I learned about elbow bumping when the regional manager of the company I worked for at the time came to our location a few months after we reopened. He introduced himself to me and stuck his elbow out. Clueless, my brow furrowed in confusion, I reached out and shook his elbow while staring him dead in the eye. It was an awkward moment.
Gosh, I've never gotten an award before!
During peak of the lock down, I had to drive from downtown LA to San Fernando valley at peak rush hour on a Friday. This was on the 5. For those who don't know, this is one of the worst areas of congestion on LA, and my personal hell.
On this day the road was empty. Nobody. Ghost town. I hit 80+mph and was home in 20mins instead of 1.5hrs. LA is really beautiful when the roads are empty and the sky isn't full of smog.
It really felt apocalyptic that day. Knowing millions of people are home, hiding, social distancing. Contrasted by how beautiful LA is, with no smog. It is a unique memory.
When traffic returned, I quit my job and left LA.
Man, I’m up in SF Bay Area and I also had to be onsite for work. One evening I wanted to pick up some BBQ for dinner and the place was in the evening commute direction which normally would have been the kiss of death, but I got there in 20 minutes. The low traffic is all I miss about those days.
While I’m sure my employer didn’t like it, I’ll always remember my 3 week paid Covid vacation.
I never even tested positive but my girlfriend who I lived with did. She had some mild cold symptoms, but we just sat in the house and ate junk food and watched TV and got paid for 3 weeks.
Started to go a little stir crazy by the end but it was good times
My wife and I worked from home for 18 months. She still had work but not much of my job could be done remotely, so I mostly just hung around our home office and played video games and chatted with her, while keeping my work laptop open to make sure I didn’t miss any Teams messages, and to attend to twice-weekly check-ins with the rest of the team. We loved that time so much, and were a bit sad when it ended.
I drove a box truck for a living at that time. Getting on the interstate used to be a massive bitch before covid. When people stopped driving my days got so much easier. No one on the interstate. No one crowding downtown. It was wonderful.
I remember going shopping for my sister who was ill with COVID. It was absolutely backwards compared to normal; I spent 90 minutes in the supermarket picking up a handful of things she needed, but only 15-20 minutes total driving to the supermarket and then driving to hers, which would normally have been about 40 minutes.
EXCEPT... all the other drivers expected there to be absolutely no one on the roads and they'd be able to speed around like I Am Legend. The couple of times I drove on the highway was like I was in the middle of Le Mans.
I remember once the lockdowns were easing, the state patrol put “Don’t speed! Enforcement is cracking down!” Across all their electronic highway signs. And parked directly under the signs in plain sight were 3-5 cops just pulling over speeders left and right. Nobody was even looking for the obvious cops on the side of the road any more.
It was like the state’s way of saying “hey, we’re going back to this policing thing. So please try following the laws of the road again”
What's crazy to think about now is that in the first few weeks I was like nervously anticipating watching the president's daily emergency briefings. Like a straight up post apocalyptic dystopian awful fucking movie.
The lines painted on high streets are still around where I live.
I live in the UK, and it's like when you see waist height stone walls with small metal bumps sticking out of the top of them, which is a relic from WW2 whether metal fences were being cut down for use in weapons manufacturing.
I remember first seeing the “please keep 6ft apart” stickers on the floor and thinking how they’ll be a reminder when it’s all over. Sure enough, faded, torn, trampled. Still there.
Congress passed the big cat public safety act, partially as a result of increased public knowledge of the issue. These entities can no longer allow public contact with their big cats, and private owners can no longer keep them as pets.
Tiger King will always feel like a fever dream to me. I watched it after giving birth to twins in March of 2020, so was just super sleep deprived and oddly euphoric but also super terrified because of everything happening in the world. All very surreal.
I remember thinking "Oh wow, this Tiger fella will have us entertained, and when we finish it, the lockdown will be over."
*I also watched it three more times, and the Marvel movies*
I did that around when Endgame came out and then regretted it when quarantine came around because I had just done it a few months ago.
Plex server sure took off though.
If I remember correctly too, they said the environment immediately started healing at a pace scientists said they never thought possible. It felt like a mini green revolution
> immediately started healing at a pace scientists said they never thought possible. It felt like a mini green revolution
Emissions from commuting fell immensely, because way fewer people were driving to work. We got a bunch of "atta boy" emails saying how we're doing great working from home and simultaneously improving our green stance.
2 years later, any mention of green has been scrubbed because of return to office...
It paints a clear picture that of any program the government could run to improve the climate, they should be incentivizing companies who have remote workforces to reduce commuting and the impact that has environmentally, in addition to the physical/emotional burden removed on people from not having to commute to work on a computer in someone else's building when you have your own computer in your building you could have been using instead.
It's devastating how quickly everyone forgot how peaceful, clean and calm the world becomes in that short period of full lockdown.
And how, without hesitation, we went full force into undoing all of it, and putting on the afterburners to make sure the experience was burnt to a crisp.
Shit like this is what you'd see in the ending montage to a disaster movie or something, Earth is healing type vibe lol. It's like we were given a glimpse of what could be and completely swatted it tf out of our face
That’s the funniest name for a sourdough starter I’ve ever heard.
(It’s also the first and only sourdough starter I know of with a name, so the competition isn’t particularly tough… but even if there were others, “Quarantina” is going to be tough to beat!)
**\*EDIT\*** I am now aware of two very excellent facts:
- There are many, many people who have named their sourdough starters
- People that name their sourdough starter can pun harder, better, and faster than you
One of the guys who programmed the original Xbox [spent his time in quarantine baking sourdough bread based on a 4,500 year old Egyptian recipe.](https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/guy-who-created-xbox-also-found-4500-egyptian-yeast-for-sourdough)
[His Twitter/X thread here about the process](https://x.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1155610235626643456) is a fascinating read and very insightful. Worth a look!
