Have you also heard historians and genealogy people say we should be writing up accounts of our experience of living through (or so far at least) the COVID 19 pandemic? If we’d kept a record from the early days depending on where you live and the luck of your draw it might start out with bewilderment, disbelief, and a range of thought that would vacillate between “we are all going to die” to “it’s not that bad” to “maybe it will magically disappear” to “life as we knew it will never be again”. Now, for us at least, its acceptance, not planning much beyond the end of the current week, being some numbed by all the news from local to worldwide and an appreciation of the months we’ve had where we could get outside easily.
One thing that takes time is laying in supplies. Where it used to be a matter of getting in the car and going to the store with some online buying, now we have stopped going to most stores, we use online shopping and like so many others, the delivery services are often at our door.
Even with this narrowed alley of life experiences these days, we find things to do. We keep a grocery list on the fridge and we were down to its last page. A few days ago I sat down to buy a magnetic shopping list. I should have set a timer to see how long the whole thing took, but let’s say 90 minutes+.
It went like this:
- Decide to shop local-Staples (at least local people work there) has a list that will do
- Sign up for an account
- Select my favourite store but every time I go to order my favourite store reverts to one 400 km away
- Website keeps asking me to turn on location services, I try to get around that but finally throw the damn thing a bone and turn on location services for this purchase
- Same bloody thing, can’t order locally
- Try a different device-no luck
- Call the store to see if they have the product (the store 400km away does) and yes they do. May I order on the phone from you? No. Staffer says, try refreshing the screen, there’s trouble with the website.
- Back to try it all over again. No go. I try the online chat with Staples-quick response-the service agent, says Safari doesn’t work well with their website, try Chrome. Arrggghh, I don’t use Chrome, I use Safari. Another option is to phone a 1-800 number.
- Now I am tired of the whole thing and think, why don’t I just remove the magnetic back from our current almost depleted list and glue it on to a pad of paper and bingo, we will have a new shopping list for the fridge.
I rifle around in a draw that holds pads of paper and what do I find at the bottom? A magnetic shopping list.
A small example of where times goes during a pandemic.
Barb's True Stories 