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Beanie Blog #
June 15, 2022 Things Covid Left Us—where can we return them?
Hello everyone, With Covid winding down—and I say that holding my breath—there are so many things about our lives that are different now. Most of that is certainly not for the better. While I’m thankful, despite having had Covid, that I survived and had only a mild case due to being triple vaccinated, I am not thankful for the residual aspects of Covid that have made everyday life even less than it was before. My husband is what they call a “long-hauler” and even though it’s been ten months since he had Covid, he still coughs like a heavy smoker and has a bit of brain fog occasionally. His sense of taste returned somewhat, but on most days he says everything tastes salty to him. Since I cook with very little salt, we know it’s a residual from Covid. My hubby may have to live with that cough for the rest of his life because even the doctors are learning about Covid as we go and no one knows about the long term effects. Covid showed us all who the real “essential” workers are. Not the Wall Street tycoons, but the grocery store workers, health care workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, and most of those workers worked for minimum wage. Some did receive bonuses for working during the earliest stages of the pandemic and risking their lives by encountering those defiant people who refused to wear masks and sometimes even assaulted the workers who asked them to. Shall we never again say that those folks only deserve minimum wage! To me, they were the real heroes of the pandemic and deserve a good living wage. Even though for the past few years we have been a divided country, Covid intensified that division, and it also brought out frustration, anger, and even rage from people who would never under normal circumstances lose their self-control. Now it’s a daily occurrence to see workers being yelled at just because the customer’s fries were cold, and sometimes even attack the worker just because they were on the other side of the counter. Why is it okay to behave this way? Are we getting numb to it? NO! IT’S NOT OKAY. Mental health is something that most people will suffer with from time to time during the course of their lives. Many people succumb to stress and begin to act out unnatural behaviors. The pandemic increased the stress levels of so many people during the isolation phase of the pandemic that even those normally well-balanced folks were becoming depressed, irritable, and struggled to get through a normal day. The elderly were particularly hard hit with isolation from loved ones. I know in my family that was true. I wrote about being unable to see my 90-year-old mother for months and it took a deep toll on both of us. Children who couldn’t go to school became isolated and depressed without seeing friends and interacting with peers. Virtual school did nothing to fill that void in their lives. Graduates during the pandemic were cheated out of a very important life milestone—graduation. Getting the diploma in the mail was just sad and I felt for those young people. Customer service is a thing of the past. It was already hanging by a thread before Covid, but now since most businesses can’t fill positions, customer service no longer exists. And even those workers in the service industry who hung on and stayed in their jobs are so burned out from taking raging abuse from the public that many of them are leaving too. What does that do to folks like you and me who need to talk to a customer service rep? It punishes us for the sins of the few (or maybe the many?) I recently uploaded one of my books to a website that distributes books to libraries and bookstores. The technicality involved in preparing the cover and manuscript to meet their requirements was grueling, to say the least. I got locked up and needed a question answered and there was literally no one to ask. The discontinued their online chat for help, they removed their phone # from the website, and the only way to ask a question was to email them. When I emailed them, I got a robot answering me. It never addressed my question but referred me to a Q & A page. I went to the page, and it had 10 Q & As and none of them addressed my question. The process came to standstill, and I was in tears. I ended up paying someone more tech savvy than me to finish the process. Now, three years later, they still don’t have any customer service because they found out they don’t have to pay people to work in their customer service dept. because they still did enough business without providing that service. Now they make YOU the customer pay others if you want help. Have you tried to call a customer service line lately? You either get an automated menu and sometimes even an automated robot who talks to you trying to figure out what you want. How many of you have found yourselves shouting into the phone??? Hopefully, as we move past Covid, some semblance of our former lives will return. Civility toward each other must happen, but I hold out no hope for customer service returning. Why should it? We can just take out our frustrations on each other and the businesses laugh all the way to the bank. (Sorry to sound so negative, but there is nothing positive that Covid left us) Always be kind, the world needs more of that, Love always,
Sabina (Beanie) Boston
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