I've been reading through this thread and it's been a moving experience. I see a lot of you are working or has family working in heathcare, huge props to you and them! I truly hope you all get through this okay! Stay strong, stay healthy, and stay safe!
Thanks
@Blind Owl for putting up this thread!
I'm a chronically worrying type, it runs in the family, also I"ve been told I'm slightly paranoid (I call it sensible precautions), so I need to vent a bit. It makes me feel better to write stuff down for some reason.
I got two grandparents still alive and doing really really well for their age, 90 and 93 respectively (93 still drives better than most 'muricans I've seen on youtube lol! j/k ofc).
I'm really worried about them as they are stubborn, and even though the whole family tells them to sit their ass down and stay at home, just ask and we will do whatever needs to be done, they still find an excuse to go out. Yesterday my granddad spent almost 2 hours waiting in line at the pharmacy cos he wanted to buy some meds, just for the apothecary to tell him that they don't carry that medicine. He could have phoned ahead or asked any of us but nope, he just went... We live 5 mins away by car ffs... This makes me mad, but what the heck can one do?
The rest of the family is either working from home or retired so that's a relief at least. Apart from my mother who works for the public health department and they don't let her work from home, although she has a desk job... Probably because it's bad for public image if workers even remotely associated with healthcare are taken off the front lines, and also they don't have the money and infrastructure to set up a freaking remote desktop. It's kinda infuriating but I wasn't expecting any better from our government...
A kinda interesting observation I made during my last trip outside is that it's mostly the elderly who don't take this seriously. They are the ones that don't wear any protective gear, don't keep distance and so on. They just live their lives like nothing is happening, furious that some of the items are out of stock, and mad at ppl wearing masks and gloves. The teenagers and ppl in their 20s are masked up and try to keep their distance. It's the internet culture vs old workers. The younger generations are either more informed or just taken by the herd mentality, while the older ones (50s-60s) refuse to accept anything that younger ppl tell them they should be doing. When you ask these older ppl they just rant: "you know nothing you young selfish spoiled twat, in my day we had such and such, and had to live like so, it was much worse..".
Ofcourse they won't accept any reasoning. They don't realize how much easier it was for them to just exist under the communists if they kept their little mouths shut and did what they were asked to do, because all the thinking and actually doing something was done by their parents for them... It boils my blood to see that their ego is way more important than their lives, and they have the audacity to think they are somehow above us "trash young ppl" just because they don't do what's necessary. It's their little revenge on all of us terrible folks who listen to loud music and dare to have fun sometimes. Meanwhile they endanger their whole family, but they're too dumb to understand that.
Anyways, I digress...
The missus seems to take it well enough, she is not the panicky type. She is more of the unbeliever type, and that can be annoying sometimes, but it's all good now.
Back when the first reports were coming in from China via youtube, I was telling her it was gonna get real, even here. She wanted to hear non of it, thought I was just lost in my little youtube bubble again and exaggerating and talking about irrelevant stuff as she was busy finding out what we should cook the next day and such everyday life stuff.
It took quiet a while, I guess she started to take it all in once Italy was getting buried in cases and the local news was full of stuff about the virus.
When she went out shopping about a month ago, I told her to grab some canned food and such, stuff we don't usully buy. She looked at me like I've finally gone totally mad lol, but she is smart enough to not waste any time arguing with me about petty things and so she did buy the stuff. A week later she went to the shops and half of the shelfs were empty, the things I asked her to buy the week before were gone. We got lucky on that one, it just shows how much faster news these these days even compared to 10-20 years ago, although it means sifting through the fake/trash/opinions pieces for the actual info.
Kid's got a cold so we got rough nights. I handle the nightshift mostly, as those are partly my working hours and I'm up anyways.
I work from home, been doing for about 5+ years now as a freelance VFX/CGi/3d artist. (I do movies, ads, packaging... If you bought a Nespresso machine in the last 3-4 years, there's a good chance that I made the machines on the box art).
I'm very very lucky, the movie/tv industry shutting down hasn't affected me yet, as I'm still finishing up a (probably terrible) locally made horror movie. The silver lining is that now that it won't release in a few weeks, I got plenty of time to work on it. I got another job lined up, which is a public event in Karlsruhe-Germany, and they haven't bailed yet as the event is set for late August. (it's the yearly lightshow, check it out on youtube, I worked on it before, it's pretty neat)
We are used to staying at home, the missus has been for 1.5 years now cos of the little one, and I've been working from home for years. We are used to doing our shopping once a week at max. Not much has changed, apart from not seeing any family members for a while and trying to go out even less fro shopping.
So all in all, it's all pretty good yet.
I was about to organize a video-bar-hopping event to practice distance-socializing with my ex-collegues cos we were postponing a proper bar visit for months and now it's not possible to do one. And I just realized I'm almost out of whiskey. Cos I just drank most of it.
F-s in the chat...
(I got a booz delivery service on speed dial so it won't be an issue for long though)
Also one of my lower back teeth exploded without warning (family trait, they do that sometimes), so yay, toothache for weeks to come as most of the local gvmnt. dentists are closed up (non-essential and ran by 60+year olds and now they are not allowed to work in direct contact with patients), and the private ones don't pick up the damn phone.
This is gonna suck...
Also also, here's to all of you finding TP and getting through this! Cheers!
