Well, day 2 is not great. I was nauseous yesterday, and woke up this AM thinking it was time to puke. I didn’t, thankfully, but it was a near thing.
Nerves. Fucking nerves.
One thing that did come of that fun morning experience was the decision that if I do come down with this disease, I’m switching to video blogging – that way there will be some kind of record for everyone of how the disease, and any subsequent treatment, changes you. Well, me, not you. But you get the point.
Of course, this is an upper respiratory infection, so nausea isn’t a side effect, right?
Oh, now we have some doctors saying that it is. And it’s the first one to appear. Joyous. I think, for my sanity, I need to ignore them, and stick to, literally, every other doctor out there. Coughing, not nausea, is the warning. Well, that and a fever. No fever here. I do, however, have bad lungs from clots in the past (plus smoking, plus a bout of pneumonia in 2008 or so), so coughing is a thing that I do a lot. Often, maybe, not exactly a lot. Hell, I’ve had low-grade coughs last 6-8 months. So coughing is something I do, illness or no. But now I am more aware of it.
Work went well – more good progress on a really annoying project to migrate some 9000 images to a Dropbox so the parent company’s team can access them. And provide descriptions. Mostly because the people who should be doing that second part won’t. An unnamed coworker foisted it upon me. First, I did the list. That part was actually easy. The images aren’t hard, just really annoying. And there are a lot of them. Once I clean the PSD files, then it’s time to convert to JPG and PNG. JPG is easy – Photoshop has a built-in fast conversion tool for that. PNG…less so. So, I moved them to my PC laptop to run them through Irfanview.
Sigh.
Day 2 brings no real updates to the state of things. I want to act like this is normal, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. Look, I like the idea of working from home as much as the next person in a similar role. But. I have no choice, and that makes it different. That changes the whole dynamic. Add in the fact that a lot of people are flat out suffering, and this becomes something wholly different.
A few days ago, I put this on Facebook. As I find myself distancing from that platform, I wanted to repeat it here. I think it matters.
Something I learned a long time ago was that when preventative measures or actions work, we never hear about it.
Think about that. We hear about the terror attacks that work, or almost do, but not the thousands (and that is an understatement) that were stopped in the planning phase. So, we think that this or that security measure is silly, or overkill, or whatever. And many are, in my opinion. But every one of them is a preventative measure based on previous attempts.
If we look back in several months, and think to ourselves, ‘damn, these quarantine measures and shutdowns were totally overkill’, then they worked. It’s a hard position to take now, because while I KNOW how that works, every time it comes up, I change positions on this response. And I know how that sausage is made…how much harder for those who are just getting introduced to the concept.
Successful prevention looks like overkill. Or nothing happening at all. But it’s still work being done.
As we close out day 2, let’s keep that in mind. Nothing happened will be success.
