your covid memories.

[Morpheus, the unwoke.]

Anyone have any strong personal memories of covid?

I didn't have covid, and no one I knew had it or died of it. I do recall a memory that stayed with me.

I was shopping for my mother at a local Walmart one night, it was early in the covid pandemic, just when it was going full bore.

The place was nearly abandoned, I me and it was ooen of course but there was almost no one in it. I felt all alone and it was almost ike a zombie movie, so alone in this all lit up store. It was like a horror movie where people walk into a store after tge mobster has killed everyone and disappeared the bodies. I me and I'd passed a very few people on tge way to the groceries section but for a minute I was all alone in it no obe in sight, couldn't hear anyone either. It was spooky and a little scarey being all alone in that long aisle.

Also so much of  the store shelves were empty. Just empty. I had this really scared and sad feeling then, I was asking myselves ''It this the end? Of American society ? No more stores with full shelves,maybe we're about to have a big collapse, maybe.... No more food? The shelves just get emptier and emptier? The end of all that we're used to?''

I got what shopping I could done and got out. I could not stand being there anymore. I was glad I went and not my mom,it was so scarey and sad in that store.

I stayed scared and sad until I went to a Walmart a week later and the shelves were full and there were people, even if we were all masked.

That's my covid memory I can share. You got any?

[lester1/2jr]

I worked (uber driver) during all of Covid. One memory was a passenger who was a garbageman. If you didn't know, garbage men make really good money, generally speaking, because no one wants to to do it. He said his route now took much longer because with more people staying at home there was more garbage. Covid affected absolutely everyone and many in unpredictable ways.

Another one was a college student who, in an effort to avoid a 20 day quarantine, had her roomate GIVE HER COVID first via having the other girl literally cough into her mouth, which didn't take, and ultimately swabbing her roomates nose and putting it deep into her own. Thus, she achieved having COVID which has killed millions and millions of people worldwide

Some industries were affected by covid more than others. While beloved restaurants closed, other places had bonanzas. Bike stores will never have years like they did in 2020. Liquor stores did great. Many cities began outdoor dining which remains popular and many companies began work from home which also remains popular.

These are some frickin memories of Covid 19 which I also had. the cold/ flu aspect was okay but insomnia and losing ability to taste were very disconcerting.

[Alex]

Most of covid left me untouched and indeed led to an improvement in my quality of life. I had started a new job and we had to work from home, but a lack of a work computer to use from home meant it was effectively free time off. As we store food, toiletries and so forth for just this very kind of situation, the shortages in the shops didn't affect us at all. It wasn't until I got deployed this time last year that it really made a negative difference in my personal life. When I finally caught Covid, it wasn't too bad (which I'll thank the vaccinations for), but did give me a couple of extra weeks off work. The worst thing about it was my aunt dying from it a few months ago just as we were thinking the family had gotten through it all more or less unscathed.

[Trevor]

Mom had a debilitating stroke in 2020 under our apartheid style lockdown and I lost 3 friends to Covid-19 😔

[El Misfit]

I was starting my current job (grocery store worker) when the call to close the schools came in. I was training on the register when everyone came in and was stocking up on bread, meat, and milk.

[Rev. Powell]

I remember a lot of people getting it. No one I knew died from it, but the girl I was dating had an uncle and a grandfather die from it.

Our first date was the night before everything shut down, but we kept up seeing each other through the entire lockdown and past until she moved away.

About a week or two after shutdown I felt sick and had a fever. I was sure it was Covid but when I went in to the doctor it actually turned out to be strep throat, which is crazy. I never get infections anymore and the coincidental timing was very weird.

I never got Covid.

[ER]

I have a God-given talent for being able to be isolated without losing my mind, so in that respect I endured the shelter-in-place portion of the plague in 2020 better than many. The roughest part for us was when late in the outbreak, after things had settled down and much had reopened, I had to work in San Diego, so I got the bright idea to take my family with me for a trip, and we were exposed to Covid there, and on the way back had to spend time quarantined on....wait for it....an air force base. Omigarwsh was that a challenge. A pastor involved in the Air Force's Thomas ministries was kind to us and did things to make this easier on the children, but man....a military base, even in private housing, is not where you wanna spend a quarantine with three children and a husband who does not share my gift for hermiting on demand. I kept wondering if maybe they had some top secret cryogenic chambers I could store my family in til it was over. (None of us got Covid.)

[Morpheus, the unwoke.]

Mom had a debilitating stroke in 2020 under our apartheid style lockdown and I lost 3 friends to Covid-19 😔

 Damn, didn't mean to bring up that much bad memories,maybe I shouldn't have posted this.

[indianasmith]

I had never even heard of ZOOM meetings, but I wound up teaching my kids through those for the remainder of the year after we went out on spring break and didn't come back till the next fall.
It was a lot less demanding than in person teaching, and I had time to go to the river a lot and made some of my all-time best finds that year.
Whenever I had to go to the store, I put on a full Plague Doctor costume, much to the amusement of other shoppers.  One fellow looked at me and said:
"You've been waiting your whole life for the government to require you to wear a mask, haven't you?"

I didn't get COVID until January of this year, and when I finally contracted it (after being vaccinated and boosted), all I had were mild cold-like symptoms for one day.

[FatFreddysCat]

My job sent me home to work remote "out of an abundance of caution" in March of 2020. At the time we all thought we'd be back in a couple of days. As it turned out, I never set foot in our office again. It was fun for a while -- "woohoo, I can watch movies while I work, and have a couple of beers in the afternoon when nobody's looking!" -- but the novelty wore off fairly quickly.

I think the moment it became "real" for me was when I learned that the nice lady who used to sit at the desk next to me at the office caught COVID and died from it just before Xmas 2020.

I ended up working remotely from my dining room table for two and a half years until I left that job altogether in August of '22. I was offered a "voluntary severance" because they were going to start sending our department's work to India. (The unspoken message seemed to be, "take this severance now because the next round might not be so voluntary.")

After working from home for that long, my "last day" on the job was weirdly anti-climactic. I said my goodbyes to the other people in my department and a few other close associates via Zoom, and the company sent me a pre-paid FedEx box to return all my company property (lap top computer, accessories, ID badge, etc.) to them. So that was the end of that.

My wife (who was working as a home health aide at the time the pandemic started) caught COVID from her elderly client so all of us (me, wife, both kids) had it for about two weeks in early 2021. Fortunately it was little more than a minor inconvenience for all of us (aside from the fact that we couldn't taste or smell anything for a while afterwards).

Her client passed away a few months later (not from the COVID itself, but she was "never quite the same" after it) and my wife chose to exit the home-health profession after more than a decade.

My wife's been working for Shop Rite supermarkets as a front end supervisor since mid 2021. I did a seasonal stint with Spirit Halloween this Fall after leaving my old job.  I'm still looking for something more permanent but in the meantime I'm about to start working at the same Shop Rite store, I start training on Wednesday. So I can quit stressing about job hunting crap for a while and enjoy my holiday season, which is nice.

Overall the COVID experience sucked, but it did set some wheels in motion on the professional/employment end of things for both my wife and I, so I can't say it was boring.