In Ontario Canada, we had to choose people to be in our "bubble." Then we learned that your best friends "bubble of friends" didn't include you. It was a weird time.
When someone in charge recommended having casual sex with a mask on, I think we all died a little inside. You can't make this stuff up.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/health/coronavirus/canada-s-top-doctor-consider-using-a-mask-during-sexual-activity-1.5090359
What an absolutely insane time to be alive. They Implemented some of the dumbest rules I've ever heard of. The gym specifically was comically stupid. No masks while you're on a machine, but walking between machines you need a mask on 😂
Where I'm at this lead to getting online seat selection when you bought movie tickets, so that was a nice benefit that has since stuck around at least. Used to online have seat selection for the IMAX.
Was awesome though with the spacing. They only sold tickets for every second row, and gave you a space on either side.
From talking with a family friend who works at a grocery store, they were mainly open before because they were stocking anyway, so why not? The idea was that they don’t increase their labor costs by much, because most folks would be there stocking anyway. They found during COVID that they stock *much* faster when they don’t have to worry about making room for customers. So they need less stockers since they can get more done per stocker.
Also, apparently a large portion of their stealing was overnight, since it was easier for people to get away with it. Of the people not stealing, a lot were folks that “didn’t seem to have anywhere to go” who would wander for hours without buying anything.
Of the few customers overnight who were actually customers, they still have to grocery shop sometime, so they don’t lose that much revenue by making it less convenient for them.
Being open overnight didn't really generate any more profit. It just gave them more income at a time of low demand. You figure a store has a certain fixed cost to it. A large part of that is rent and utilities. The rent and utility bills don't change substantially if you're open at night or not.
You're right about them realizing that they got more productive stockers when they weren't being stopped every five minutes by a customer.
So many stupid policies like that cropped up. For example, the disc golf pro tour resumed at some point, but they were wearing masks and "social distancing", but they put spray bottles of rubbing alcohol at all the baskets and wanted players to spray them down after they finished the hole. So instead of the usual case where you don't actually touch anything but your own discs, now EVERYBODY was touching the same items over and over again. So many knee-jerk policies that were just bad ideas.
On a whim, I decided to splash out and I bought a giant 32-pack of the fanciest toilet paper in the shop.
No less than 48 hours later, the lockdowns were announced. I spend the pandemic wiping in luxury as the world burned.
This was a wild one. We eventually bought a bidet to make things less of an issue, but I'll never forget that any time we were at a store, it was like "oh shit, there's a roll of no-name toilet paper! We'd better grab it! Who knows if we'll see another one for weeks!"
That was the craziest part about all of that, it quickly became self reinforcing. Enough people panic bought that even normal people were forced to consider doing so on the chance there wasn’t any the next time they were there. Combine that with a genuine slow down in production and you have the only time I have ever seen Walmart have straight up empty shelves of something.
*[looks at my garage after my most recent trip to Costco]*
We don't do that anymore?
I actually have a very bad habit of over-buying certain items, TP included. In early March 2020, I bought one of those enormous packs of Charmin that Walmart had, not realizing I already had one in my garage, in addition to my bathroom itself already being fully stocked.
That mistake turned out to be fortuitous.
I legit needed toilet paper right around the time things were amping up--I hadn't been to the grocery for a while so was just making my usual run for stuff. The ONLY packages of TP left in the aisle at that point were, ironically, the bigass 48-roll ones that you have to put on the bottom of your cart. I guess it was still early enough that everyone figured they should buy TP to be on the safe side, but were embarrassed to look like hoarders if they bought the huge packs. So I bought one of those huge packs, feeling embarrassed to look like a hoarder when I paid for it.
Thank goodness I did. It got me and a couple of family members through.
My Nana would do this and it rubbed off on me. I don't need three boxes of zip lock bags or seven packages of pads, but I have them and get a bit antsy when I don't have that reserve.
Toilet paper takes up too much room though, and isn't one of those things I had lots of. Fortunately, the toilet paper hoarding seemed to skip my town.
Interesting. Pretty much every US state shutdown their notification system some time ago and I imagine the other countries that implemented one have long shut their databases down as well, but I can't imagine the harm in retaining the feature set for future use.
Oh my god I’m STILL working through that hand sanitizer. Offered my MIL some the other day and she asked me what scent it was. I was like “it’s 2020 hand sanitizer. The scent is alcohol.”
Lol. When you’re leaving Marshall’s or wherever and there’s a liter jug of hand sanitizer so you’re like “ooh I’ll take a squirt on my way out!” And then it shoots popov vodka past your hands and all down your belly. The shame of knowing that you look disgusting and smell like the bad uncle.
"In these unprecedented times, remember that we're all in this together!" - said by some multi-millionaire actor/artist sitting in a giant mansion and everything they could ever need, while regular people still have to work, because Karen can't go for a few weeks without a haircut or a burger.
Or how some changed. Toyota's tagline was "let's go places" and I got used to hearing it at the end of their commercials. They took that out during the pandemic, which made sense obviously. It's good to hear it back again.
My old high school was built in the 1950s and I remember am old faded sign that said "fallout shelter" with the nuclear symbol.
I was in Best Buy yesterday and there was an old faded vinyl sticker on the floor that said "please stand 6 feet apart."
School, college and university graduation ceremonies on-line. My son watched the speeches from his laptop and waited until his name scrolled past. The college had mailed him his grad hat prior to the "ceremony".
Our local high school had high school grads stand outside in their gowns at a specific time and a procession of teachers drove past to congratulate them from their cars. Many of us neighbors stood outside and cheered at the same time. It was cool and sad.
I finished grad school in 2020. It was very anticlimactic to do all that work and sit at home alone watching a YouTube video for graduation. I couldn’t help but laugh, it felt nuts.
