which is people don't stay in their seats, they move around the plane. For example, they might have started in Seat 12, but somewhere along the line they've moved to an empty row in the front of the plane.
So the Steward has to do some detective work to figure out who the person is.
She said her son launches into rants about this - and these crazy people. Oh, they sell KN95 masks at the airports now. I think they are also giving them out, according to Jay's son.
When he comes home - Jay and her daughter spray him with disinfectant, then he has to disrobe, put his uniform in the laundry and take a shower.
I think I'm going to avoid flying anywhere for the time being. It's not like I can go anywhere - the people I'd love to visit, wouldn't have me, it's not safe. And I don't want to put anyone at risk either.
Family
My Aunt K is having the family members that live near here in Florida over for Thanksgiving, but she has an air filteration system and is airing out the apartment. Also, they've all been under lock-down and being careful.
I figure the holidays are going to be the toughest for me to get through.
I'm preparing myself for it. Thanksgiving I can handle, but Christmas is going to be brutal - and I've two weeks off at Xmas...I've no idea what I'll do with myself. Usually, I visit my parents in South Carolina - but unless a miracle occurs, I do not see that happening this year. But its better than trying to work, with a 10 percent reduction in pay.
Suffice it to say - I'm dreading December, and thinking okay - you just have to get through this year. One day at a time.
It could be worse. My heart goes out to my cousin who according to mother just announced on FB that she'd separated from her husband and was getting a divorce. My Aunt K apparently filled in the details to mother over the phone.
Mother told me that they'd been having problems for quite some time now and cousin had finally decided she'd had enough. It was affecting her mental, physical and emotional health. She's feeling much better now that they have separated. Her three adopted kids are living with her, apparently, so I assuming she got the house and he moved out. I know he was an ultra conservative, Trump supporter, and my cousin wasn't. But I'm not certain how much of that was the cause of the rift between them. The Pandemic has caused a lot of people to separate - mainly because marriage let alone living with someone is hard enough without a pandemic keeping you locked down together in mutual misery. There's such as thing as TOO much time together.
My heart goes out to her. But it is yet another example of how deceptive certain social media platforms truly are. Because it appeared from her postings on social media that her life was amazing. Granted I'm not really following her on FB, so much as Instagram - and she's retreated to Instagram and Twitter. Possibly to avoid her husband, his friends, his family and others. Goes to show you - that we really have no idea what is really happening in others lives - unless they tell us. And people are great fabrications, little deceptions and embellishments. We all do it. Sometimes to shorten the story or make it more entertaining. Non-fiction is kind of lie, if you think about it. Fiction is a heck of a lot more honest.
That said, I don't like to lie or make fabrications. But I admit I will exaggerate or embellish to make a point or make it more entertaining. Not at the moment, but I've done it.
Mother is doing okay, I suppose. She's impossible to call at the moment. I may give up and let her call me. There's a health care worker who shows up in the mornings from 8-12 only. She's done away with the night worker and the afternoon crew. I'm not sure why she picked the morning schedule. And she said it's until Thursday, she's not sure what she'll do after that. The truth of the matter is my mother doesn't like having help - she wants to do it herself. And the workers are kind of bored.
My mother is busier than I am. I'm not that busy - outside of work, and Zoom worship calls, and taking care of myself - not a lot I'm doing. I'm finding myself resenting the people who complain about being busy or who are kind of bragging about it. I wish they wouldn't tell me.
New York vs. the Corona Virus
I'm still in the RED ZONE, but the cases have gone down slightly in my area, while the hospitalizations and case load has gone up in Long Island.
At least 17 new coronavirus deaths and 1,032 new cases were reported in New York on Oct. 12. Over the past week, there have been an average of 1,400 cases per day, an increase of 64 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been at least 481,436 cases and 32,905 deaths in New York since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. - Source NY Times, Corona Virus updates.
Right now, they are still fighting with the orthodox jewish community who feel unjustly discriminated against. So is now protesting, often without masks en mass. Some of the protests have been violent. They are upset, because their worship is now limited to 10 people inside the house of worship at once. Apparently Zoom is beneath them. No, they have to worship en mass in their houses of worship. I get it - a lot of them don't have computers or Zoom capabilities. Also they tend to be rather conservative politically, and a lot of them think this is BS.
