A Thursday Full of Bitch-Slaps
Jul. 3rd, 2020 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI'd been hoping that we would usher in a second half of 2020 that would see some return to a normal way of life. If Day Two of the second half is any indication, this year's still got a lotta 'splainin to do.
Eleanor left the poetry session a little early Wednesday night. She'd also left work about a half hour early. She'd been feeling a little feverish (but still under the 100F cutoff for symptomatic), had a headache, and above all was just TIRED. How much of this was clinical, how much from the previous almost seven hours in the retail trenches, and how much from working her ass off around the yard preparing for the patio project? Unknown, Captain. But she did decide to call in sick to work Thursday, meaning she would have five straight days off to get things back together.
I found this out shortly after I woke up yesterday morning, which had already brought me a downer of a report when I grabbed my phone first thing:
That's the upper left corner of my main Facebook page. I'd never seen one of Those Things before in the 10-plus years I've used the platform. What had I done? I followed it down the rabbit hole: turns out I had posted something that did not "follow our Community Standards on hate speech."
It pointed to a link I'd posted six weeks ago to a Buffalo News article of that date. In my accompanying post, I called out two of the three Republicans elected here to the four countywide offices- proof of the clusterfuck of a Democratic party we have here, which consistently loses countywide elections despite having a major enrollment advantage. The two I was calling out, our county comptroller and county clerk, had joined in condemning "the state" for putting limits on their offices' ability to narc on undocumented immigrants.
I specifically called out their hypocrisy on this count: there is no county law or procedure requiring enforcement of federal immigration laws, but they seem determined to go "see something, say something" about any instances they come across. Meanwhile, they are silent, or consider it horrific governmental overreach, to report on violations by people or businesses of COVID restrictions and mandates that ARE enforceable Erie County law- including the wearing of masks, the opening of businesses still required to be closed, and social distancing. THAT's "snitching," as far as they're concerned.
Did I get in trouble for this opinion? I doubt it. I next thought I'd been given a black mark for referring to these two officeholders as "Tricky Mickey" and "Stupid Stefan." I admit, I've been dragged down into the sewer of name calling that's been prevalent from the top down since 2017, and I know some people don't like that. But finally, I realized what had tripped one of the algorithms all these weeks after the post: I'd used a bad word to describe the Latino victims of the Republican Inquisition. It begins with a W, and is one I would never hurl as an epithet out of my own mouth, but was rather projecting what THEY would say.
Sadly, subtlety is lost on the Internet. Especially now.
So my Almost Scarlet Letter still sits there, on my personal page and on the Facebook app. It warned me that another such outburst could lead to a 24-hour banhammering on posting or commenting, and it will be on my Permanent Record Card for a year (from yesterday? May 22nd?). Though visible only to me, it's an OCD annoyance seeing it there; there's nothing to do in response to it being there, it can't be deleted, and even the post itself can't be taken down even though nobody else can see IT, either.
Eventually, I may adjust to considering it a badge of honor- especially because Facebook seems determined not to put any limits on the President*'s hate speech.
----
In the grand scheme of things, it was a minor annoyance and there was an office to get to. That's where the major annoyance came from yesterday.
I headed in, got a few things off my desk- it's been a dead quiet week generally- but eventually heard two things. One, a coworker was having her birthday celebrated with lunch and cake in the conference room. But also, checking in with the home front, I heard right before that sitdown that Eleanor had decided to go for a COVID test, just to be on the safe side.
You may recall that Eleanor had a similar go-round of symptoms in late March, just as things were starting to go bad in the world; when she went to the ER, they couldn't even test her at the time beyond taking her temperature. It went away after a day, I never showed any signs of anything, but we both took two weeks of precautions, her not working at all (but getting paid anyway) and me working almost entirely from home.
This time, at least things are a little easier in the testing department. The local CVS does it through their drive-through pharmacy; the swab, forms and instructions come through the pneumatic tube, you stick it in you and then in the container and whoosh it back. She won't get results for 2 to 5 days from yesterday. I found out she'd gone just before the food arrived, and somewhere in the lunchtime conversation, I mentioned she had taken the day off and had gotten tested. Nobody said anything to me beyond maybe a "oh, I hope she's okay," but over the next hour or so, at least a few of them traipsed into the other attorney's office (they're all her staff- I have no employees) and bitched to her about how I "exposed" them all.
Their boss was more upset that I'd said anything to them- they can get pretty bitchy about things in general, resisted returning to work after weeks of working from home, but nobody in our workspace wears masks or particularly distances from anyone while in the office except when clients are there.
I don't feel particularly guilty about it- if Eleanor has "it," she probably got "it' before Wednesday and I've been walking around as positive as I'm ever going to be. (I am waiting for an appointment a week from tomorrow to donate platelets again, and they WILL test as part of that.) The thing I'm more troubled by is how this plays into the whole societal craziness about this condition. I am sure there are people who have avoided being tested just because they don't want to subject themselves to this kind of treatment. The attitude seems to be: if you test positive, you're a pariah. If you're waiting for results, same. If you test negative, so what, it could be false negative or you're still under suspicion just because you went and GOT tested. And even me yesterday, one person removed from the testee, gets this attitude.
At least we're in a state where the "return to normal" has been slow and cautious, and our daily new cases continue to stay at very low levels even as more and more things have returned. Wegmans still requires masking and thorough register cleanings between customers, but their stores are starting to remove "the queue"- what I call "triage," the one line for all checkouts where an employee checks your cart (and, I suspect, checks the customer for obvious signs of bad health) and assigns a register to report to.
Sit-down restaurants have been allowed to open, inside and out, for a few weeks, with no spikes reported here yet, but I hear reports of bad behavior. Our simplest way to not be disappointed by a reversal of course is to not go out to those places in the first place. We're at the beginning of a heat wave that is projected to last through almost all of next week, we have things to do here, and we have each other.
----
We also have our country to celebrate:
Our lawn sign has not come in yet, but we picked up the flag on the Home Despot run the other day and it now flies proudly. Dammit, WE’RE taking America back, and its flag, from its 3½ years of being held hostage.
Speaking of "America Back," here's a link to a Claymation Celebration of what our country really IS all about:
Uh oh. She uses that bad word in there, too, with a Mariachi band completely understanding what SHE means.
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Date: 2020-07-04 05:28 am (UTC)