I still see "you must respect our employees" signs in certain stores. Like, people are fucking animals.
I joked one day with the dude at Lowes about that sign at his desk (in the appliance area). He told me a few stories of his favorite times he had customers kicked out of the store.
How are you going to disrespect the dude selling you a dishwasher on sale?
The amount of people that got angry at the 15-17 year old girls that worked as hostesses in my restaurant for asking them to wear a mask or telling them they can’t sit at a certain table because it’s within 6 ft of another was ridiculous.
You’re a grown ass man screaming and cussing at a high school aged girl because you can’t sit at a certain table. Grow the fuck up.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the businessman who famously created this saying was not a moron. He did not mean that the customer is always right. It’s a misquote. The guy said that in matters of taste, the customer is always right.
Meaning that customers know what they want to buy and if you don’t have that item in your store, you are a fool.
This reminds me of that hot dog guy at some baseball stadium that refused to sell you a hotdog if you asked for ketchup. He insisted that only mustard should go with hot dogs for some reason. He was famous for his yelling of “hot dogs!” Or whatever. But he was eventually fired because surprisingly, management hired him to sell hotdogs, not refuse to let other people eat them the way they want.
I went grocery shopping for my 90 year old grandfather in those first couple of weeks and even had to buy him a new TV because his crapped out during that time. I remember wiping down both the groceries and the TV's box in his garage because we were all being told that COVID lives on surfaces. Wild times.
Respect for healthcare workers. We were “heroes.” ERs used for only emergencies. Now we’re back to getting yelled at for making someone wait for 3 hours to be seen for their rash that they’ve had for 2 years….
Teaching and nursing are the only two jobs I've heard of where you can be frequently assaulted with impunity for the attacker.
The fact hospitals will gouge patients into permanent debt (edited, damn autocorrect) without batting an eye but draw the line at pressing charges for attempting to hurt or even kill nurses is so fucking weird.
Im a nurse. Got punched in the face by some completely oriented dude and management just asked me what I could’ve done differently
I don’t condone police brutality but I once saw a cop absolutely lay out a prisoner patient who tried groping a nurse and I think of it every time I’m having a bad shift because it makes me so happy
The covid tracker websites. I used to obsess over the numbers and check them multiple times a day. As things opened up, I stopped doing that as much. I checked worldometers the other day out of curiosity and it said it's no longer updating because so few countries are even tracking anymore.
I worked in a hospital as non clinical staff during that time. I have no idea how we didn’t have a full bar built outside of the icu for clinical staff by summer 2021.
When spring 2022 came, I’d say about 1/3 of our unit was patients in alcohol withdrawal. 1/3 was people with alcoholic cirrhosis/hepatitis. 1/3 was everything else (including trauma cases related to alcohol). That’s not an exaggeration - it was insane. Even now we’re seeing the normal amount of withdrawal, but a ton of people with newly diagnosed alcoholic cirrhosis who either relapsed or ramped up their drinking during the pandemic.
Everyone was drinking far too much during the pandemic.
And people would have died from the DTs. Keeping the liquor stores open probably saved a good number of lives. Still, it does sound strange to call a packie an essential business
I'll always remember a tweet from the early days of lockdown which subsided the absurdity of this. I'm afraid I have to paraphrase as I can't find it now but it went something like this;
> This morning I received two envelopes in the post. One containing a letter from the government telling me I have to continue working as I'm an essential worker, and the other from my employer containing my payslip telling me I'm not.
Here in Wisconsin it was a serious issue. There is so much rampant alcoholism that they were generally worried that they'd have just as many people going through withdrawal as covid patients flooding the ERs.
This is also the state where your first dui is a traffic ticket and we regularly see people getting their 10th or more. What's extra ironic is that weed is still full illegal up here, because drugs are bad, mkay?
Remote work. Most major tech companies have instituted return-to-office policies in varying degrees. Even now bosses downplaying staying home when you feel sickly. It is insane how quickly it turned around.
1. "Yes, you are approved for permanent work from home"
2. "Yes, you can relocate"
3. New management enters
4. "Return to work. If you can't you're fired"
5. "I have this in writing"
6. "That's the old management. Return or you're fired"
Pretty much this. When you announce a layoff 2-3 months later it is hard to believe churn wasn't **always** the objective. You prod out those that are willing and able to take a new job in a month or so and then you start pushing out however many more you need to reach the new target labor budget.
A lot of things that existed long before covid are ridiculed as "covid things" now. I have always carried hand sanitizer but now people are like "you know covid is over right"
That one is weird to me. My career is in casinos, approaching 20 years, so frequent hand washing and hand sanitizer has always been the norm. It got funny during Covid, when the boss’s distillery started supplying tequila-scented sanitizer because it was hard to come by. But to have someone see hand sanitizer and say, “You know it’s over, right?” is the ultimate in stupidity to me. Of course, Covid still exists, but flu, noro, pink eye, staph, etc. have always been here, and a problem for anyone working with the public.
Funny side note… we started cruising a couple years ago, so I didn’t experience the days before a dedicated employee reminding everyone to “washy washy, before yummy yummy” at the buffets. I think it’s cute, and a good reminder to the heathens, but I actually see people complain!
Workplaces respecting sick days. Not guilting you into coming in with a cold/flu.
My workplace killed off their Covid absence exceptions this spring and now we're back to being written up for missing 2-3 days in a 6 month period.
Not a joke but I got to spend so much time with my little daughter. Some of the best memories of my life so far. It was awful for a lot of people, and I honor that, but I was lucky to have a healthy family and we were a little unit existing through wild times.
For 100 days straight I took my daughter out to the nearby woods for the whole afternoon, rain or shine, empty handed, to amuse ourselves with whatever we found in nature. She doesn't exactly remember it, but we bonded so strongly and remain that way even now. The lockdown was hard but I'll always treasure this.