They also feel they are being targeted as the main cause for the uptick. True. Although to be fair - that's partly because they are the ones with the highest rate of positive cases. But it is equally true that the maskless wonders abound, and yes, there are quite a few people ignoring the rules across the spectrum. I know of a few meetup groups that are meeting in restaurants and doing group walks with up to 40 people.
Hell, people in my apartment complex can't figure out that you should not have two people ride in our elevator. At least they are wearing masks now. Progress.
Watching how people handle this pandemic has been an education. Today at work - there was email sent out, that if you happened to be in the office, stop by the lunch room and pick up an individually wrapped cookie for the baby shower. I was thinking - we're not supposed to be sharing food. Also how is a plastic wrapped cookie in the lunch room safer than an non-wrapped cookie? Not that I think either is going to pass the virus. It isn't passed by food.
In the delivery business - LL Bean is fast. I ordered new sweat pants and boots last week, and they came today. Pottery Barn however - is not fast, but admittedly the coffee table is coming from California and it's a coffee table. I ordered the coffee table way back in September, it's supposed to arrive anywhere between Oct 9 and Oct 23, how much you want to bet it gets here sometime around Oct 23?
Meanwhile..Crazy Workplace never fails to amuse. Remember that email problem I was telling you all about some weeks back? And yesterday? Well...
What happened is - new organization within crazy org's human resources department set up "a group email" in Microsoft Teams, which is also a group Teams category. This is to send out HR notices about the Telework from Home Assignments, Filing paperwork for Telework From Home, and meetings etc regarding the Telework From Home. But mainly it's just there for people to upload their telework from home forms for audit purposes.
Well, people are using this group "email" tag which contains the emails of over 1000 people throughout the org, as a shortcut to set up a meeting in teams. They click on Teams, click on the group, put in the people required, and send the meeting notice.
And...instead of just going to the five or six people who need to be at the meeting - the meeting notice goes to a thousand people who have nothing to do with it.
Now, logic would dictate that someone in charge would send a follow up email just to the individual who screwed up, stating - oops, you accidentally sent this meeting notice to 1000 recipients, please cancel, take out the teams tag, and resend just to the people in the meeting. Also post an apology, BCC the teams, ensuring that respondents can't hit reply all and send their complaints to everyone.
Did that happen? No. Of course not.
Instead..
J: What is this meeting about?
P: I have nothing to do with this - why did you send it to me?
L: Stop sending me meeting notices.
K: THIS IS BEYOND RUDE, NEVER SEND ME MEETING NOTICES AGAIN!
M: Take me off of this email list.
H: Cancelling meeting.
X: STOP SENDING ME EMAILS, TAKE ME OFF THIS THREAD.
HR: A gentle reminder to stop using the group email tag to set up meetings and send out emails - this is only for uploading the work logs.
E: Take me off of the email list.
B: There's some confusion here. Please stop responding, and just delete the emails that don't concern you, so that it can get cleared up.
And I'm laughing my head off. This did happen a while back with my current agency - where a group of people decided to have a chat and send it to everyone in the organization. After being told repeatedly to either use BCC for group emails, and not hit reply all, and only put the person it pertains to in the line - they were finally informed by the IT department and HR that if they couldn't figure out how to use email in a professional and appropriate manner - it would be taken away from them.
I'm waiting for new merged agency group to figure that out and impose the same restrictions.
Also spoke to Jay for a bit, mainly about business stuff. She did tell me about her son, who is an airline steward. He's been flying again. And while they do have restrictions in place there are some, ahem, challenges.
The airline's rule is as follows: You are given two warnings to put on a mask, if you refuse on the third try, you are handed a card that states you will be put on the No Fly List. Then the steward has to take back the card (why, Jay had no clue). This poses some challenges for the Stewards. One of which is people don't stay in their seats, they move around the plane. For example, they might have started in Seat 12, but somewhere along the line they've moved to an empty row in the front of the plane.
So the Steward has to do some detective work to figure out who the person is.
She said her son launches into rants about this - and these crazy people. Oh, they sell KN95 masks at the airports now. I think they are also giving them out, according to Jay's son.
When he comes home - Jay and her daughter spray him with disinfectant, then he has to disrobe, put his uniform in the laundry and take a shower.
I think I'm going to avoid flying anywhere for the time being. It's not like I can go anywhere - the people I'd love to visit, wouldn't have me, it's not safe. And I don't want to put anyone at risk either.
