Report by Trentin Quarantino
I wake up to the sound of birds singing outside the window at 8.30am. Bastards clearly don't realise that there's a crisis going on. Or don't care. It should be illegal to be that chirpy at that time of the morning, even for birds.
I can already tell I'm going to be in one of THOSE moods today.
As Harley is only allowed outside between 10am and 1pm, and as she wants to go to the post office to post the shoes she made yesterday, we head to a local park for a morning walk. Post office, like all stores, is reserved for people over 65 until 12 noon, and by the time we get outside it's 10.30, but at least we get to be out of the flat for a while.
As it's now illegal to be outside without covering your mouth and nose Harley fashions a couple of facemasks out of headscarves so we can keep the masks she made a few days ago clean for the post office, and walking around we see that almost everyone is now abiding by the rule. Although it feels really surreal to see people walking around in facemasks, something that would have been unimaginable even a week ago, it's good to see that almost everyone is taking the situation seriously.
Of course there are some people that don't seem to comprehend how masks work - one guy has his mouth covered but not his nose, and a couple of old people have masks that only actually cover their chin. But as the old are the most vulnerable I guess they feel they can take the risk if they want to. Personally I'm waiting to see the first person who has cut a hole in their mask so they can smoke through it - I know it's only a matter of time.
I joke with Harley that maybe the virus was released by ISIS to force Sharia Law on us through the back door, and then realise that as soon as I post this statement there will be idiots on the internet who will actually believe that this is what happened. I guess I'm now the distrubutor of Fake News then...
After Harley does her thing at the post office we separate briefly so I can go to the store to see if they by any chance have a thing that I believe to be called a Snood, as I think these could be useful for going outside in the coming days or weeks. They don't have any, but then my mood officially tanks for the day when I get a message from one of my managers.
The message starts with "Hi. I'm guessing you still want to be off next week", and ends with "Options are take a 40% pay cut to stay home to look after Harley, or take annual leave and lose your holidays. The choice is yours".
I can feel the steam coming out of my ears as I read this, and the idiot that sent the message needs to count himself lucky the office is quarantined and I don't know where he lives, or I'd be going to see him and teach him a little bit about a Czech tradition called defenestration.
I'll list the problems with this message he sends here:
1 - I do not WANT to be off work next week. I am, in fact, more than happy to work next week. I just need somewhere to do it that isn't our home.
2 - The reason I cannot work from home is Harley - she is recovering from a mental breakdown caused by that job. Her chances of recovering from that breakdown whilst I am doing the job that broke her in our kitchen are about as high as the chances of Donald Trump being unmasked as the world's smartest man.
3 - Even if she hadn't had the breakdown, I work nights, on the telephone, in a small flat. So if I were to work from home I'd be keeping her awake all night. Which is something I'm not prepared to do - I have a fucked up body clock and am a night owl. I'm not going to force her to become one too.
4 - All of this was discussed in depth with my managers last week, before the building was quarantined because of an infected member of staff. Clearly they didn't listen to me, which shouldn't come as a surprise really considering their inability to use their ears directly contributed to Harley's breakdown.
5 - Their 'solutions' to the problem both involve me being punished - either 40% pay cut or lose my holiday entitlement. And what happens with the next quarantine period? Do I give up even more of my holidays, and then start cancelling all of the things I'm looking forwards to in order to benefit the company?
Fuck that, and fuck them. Wankers.
I'm really pissed off when I get home, and quickly discover that Harley is equally angry as another colleague is messaging her about the fact she is becoming sick working from home without the adequate tools she needs to do the job. And another colleague who was sick before the building got shut down has been asked to kindly stop being sick and go back to work because the company needs all the people it can get working right now - this last one is downright illegal.
So Harley and I have another fight with our home-made clubs, and that helps to work off at least some of the frustrations, but by no means all of it. I at least manage to calm down enough to think more clearly than just listening to the red mist telling me to kill them all, and make a decision to contact an employment lawyer as soon as possible once this crisis ends.
It's time to find out what my actual rights are and then take things from there.
And then another manager starts messaging me on the Book of Face to see if we can find somewhere I can work from. It's instantly clear that he hasn't spoken to the first idiot - for a communication company the place I work is really shit at having people talk to one another. The conversation lasts for a few hours with no real progress being made, and while it's taking place I make dinner - who says men can't multi-task?
For the record, for anyone wondering why this conversation is only happening on Day Four of the national lockdown, I should point out that I have a silly work schedule that means I only actually work for 12 days a month, so I have a week off each month as standard. So I was happy to give them the first few days of the week to deal with the crisis of arranging for everyone to work from home.
Everyone except me, that is. Because I'm special. Well, Harley is anyway, and I will always do what I can to protect her.
No matter what I do today though nothing is really taking a proper grip on my anger for any length of time. I try to keep it inside as much as possible, because the last thing Harley needs is an enraged neanderthal stomping around the house, but she's angry too so this day is guaranteed to be pretty much written off as one of the shit ones.