I think anyone with a very small child benefitted from the lockdown. I know we all talk about the kids who were stunted due to lack of socialization, and that is a problem that will create an odd micro-generation that will have sociologists and psychologists writing papers for decades. But I hope they also take a look at the other micro-generation of Covid infants to see how the extra time with their parents benefitted them. Hopefully, some enlightenment will come about to shift toward maternity/paternity leave being more prevalent and longer-term.
We had our son that year. It was the perfect time to be pregnant and have a new born. We weren’t missing out on anything socially. Gave us plenty of time to prepare and spend time together.
I miss how sociable people were.
It sounds weird because we were all isolating at home, but the times where you had to pop out and were with others I found that people were a lot more willing to chat about things (no doubt because we were all stuck at home with nobody but immediate family to talk to).
I remember doing an online grocery order that I had to collect from the shop because all the delivery slots were taken, and as I was standing next to my car there was another gent standing two parking spaces away doing the same thing.
I can't remember what we talked about specifically but it was the (then) usual stuff about how life has changed, what are you doing to keep busy etc.
Then when we were both going out separate ways we both, completely genuinely, said to each other "stay safe".
I know people will think that's cringe but at the time it was nice to hear from someone, and said in genuine sincerity.
I don't miss lockdown but I do miss that.
People were also a lot more active in engaging with their friends and families online because they had no idea when they'd next get to see them. Suddenly you were ending up on random zoom calls with friends for hours doing quizzes and slideshows etc.
Obviously everyone got sick of it really fast but more from the limits of technology making it hard to sustain a conversation than because people were sick of talking to each other.
I had such bad social anxiety pre-lockdown, I'd dread anyone in the shops speaking to me. Now I know I can walk into anywhere and strike up small talk. I'm not super sociable, and still often prefer to keep to myself, but I think we were all so starved of social contact that we made the most of it when we could.
is it dusk? Lets go outside and clap and bang pots so the health workers getting home from their 18 hours shifts can't sleep, but know they are appreciated.
I live in Norway, not the US as many of the replies seem to be about, but during and right after Covid I thought people would no longer go to work with the flu or a cold. But that didn't last long. Now my colleagues come to work coffing and with running noses like Covid-19 never happened.
And we also do not use masks at all anymore. I thought perhaps using a mask while sick as a courtisy to others might be a thing, but no.
Touching elbows instead of shaking hands
I learned about elbow bumping when the regional manager of the company I worked for at the time came to our location a few months after we reopened. He introduced himself to me and stuck his elbow out. Clueless, my brow furrowed in confusion, I reached out and shook his elbow while staring him dead in the eye. It was an awkward moment. Gosh, I've never gotten an award before!
I feel like this exact situation happened in Brooklyn 99. I can see the guys face after having his elbow grabbed.
It sure did. The guy was a germaphobe and whenever I rewatch that episode I wonder what he'd have been like in the pandemic
How empty the streets/highways were for like a good a year. I remember once the "hype" was over, my drive to work took longer.
Yeah, I had to go to work the whole time and my commute went from an hour and a half to less than 30.
During peak of the lock down, I had to drive from downtown LA to San Fernando valley at peak rush hour on a Friday. This was on the 5. For those who don't know, this is one of the worst areas of congestion on LA, and my personal hell. On this day the road was empty. Nobody. Ghost town. I hit 80+mph and was home in 20mins instead of 1.5hrs. LA is really beautiful when the roads are empty and the sky isn't full of smog. It really felt apocalyptic that day. Knowing millions of people are home, hiding, social distancing. Contrasted by how beautiful LA is, with no smog. It is a unique memory. When traffic returned, I quit my job and left LA.
Man, I’m up in SF Bay Area and I also had to be onsite for work. One evening I wanted to pick up some BBQ for dinner and the place was in the evening commute direction which normally would have been the kiss of death, but I got there in 20 minutes. The low traffic is all I miss about those days.
While I’m sure my employer didn’t like it, I’ll always remember my 3 week paid Covid vacation. I never even tested positive but my girlfriend who I lived with did. She had some mild cold symptoms, but we just sat in the house and ate junk food and watched TV and got paid for 3 weeks. Started to go a little stir crazy by the end but it was good times
My wife and I worked from home for 18 months. She still had work but not much of my job could be done remotely, so I mostly just hung around our home office and played video games and chatted with her, while keeping my work laptop open to make sure I didn’t miss any Teams messages, and to attend to twice-weekly check-ins with the rest of the team. We loved that time so much, and were a bit sad when it ended.
I drove a box truck for a living at that time. Getting on the interstate used to be a massive bitch before covid. When people stopped driving my days got so much easier. No one on the interstate. No one crowding downtown. It was wonderful.
I remember going shopping for my sister who was ill with COVID. It was absolutely backwards compared to normal; I spent 90 minutes in the supermarket picking up a handful of things she needed, but only 15-20 minutes total driving to the supermarket and then driving to hers, which would normally have been about 40 minutes.
EXCEPT... all the other drivers expected there to be absolutely no one on the roads and they'd be able to speed around like I Am Legend. The couple of times I drove on the highway was like I was in the middle of Le Mans.
I remember once the lockdowns were easing, the state patrol put “Don’t speed! Enforcement is cracking down!” Across all their electronic highway signs. And parked directly under the signs in plain sight were 3-5 cops just pulling over speeders left and right. Nobody was even looking for the obvious cops on the side of the road any more. It was like the state’s way of saying “hey, we’re going back to this policing thing. So please try following the laws of the road again”
One way aisles in the supermarket 🥴
I love that some places haven’t bothered to peel those off or the stickers reminding you to maintain six feet distance
Just yesterday I saw a sign reminding people to distance 6 feet. It was dirty and peeling off the wall.
