Most liked posts in thread: Your experience during the pandemic

I am retired and my wife teaches college math online. We live in an isolated community of 18 homes where the smallest lot is one acre. It is a twenty minute drive to get to the nearest store in town.

Other than wearing masks, shopping and driving less frequently and washing our hands more frequently, our lives have not changed much. We don't know anyone who has contracted Covid -19. The population of our county is around 300,000. There have been about 1200 cases of Covid-19 recorded here since the outbreak.

 

I live in Charlotte, NC... a few miles south of downtown (what we call 'Uptown' here), in a nice suburban neighborhood... 1/2 acre lots of free-standing, one-family homes. It makes COVID isolation pretty easy.

It's just my wife and I, plus our 2 little dogs, so we are pretty lucky. Charlotte is one of the denser areas of the state and has one of the lower average incomes, so we were a COVID hot-spot very early on. Lots of folks who needed to get back to work or were essential employees.

I am a Project Manager for a large US bank and worked from home 90% of the time pre-COVID, so working from home 100% of the time hasn't been an issue for me. My wife works for a large law firm and used to go into her office 100%, but is now camped out in our dining room (she probably won't go back to her office until 2021). I've got a dedicated home office, so it's nice for us... we get to spend lots of time together.

My wife is on the COVID high-risk list for several reasons, so we take our isolation and virus avoidance measures seriously. She went with me to the grocery store for the first time last week since March, and that was only because she needed to get her flu shot and we do that at the grocery's pharmacy (free $10 grocery gift card with every flu shot). I do our shopping and errand running. Amazon is the most popular website in our household, but I still grocery shop every 10 days or so because the grocery delivery guys seem to choose the crappiest fruit / veg in the pile. We haven't eaten out in a restaurant since February, but we have a few regular take-out places nearby and do the occasional DoorDash. I've been cooking more at home.

We had tickets to go see Hamilton in Atlanta in April and had a short trip planned to Philadelphia for sight-seeing and a Pet Shop Boys concert (she has a thing for 90's techno and related music)... both of those trips went into the cancellation pile, along with MOTD 2020.

I spent the first 2 months of the pandemic helping my bank in their COVID response efforts. I am technically in the HR department (though I do technical Project Management), so I would answer calls from employees who had potential COVID exposure and needed to be out of work to deal with that issue and protect their co-workers. I closed down several branches of our bank when I detected an outbreak / exposure and was very impressed with my employers response. Child care expense reimbursement and travel expense reimbursement policies went into effect VERY quickly (Up to $100/day reimbursement to get you to/from work safely / isolated + paying extended family to tend to your kids. Employees on the COVID high-risk groups were paid [and still are] their full salaries to stay home and be safe until a work-from-home option can be developed). The firm was prepared for disaster response, was overwhelmed by the size but recovered and adjusted amazingly quickly. I dropped my day-to-day job for 2 months and nobody said a word. I'd say "Sorry... I'm working COVID response..." and I'd get a "What can we do to help you / cover the work?" I was working 70-80 hour weeks for the first month and a half and then the flood of calls settled down as new things became more 'normal.' That time was emotionally draining as we were operating without a lot of information, but we made decisions in the best interest of our employees and our customers, and the bank backed us up. I was speaking to 5+ people per day who had tested COVID positive and 10-20 who had been in immediate contact with those folks and had symptoms / outstanding tests, if they were even able to get tests back then. One woman wasn't showing any symptoms, but her husband and 4 kids were all bedridden and she was their sole caregiver... waiting for her symptoms to show up every morning when she woke up (I called her every day for a few weeks, just to check in and see what we could do for her and give her a place to ask questions or just vent). I broke down several times in those first 6 weeks from the sheer overwhelming stress these people were going through.

We are 7 months into the work-from-home order to myself and my immediate home-office colleagues and we don't expect a light call-back until 2021 (and then, probably every second or third day).

We canceled one trip to see family due to a COVID outbreak in the extended family we were going to visit. We just spent 4-5 days with my mother-in-law... the first time seeing her since March. I made it out once to see my Mother a month or so as well.

I went to my first MINI event a few weeks ago... 20 or so cars, socially distancing / masked passengers and drivers. It was a bit odd to be out and about that way as my wife and I are still pretty cautious w/ her health issues. I did get lots of time to work on the MINI and wrapped up my last few projects!