Especially up here in the Seattle area. On Wednesday, to curb the spread of coronavirus COVID-19, the King County Department of Health advised businesses to allow "nonessential" employees to work from home. My company, based in the heart of Seattle's steadily-shrinking retail core, displayed a prudent abundance of caution, took the county's advice and told us not to grind our cootie-blooming carcasses against its freshly-disinfected door knobs until at least March 20.
Okay, sure, good call, but still I'm a feeling a little salty that creating cutting-edge digital advertising wouldn't be considered essential. There is such a thing as a fashion emergency, after all; it's freaking documented:
So here I am, working from home, aka WFH. Other commonly kicked-around corporatisms for this arrangement include IHD (It's Haircut Day), Riding Dirty (Remaining un-showered until... a little bit later) and SBCTLT (Shit, better check the laptop).
Just kidding, you all know my work ethic.
During times like these, I find that my fear of uncertainty can overwhelm the uncertainty itself, if that makes sense. My mind concocts scenarios far uglier than the actual events that eventually transpire.
Back around the time the hippie picture above was taken, I remember experiencing a sleepless night on the eve of a home inspection. Our house had been sold, and prior to closing they wanted this small window issue fixed. I took care of it myself, which of course immediately worried the shit out of me.
All night I churned out mental screenplays where the inspector berated me for the job I'd done, told me that now the house could never be sold and we'd all have to stay in that house and be miserable because we're having another baby in a few months and we'll all be crammed so close together that we'll hate each other and at least two of us will become homicidal and we'll never become a real family. Oh, and he was laughing.
It didn't quite turn out that way. The real inspector showed up holding a small dog, looked at the window for about five seconds and signed off on it without even putting down his Chihuahua. He wasn't laughing and he definitely had pants on. Sorry, that happened in one of the screenplays.
I'm trying to keep that mindset from seeping into my thoughts right now. Just because we don't know the true scale of events to come, it doesn't mean we should envision Armageddon as a given. Should we prepare ourselves? Of course.
Last Saturday, my wife and I assessed our current provisions. Living where we do, it doesn't hurt to have a small stockpile of canned and dried foods in the unfortunate event of an earthquake. Who wants to struggle a week without food, then desperately gnaw at the lifeless cadaver of Frank, your elderly next door neighbor who goes door to door during the holidays to dole out his world-famous mountain goat muffins? Wouldn't you just rather pop open a can of satisfying Chef Boyardee Beef-a-Roni and ignore Frank's body altogether?
That's what we figured back in 2012 when we took the girls to the grocery store to stock our emergency preparedness kid. In hindsight, it's creepy that we did that. What did we say to them? "Hey, kids, guess what? We're taking a trip to Safeway to buy stuff in case our house falls into the earth. Who wants Spaghetti-Os?"
Last weekend, after going online and discovering that even the most robust of canned food (low-acid products, such as meats and vegetables) can only hold out three to five years, I'd felt like I'd dodged a gastrointestinal grenade in not cluelessly devouring some honey baked beans from Obama's first term.
So we emptied out the old stuff:
Beautiful, yes? It has the makings of a hot dish to end all hot dishes. And while I don't specifically remember, if I were (pot)lucky at some point in the late '60s or early '70s, I scooped something similar to this ambrosia from a random slow cooker in the Messiah Lutheran Church fellowship hall.
Here's the replacement load, or part of it, anyway:
Since we were buying for a different demographic, the Boyardee factor gave way to slightly healthier choices. Still, canned food tends not to get that fancy; lots of salt and sugar, pretty much regardless of what you buy. And seriously, if things get that rough, I'll be breaking into the other shopping cart: the one filled with nothing but vodka and thoughts of happier times.
Please stay safe during this flu thing. We're all going to have to break some unhealthy habits in order to get a handle on this. I, for one, am willing to sacrifice, even if it means not kissing people good morning on the bus for a while.
Oh, and please stop buying toilet paper, because I'm sure you already have enough.
Take care of yourself.