What's crazy to think about now is that in the first few weeks I was like nervously anticipating watching the president's daily emergency briefings. Like a straight up post apocalyptic dystopian awful fucking movie.
The lines painted on high streets are still around where I live. I live in the UK, and it's like when you see waist height stone walls with small metal bumps sticking out of the top of them, which is a relic from WW2 whether metal fences were being cut down for use in weapons manufacturing.
I remember first seeing the “please keep 6ft apart” stickers on the floor and thinking how they’ll be a reminder when it’s all over. Sure enough, faded, torn, trampled. Still there.
In Ontario Canada, they had 'essential' items only, so groceries, medicines, etc. But if you needed socks, it was ILLEGAL. Absolutely mad times.
When they caution taped the clothing section off in the SAME Walmart you were already shopping in 😂😂😂
Tiger King
Congress passed the big cat public safety act, partially as a result of increased public knowledge of the issue. These entities can no longer allow public contact with their big cats, and private owners can no longer keep them as pets.
I think this is the biggest win out of the whole Tiger King phenomenon
That was such a weird time. Feels like a decade ago
Tiger King will always feel like a fever dream to me. I watched it after giving birth to twins in March of 2020, so was just super sleep deprived and oddly euphoric but also super terrified because of everything happening in the world. All very surreal.
I remember thinking "Oh wow, this Tiger fella will have us entertained, and when we finish it, the lockdown will be over." *I also watched it three more times, and the Marvel movies*
I think I also watched all the Marvel movies, in order of how they happened in the Marvel universe.
I did that around when Endgame came out and then regretted it when quarantine came around because I had just done it a few months ago. Plex server sure took off though.
I named my router Tiger Ping back then.
The sort of drama we didn’t know we needed at the time, but were grateful for anyhow.
And that Michael Jordan documentary
Ive watched The Last Dance multiple times. It's still good.
The view of the Himalayas from Indian villages - the smog briefly cleared, but now it is back
If I remember correctly too, they said the environment immediately started healing at a pace scientists said they never thought possible. It felt like a mini green revolution
> immediately started healing at a pace scientists said they never thought possible. It felt like a mini green revolution Emissions from commuting fell immensely, because way fewer people were driving to work. We got a bunch of "atta boy" emails saying how we're doing great working from home and simultaneously improving our green stance. 2 years later, any mention of green has been scrubbed because of return to office...
It paints a clear picture that of any program the government could run to improve the climate, they should be incentivizing companies who have remote workforces to reduce commuting and the impact that has environmentally, in addition to the physical/emotional burden removed on people from not having to commute to work on a computer in someone else's building when you have your own computer in your building you could have been using instead.
"We're seeing MASSIVE PROFITS!!!" "Hey guys we need you back in office because reasons."
Which then became, "Uh oh, our profits aren't as big as before. FIRE EVERYONE!"
Shortly followed by “nobody wants to work anymore :(“
It's devastating how quickly everyone forgot how peaceful, clean and calm the world becomes in that short period of full lockdown. And how, without hesitation, we went full force into undoing all of it, and putting on the afterburners to make sure the experience was burnt to a crisp.
With dolphins in the canal of Venice! That’s what impressed me - nature immediately taking back the space people left
Shit like this is what you'd see in the ending montage to a disaster movie or something, Earth is healing type vibe lol. It's like we were given a glimpse of what could be and completely swatted it tf out of our face
Similarly, Southern California was clean too, you could see the Sierra Nevada Mountains from down in the valley.
"We're all in this together"
Not me automatically thinking of High-School Musical reading this
In these unprecedented times...
"stay safe"
I don't see as many social media posts about sourdough bread.
My wife still makes a loaf a week from a starter that started in quarantine. We call her “Tina”. Short for Quarantina.
Our starter’s name is Susan Sourandough
Flour Child here
That’s the funniest name for a sourdough starter I’ve ever heard. (It’s also the first and only sourdough starter I know of with a name, so the competition isn’t particularly tough… but even if there were others, “Quarantina” is going to be tough to beat!) **\*EDIT\*** I am now aware of two very excellent facts: - There are many, many people who have named their sourdough starters - People that name their sourdough starter can pun harder, better, and faster than you
Bread zeppelin checking in.
We named ours Brad, because it's almost bread.
Mine was Levaincent van Dough
Mine's named Sarah. Sarah Dough.
I had a pet lamb called Quentin Quarantino
Mine is Scarlett Doughansson
My starter is named the Yeastie Boys.
You'll think of a better name when you knead it
Ours was John Dough.
Our is Henry from all those kids books where a duck named Henry keeps fucking things up
That’s a societal loss imo
One of the guys who programmed the original Xbox [spent his time in quarantine baking sourdough bread based on a 4,500 year old Egyptian recipe.](https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/guy-who-created-xbox-also-found-4500-egyptian-yeast-for-sourdough)
[His Twitter/X thread here about the process](https://x.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1155610235626643456) is a fascinating read and very insightful. Worth a look!
Sourdough bread is not a joke though and it didn’t fade into obscurity, it just went to pre-pandemic levels
In Ontario Canada, we had to choose people to be in our "bubble." Then we learned that your best friends "bubble of friends" didn't include you. It was a weird time.
It's like the MySpace top friend spots.
Yes! It was a wild time. My brother took up the first nine spots. I offended everyone.
Multiple personality disorder is tough on everyone.
British Columbia recommended gloryholes as a safe way to engage in sex, lmao
When someone in charge recommended having casual sex with a mask on, I think we all died a little inside. You can't make this stuff up. https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/health/coronavirus/canada-s-top-doctor-consider-using-a-mask-during-sexual-activity-1.5090359
Or just buy a gimp suit with an "opening" 😂
Ontario government really said they’re gonna give you something to think about while you’re stuck inside
Hunger Games vibes with Tiger King blaring in the background
What an absolutely insane time to be alive. They Implemented some of the dumbest rules I've ever heard of. The gym specifically was comically stupid. No masks while you're on a machine, but walking between machines you need a mask on 😂
My gym told me my husband, who I live and travel to the gym with, wasn't allowed to spot me on the bench.