Family
My Aunt K is having the family members that live near here in Florida over for Thanksgiving, but she has an air filteration system and is airing out the apartment. Also, they've all been under lock-down and being careful.
I figure the holidays are going to be the toughest for me to get through.
I'm preparing myself for it. Thanksgiving I can handle, but Christmas is going to be brutal - and I've two weeks off at Xmas...I've no idea what I'll do with myself. Usually, I visit my parents in South Carolina - but unless a miracle occurs, I do not see that happening this year. But its better than trying to work, with a 10 percent reduction in pay.
Suffice it to say - I'm dreading December, and thinking okay - you just have to get through this year. One day at a time.
It could be worse. My heart goes out to my cousin who according to mother just announced on FB that she'd separated from her husband and was getting a divorce. My Aunt K apparently filled in the details to mother over the phone.
Mother told me that they'd been having problems for quite some time now and cousin had finally decided she'd had enough. It was affecting her mental, physical and emotional health. She's feeling much better now that they have separated. Her three adopted kids are living with her, apparently, so I assuming she got the house and he moved out. I know he was an ultra conservative, Trump supporter, and my cousin wasn't. But I'm not certain how much of that was the cause of the rift between them. The Pandemic has caused a lot of people to separate - mainly because marriage let alone living with someone is hard enough without a pandemic keeping you locked down together in mutual misery. There's such as thing as TOO much time together.
My heart goes out to her. But it is yet another example of how deceptive certain social media platforms truly are. Because it appeared from her postings on social media that her life was amazing. Granted I'm not really following her on FB, so much as Instagram - and she's retreated to Instagram and Twitter. Possibly to avoid her husband, his friends, his family and others. Goes to show you - that we really have no idea what is really happening in others lives - unless they tell us. And people are great fabrications, little deceptions and embellishments. We all do it. Sometimes to shorten the story or make it more entertaining. Non-fiction is kind of lie, if you think about it. Fiction is a heck of a lot more honest.
That said, I don't like to lie or make fabrications. But I admit I will exaggerate or embellish to make a point or make it more entertaining. Not at the moment, but I've done it.
Mother is doing okay, I suppose. She's impossible to call at the moment. I may give up and let her call me. There's a health care worker who shows up in the mornings from 8-12 only. She's done away with the night worker and the afternoon crew. I'm not sure why she picked the morning schedule. And she said it's until Thursday, she's not sure what she'll do after that. The truth of the matter is my mother doesn't like having help - she wants to do it herself. And the workers are kind of bored.
My mother is busier than I am. I'm not that busy - outside of work, and Zoom worship calls, and taking care of myself - not a lot I'm doing. I'm finding myself resenting the people who complain about being busy or who are kind of bragging about it. I wish they wouldn't tell me.
New York vs. the Corona Virus
I'm still in the RED ZONE, but the cases have gone down slightly in my area, while the hospitalizations and case load has gone up in Long Island.
At least 17 new coronavirus deaths and 1,032 new cases were reported in New York on Oct. 12. Over the past week, there have been an average of 1,400 cases per day, an increase of 64 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been at least 481,436 cases and 32,905 deaths in New York since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. - Source NY Times, Corona Virus updates.
Right now, they are still fighting with the orthodox jewish community who feel unjustly discriminated against. So is now protesting, often without masks en mass. Some of the protests have been violent. They are upset, because their worship is now limited to 10 people inside the house of worship at once. Apparently Zoom is beneath them. No, they have to worship en mass in their houses of worship. I get it - a lot of them don't have computers or Zoom capabilities. Also they tend to be rather conservative politically, and a lot of them think this is BS.
They also feel they are being targeted as the main cause for the uptick. True. Although to be fair - that's partly because they are the ones with the highest rate of positive cases. But it is equally true that the maskless wonders abound, and yes, there are quite a few people ignoring the rules across the spectrum. I know of a few meetup groups that are meeting in restaurants and doing group walks with up to 40 people.
Hell, people in my apartment complex can't figure out that you should not have two people ride in our elevator. At least they are wearing masks now. Progress.
Watching how people handle this pandemic has been an education. Today at work - there was email sent out, that if you happened to be in the office, stop by the lunch room and pick up an individually wrapped cookie for the baby shower. I was thinking - we're not supposed to be sharing food. Also how is a plastic wrapped cookie in the lunch room safer than an non-wrapped cookie? Not that I think either is going to pass the virus. It isn't passed by food.