We spend a little time in the early evening trying to learn a song together called Misanthropic Drunken Loner - Harley already knows it pretty well, and quickly teaches herself to play it on guitar too. Our efforts aren't great - mainly because I can't sing, but it helps a little. I then quickly re-write another song I never heard before, but we don't get a chance to try that one as there's a comedy show being live streamed that we both want to watch.
Except, the comedy show is dreadful, truly dire. Improv comedy is of course a team sport by nature, and when the team are confined to their own homes and trying to work using technology that clearly isn't working properly and has an obvious lag happening, it's something that just doesn't work.
I applaud their efforts for trying, but we barely manage ten minutes before we give it up. And then Harley comes over all sick suddenly.
Fuck.
She appears to have a mild fever, but feels absolutely dreadful. We're literally laughing and joking one minute and she crashes the next. I'm hoping it's simply because she didn't eat today - yes, I cooked dinner, but we didn't eat it yet - but there is no way to really tell for sure.
She wants to be alone for a while so I go panic in the kitchen for an hour or so, hoping she's at least able to sleep. After a while she joins me and is clearly upset that I'm upset. I need to find a way to persuade her that she isn't to blame for everything that ever happens to anyone she is ever associated with.
I manage to eat while we talk, but she isn't able to eat anything - which unfortunately means nothing much - her not eating is far too common for my liking, no matter how much I try to limit what I cook to things I know she likes to eat. So lack of appetite isn't a sign she has the virus. Or can't be taken as one anyway.
This is fucked.
The rest of the night basically consists of talking and crying before we go to bed. I really hope she feels better when she wakes up in the morning.
Additional reporting by Harley Quarantinova
Woke up determined to make the most out of the fact that Spring is invading every corner of Prague now, improvised some face covers out of headscarves for Trentin and myself as we will need the actual masks to still be dry and as clean as possible when we go to the post office later.
Noticed that about 98% of the people outside are approaching the situation very responsibly and not half-assing it as I would have expected. It is still silly to look at the dog owners in parks. Now they are the ones who need to wear muzzles! And not only on public transport, everywhere! I wonder what dogs think about that.
On our way from the park to the post office I saw two things that stood out. The first was a group of three policemen trying to persuade a drunken person to leave the bus stop bench. There was something unspeakably polite and at the same time creepy about the situation - even the dirty drunk had his face properly covered...
We also walked past two uncovered people who seemed absolutely unaware of all the silent well-managed madness around them - a woman sitting on her heels in the middle of a path showing her approximately 4 years old son how to set fire to dead leaves. The child wanted to show initiative and tried to contribute with an old pinecone, but the mom obviously didn't think it was the right time for it just yet.
We arrived at the post office a few minutes after 12, till then it's reserved for people aged 65+ which makes perfect sense to me. There were workers going around disinfecting tables, that impressed me. Less impressive was the woman selling me special envelopes I needed in order to send my valuable packages. She improvised covering her face with a headband that wasn't wide enough. She looked silly with the red strap over her nose. It's reassuring to see that even the international health panic isn't able to change anything about Czech postworkers' laid-back attitude.
Trentin went hunting for food without me. He came home angry because of some work stuff. I cannot go into details about work, not only because I signed a paper saying I wouldn't, but also because it still turns my stomach. Nevertheless more work stuff filtered through thanks to a desperate colleague so me and Trentin went for another huge ding-dong slapping match to cool down a bit.
I can never apologise to him enough for how all the frustration and anger ended up being transformed into very loud, forcefull, and most probably really painful hits. I tried to avoid his head this time though, because no matter what he says I'm afraid today I could manage to accidentally turn a humorously shaped pillow into a murder weapon.
We're both still enraged but less frustrated now. He's using his excessive energy on cutting carrots, I'll probably tear up some of his old shirts to create headscarves. They're easier to make than proper face masks, do probably as good a job as them as well, and once this hysteria is over I can use them for their main purpose.
Most of our afternoon got repeatedly hijacked by thoughts of work even though none of us is on active duty this week, but more frustration and hatred accumulated. This time we try turning it into yelling a punk song about what waste of breath humans are that Trentin is memorising the words of now.
Our attempt of making music sucked much less than the streamed comedy soiree we were looking forward to watching. We only survived for about 10 minutes before turning it off. Shortly after that I freaked us both out by almost passing out and asking for a thermometer as I suddenly started feeling dizzy, weak and shaky.
My temperature is pathetic 37°C which according to Trentin's internet search is normal. Well, I don't feel normal, asshole, so stick the whole Internet up your butt. Also, I'm 31, I took my body temperature before and know what is normal for me. I hate doctor Google. And I don't need this additional stress I'm putting on myself. Staying away from the pandemic and work news, that's what I need. Given my partner still has to be in occasional contact with the management even on his days off makes that a bit hard.
Everything is more than just a bit hard now. I'm internally suffocating in the shitty situation I put myself into. It's easiest to blame myself for everything because that way I can try to help myself get out of that shit. God knows the people who had the power to prevent the shit from happening to me don't give a single tiny fuck.
I'd like to give up fighting for anything now. Probably the best idea is to try going to sleep now, this day felt too weird and just wrong. And once again I didn't manage to eat anything substantial today.
No comments:
Post a Comment