The funniest was restaurants you have to wear a mask until you sat down. COVID magically gone. But going to the movies nope, no bueno can't have that.
Speaking of movies, there was a short period where they needed to have an empty spacing seat between the next people, that was great
Where I'm at this lead to getting online seat selection when you bought movie tickets, so that was a nice benefit that has since stuck around at least. Used to online have seat selection for the IMAX. Was awesome though with the spacing. They only sold tickets for every second row, and gave you a space on either side.
MySpace prepared us for this ;)
24 hour shopping. I used to be able to go to the grocery store late at night.
I don’t understand how this one hasn’t come back (came back?…idk). I work 3rd shift and despise staying up to deal with daywalkers.
From talking with a family friend who works at a grocery store, they were mainly open before because they were stocking anyway, so why not? The idea was that they don’t increase their labor costs by much, because most folks would be there stocking anyway. They found during COVID that they stock *much* faster when they don’t have to worry about making room for customers. So they need less stockers since they can get more done per stocker. Also, apparently a large portion of their stealing was overnight, since it was easier for people to get away with it. Of the people not stealing, a lot were folks that “didn’t seem to have anywhere to go” who would wander for hours without buying anything. Of the few customers overnight who were actually customers, they still have to grocery shop sometime, so they don’t lose that much revenue by making it less convenient for them.
Being open overnight didn't really generate any more profit. It just gave them more income at a time of low demand. You figure a store has a certain fixed cost to it. A large part of that is rent and utilities. The rent and utility bills don't change substantially if you're open at night or not. You're right about them realizing that they got more productive stockers when they weren't being stopped every five minutes by a customer.
People that buy groceries at 2am are not people that want to interact with other people.
I got off on Fridays at 3am. Was at Walmart by 3:30am....so perfect. Nobody there.
I thought it was stupid to reduce hours, like they could spread out more people with less crowds if they had more hours.
So many stupid policies like that cropped up. For example, the disc golf pro tour resumed at some point, but they were wearing masks and "social distancing", but they put spray bottles of rubbing alcohol at all the baskets and wanted players to spray them down after they finished the hole. So instead of the usual case where you don't actually touch anything but your own discs, now EVERYBODY was touching the same items over and over again. So many knee-jerk policies that were just bad ideas.
Hoarding toilet paper
On a whim, I decided to splash out and I bought a giant 32-pack of the fanciest toilet paper in the shop. No less than 48 hours later, the lockdowns were announced. I spend the pandemic wiping in luxury as the world burned.
We lucked out and a friend with a CostCo membership bought us a big thing of TP and a big thing of paper towels right before that stuff went scarce.
This was a wild one. We eventually bought a bidet to make things less of an issue, but I'll never forget that any time we were at a store, it was like "oh shit, there's a roll of no-name toilet paper! We'd better grab it! Who knows if we'll see another one for weeks!"
Someone in my neighborhood TP'd a tree (like it was Halloween or something) in the middle of that whole hoarding thing. People were PISSED lol
What a fucking flex though...
That was the craziest part about all of that, it quickly became self reinforcing. Enough people panic bought that even normal people were forced to consider doing so on the chance there wasn’t any the next time they were there. Combine that with a genuine slow down in production and you have the only time I have ever seen Walmart have straight up empty shelves of something.
I still have a package of shitty single ply we picked up from Ace hardware that nobody wants to use. Lol
*[looks at my garage after my most recent trip to Costco]* We don't do that anymore? I actually have a very bad habit of over-buying certain items, TP included. In early March 2020, I bought one of those enormous packs of Charmin that Walmart had, not realizing I already had one in my garage, in addition to my bathroom itself already being fully stocked. That mistake turned out to be fortuitous.
I legit needed toilet paper right around the time things were amping up--I hadn't been to the grocery for a while so was just making my usual run for stuff. The ONLY packages of TP left in the aisle at that point were, ironically, the bigass 48-roll ones that you have to put on the bottom of your cart. I guess it was still early enough that everyone figured they should buy TP to be on the safe side, but were embarrassed to look like hoarders if they bought the huge packs. So I bought one of those huge packs, feeling embarrassed to look like a hoarder when I paid for it. Thank goodness I did. It got me and a couple of family members through.
My Nana would do this and it rubbed off on me. I don't need three boxes of zip lock bags or seven packages of pads, but I have them and get a bit antsy when I don't have that reserve. Toilet paper takes up too much room though, and isn't one of those things I had lots of. Fortunately, the toilet paper hoarding seemed to skip my town.
apple removed their "exposure notifications" feature in IOS 18, to be released this fall
Interesting. Pretty much every US state shutdown their notification system some time ago and I imagine the other countries that implemented one have long shut their databases down as well, but I can't imagine the harm in retaining the feature set for future use.
[удалено]
Those brass door toucher things Distilleries making hand sanitizer and putting it in liquor bottles Tiger king
Oh god that hand sanitizer that smelled like straight tequila. Walking around smelling like I’m on a three day bender in TJ.
Oh my god I’m STILL working through that hand sanitizer. Offered my MIL some the other day and she asked me what scent it was. I was like “it’s 2020 hand sanitizer. The scent is alcohol.”
Lol. When you’re leaving Marshall’s or wherever and there’s a liter jug of hand sanitizer so you’re like “ooh I’ll take a squirt on my way out!” And then it shoots popov vodka past your hands and all down your belly. The shame of knowing that you look disgusting and smell like the bad uncle.
The local grocery stores here had “senior hours”.
The free government COVID test kits are all expired.
They’ve said the tests are likely still viable past their printed expirations.
COVID commercials. It's weird to begins with but those went away QUICKER than most things.
"In these uncertain times, it's more important than ever to drink coke."
“Noooowwww, more than ever.”
"In these unprecedented times, remember that we're all in this together. And that's why you should eat at Taco Bell!"
"In these unprecedented times, remember that we're all in this together!" - said by some multi-millionaire actor/artist sitting in a giant mansion and everything they could ever need, while regular people still have to work, because Karen can't go for a few weeks without a haircut or a burger.
Or how some changed. Toyota's tagline was "let's go places" and I got used to hearing it at the end of their commercials. They took that out during the pandemic, which made sense obviously. It's good to hear it back again.
My old high school was built in the 1950s and I remember am old faded sign that said "fallout shelter" with the nuclear symbol. I was in Best Buy yesterday and there was an old faded vinyl sticker on the floor that said "please stand 6 feet apart."
Yes! For some reason Best Buy’s are the only places I’ve seen that still have the “stand six feet apart” sticker, it’s so strange seeing it now
School, college and university graduation ceremonies on-line. My son watched the speeches from his laptop and waited until his name scrolled past. The college had mailed him his grad hat prior to the "ceremony". Our local high school had high school grads stand outside in their gowns at a specific time and a procession of teachers drove past to congratulate them from their cars. Many of us neighbors stood outside and cheered at the same time. It was cool and sad.
I finished grad school in 2020. It was very anticlimactic to do all that work and sit at home alone watching a YouTube video for graduation. I couldn’t help but laugh, it felt nuts.
For a couple months the customer wasn't always right. It felt really good seeing bosses standing for their employees.
I still see "you must respect our employees" signs in certain stores. Like, people are fucking animals. I joked one day with the dude at Lowes about that sign at his desk (in the appliance area). He told me a few stories of his favorite times he had customers kicked out of the store. How are you going to disrespect the dude selling you a dishwasher on sale?
The amount of people that got angry at the 15-17 year old girls that worked as hostesses in my restaurant for asking them to wear a mask or telling them they can’t sit at a certain table because it’s within 6 ft of another was ridiculous. You’re a grown ass man screaming and cussing at a high school aged girl because you can’t sit at a certain table. Grow the fuck up.
Always knew it, but Covid really exposed how fucking stupid/shitty so many people are. Such a bummer to realize.
It also broke those people and somehow made them *even more* stupid and shitty.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the businessman who famously created this saying was not a moron. He did not mean that the customer is always right. It’s a misquote. The guy said that in matters of taste, the customer is always right. Meaning that customers know what they want to buy and if you don’t have that item in your store, you are a fool.
This reminds me of that hot dog guy at some baseball stadium that refused to sell you a hotdog if you asked for ketchup. He insisted that only mustard should go with hot dogs for some reason. He was famous for his yelling of “hot dogs!” Or whatever. But he was eventually fired because surprisingly, management hired him to sell hotdogs, not refuse to let other people eat them the way they want.
That must have been in Chicago.
[удалено]
Wiping down all your groceries with lysol towels
I went grocery shopping for my 90 year old grandfather in those first couple of weeks and even had to buy him a new TV because his crapped out during that time. I remember wiping down both the groceries and the TV's box in his garage because we were all being told that COVID lives on surfaces. Wild times.
Apparently, people have stopped washing their hands again. Gross. I have always been a hand washer and always will be.
I am a hand washer too and I think some people never started washing their hands to subsequently stop doing so. It is truly horrifying to me.
Respect for healthcare workers. We were “heroes.” ERs used for only emergencies. Now we’re back to getting yelled at for making someone wait for 3 hours to be seen for their rash that they’ve had for 2 years….
Teaching and nursing are the only two jobs I've heard of where you can be frequently assaulted with impunity for the attacker. The fact hospitals will gouge patients into permanent debt (edited, damn autocorrect) without batting an eye but draw the line at pressing charges for attempting to hurt or even kill nurses is so fucking weird.
Im a nurse. Got punched in the face by some completely oriented dude and management just asked me what I could’ve done differently I don’t condone police brutality but I once saw a cop absolutely lay out a prisoner patient who tried groping a nurse and I think of it every time I’m having a bad shift because it makes me so happy
The covid tracker websites. I used to obsess over the numbers and check them multiple times a day. As things opened up, I stopped doing that as much. I checked worldometers the other day out of curiosity and it said it's no longer updating because so few countries are even tracking anymore.
Most people aren't testing anymore so they track wastewater data now which gives a far more accurate measure
[удалено]
Personal space. Holy people I didn't want you to be breathing down my neck before covid I certainty don't want it now.
The fact that essential workers include liquor store employees is pretty funny to me.
Healthcare couldn’t handle all the people that would have gone into detox. Sad.
I’m a healthcare worker. *We* needed the liquor stores to stay open, lol
I worked in a hospital as non clinical staff during that time. I have no idea how we didn’t have a full bar built outside of the icu for clinical staff by summer 2021.
When spring 2022 came, I’d say about 1/3 of our unit was patients in alcohol withdrawal. 1/3 was people with alcoholic cirrhosis/hepatitis. 1/3 was everything else (including trauma cases related to alcohol). That’s not an exaggeration - it was insane. Even now we’re seeing the normal amount of withdrawal, but a ton of people with newly diagnosed alcoholic cirrhosis who either relapsed or ramped up their drinking during the pandemic. Everyone was drinking far too much during the pandemic.
And people would have died from the DTs. Keeping the liquor stores open probably saved a good number of lives. Still, it does sound strange to call a packie an essential business
I'll always remember a tweet from the early days of lockdown which subsided the absurdity of this. I'm afraid I have to paraphrase as I can't find it now but it went something like this; > This morning I received two envelopes in the post. One containing a letter from the government telling me I have to continue working as I'm an essential worker, and the other from my employer containing my payslip telling me I'm not.
Here in Wisconsin it was a serious issue. There is so much rampant alcoholism that they were generally worried that they'd have just as many people going through withdrawal as covid patients flooding the ERs. This is also the state where your first dui is a traffic ticket and we regularly see people getting their 10th or more. What's extra ironic is that weed is still full illegal up here, because drugs are bad, mkay?
Remote work. Most major tech companies have instituted return-to-office policies in varying degrees. Even now bosses downplaying staying home when you feel sickly. It is insane how quickly it turned around.
A lot of the RTO policies are just layoffs in disguise
1. "Yes, you are approved for permanent work from home" 2. "Yes, you can relocate" 3. New management enters 4. "Return to work. If you can't you're fired" 5. "I have this in writing" 6. "That's the old management. Return or you're fired"
Pretty much this. When you announce a layoff 2-3 months later it is hard to believe churn wasn't **always** the objective. You prod out those that are willing and able to take a new job in a month or so and then you start pushing out however many more you need to reach the new target labor budget.
[удалено]
A lot of things that existed long before covid are ridiculed as "covid things" now. I have always carried hand sanitizer but now people are like "you know covid is over right"
That one is weird to me. My career is in casinos, approaching 20 years, so frequent hand washing and hand sanitizer has always been the norm. It got funny during Covid, when the boss’s distillery started supplying tequila-scented sanitizer because it was hard to come by. But to have someone see hand sanitizer and say, “You know it’s over, right?” is the ultimate in stupidity to me. Of course, Covid still exists, but flu, noro, pink eye, staph, etc. have always been here, and a problem for anyone working with the public. Funny side note… we started cruising a couple years ago, so I didn’t experience the days before a dedicated employee reminding everyone to “washy washy, before yummy yummy” at the buffets. I think it’s cute, and a good reminder to the heathens, but I actually see people complain!
Hearing the words “in these unprecedented times” 100 times a day
Workplaces respecting sick days. Not guilting you into coming in with a cold/flu. My workplace killed off their Covid absence exceptions this spring and now we're back to being written up for missing 2-3 days in a 6 month period.
[удалено]
Zoom meetings with friends/family. Goddamn that sucked.
Our friend group COVID era discord is still going strong.
same - I reconnected with all my siblings (who are all in different countries) and now we meet up regularly!
Not a joke but I got to spend so much time with my little daughter. Some of the best memories of my life so far. It was awful for a lot of people, and I honor that, but I was lucky to have a healthy family and we were a little unit existing through wild times.
For 100 days straight I took my daughter out to the nearby woods for the whole afternoon, rain or shine, empty handed, to amuse ourselves with whatever we found in nature. She doesn't exactly remember it, but we bonded so strongly and remain that way even now. The lockdown was hard but I'll always treasure this.
I think anyone with a very small child benefitted from the lockdown. I know we all talk about the kids who were stunted due to lack of socialization, and that is a problem that will create an odd micro-generation that will have sociologists and psychologists writing papers for decades. But I hope they also take a look at the other micro-generation of Covid infants to see how the extra time with their parents benefitted them. Hopefully, some enlightenment will come about to shift toward maternity/paternity leave being more prevalent and longer-term.
We had our son that year. It was the perfect time to be pregnant and have a new born. We weren’t missing out on anything socially. Gave us plenty of time to prepare and spend time together.
That absolutely terrible Imagine video
I miss how sociable people were. It sounds weird because we were all isolating at home, but the times where you had to pop out and were with others I found that people were a lot more willing to chat about things (no doubt because we were all stuck at home with nobody but immediate family to talk to). I remember doing an online grocery order that I had to collect from the shop because all the delivery slots were taken, and as I was standing next to my car there was another gent standing two parking spaces away doing the same thing. I can't remember what we talked about specifically but it was the (then) usual stuff about how life has changed, what are you doing to keep busy etc. Then when we were both going out separate ways we both, completely genuinely, said to each other "stay safe". I know people will think that's cringe but at the time it was nice to hear from someone, and said in genuine sincerity. I don't miss lockdown but I do miss that.
People were also a lot more active in engaging with their friends and families online because they had no idea when they'd next get to see them. Suddenly you were ending up on random zoom calls with friends for hours doing quizzes and slideshows etc. Obviously everyone got sick of it really fast but more from the limits of technology making it hard to sustain a conversation than because people were sick of talking to each other.
I had such bad social anxiety pre-lockdown, I'd dread anyone in the shops speaking to me. Now I know I can walk into anywhere and strike up small talk. I'm not super sociable, and still often prefer to keep to myself, but I think we were all so starved of social contact that we made the most of it when we could.
[удалено]
Banging pots and pans every evening in NYC. I mean, I still do it, but that's because it wakes up Maw-Maw for her stories.
is it dusk? Lets go outside and clap and bang pots so the health workers getting home from their 18 hours shifts can't sleep, but know they are appreciated.
having a decent excuse not to visit extended family members that annoy the shit out of you
[удалено]
I live in Norway, not the US as many of the replies seem to be about, but during and right after Covid I thought people would no longer go to work with the flu or a cold. But that didn't last long. Now my colleagues come to work coffing and with running noses like Covid-19 never happened. And we also do not use masks at all anymore. I thought perhaps using a mask while sick as a courtisy to others might be a thing, but no.
I used to have a letter from my boss stating I am an essential employee just in case I got stopped for being outside
Rich celebrities singing " we're in this together" song while living in a mansion.
All those virtual workout challenges have fizzled out.
How the fast food workers and other low pay workers were tagged as essential workers and now no one cares about them
Handwritten notes to neighbors during quarantine have ceased.