Tag Working From Home

Alive and Kicking

Michael 2 Comments
I’ve missed some of my “regular “posting days but not to worry, I’m still alive and kicking. You may recall I’m in the midst of preparing for a move and that has taken me to places filled with cardboard boxes and bubble wrap and tape that sticks to everything except cardboard boxes. But I am quite alive and desperately kicking. I haven’t always been here to write and occassionally I don’t even get to read as much as I’d like, but… well, as I said I’m still alive and kicking. Now just in case you might have missed some of the news, I took some time over the weekend to catch up on it and I’ve found I am not the only thing you might have mistaken as being out of your lives but in reality is still A and K.
 
Also very much alive is:
 
Working from home. I don’t know what the conditions are around you but around me quarantine orders are relaxing. Retail businesses are opening and some restaurants have either reopened their doors to half capacity crowds or have co-opted outdoor space, or both, to satisfy the eating out crowd at acceptably social distances. This has “resurrected” an early casualty of the virus, traffic. But office based businesses are still mostly still home based and you can tell by the way the group dog walks happen every day at 8:30, 12:30 and 4:30.
 
Spam calls: What looked to be another early virus casualty, unsolicited sales calls and robocalls have proved to be rich in COVID antibodies and are thriving once again. More likely the robo-coders got established in their home offices and the rest is weird history.
 
Greed: If you think really hard you might remember those early fund raisers, donations, food distributions, and loan/living expense forgiveness programs that were once all the headlines. It took less than a fiscal quarter for the layoffs, contract renegotiations, and bankruptcies to re-capture the headlines. 
 
Hatred: I’ll leave this to your nightly news.
 
Stupid memes: In typical American fashion we can’t let a crisis go by without demonstrating that we can overdo everything. Robert Orben, a professional comedy writer known for his work in early telelvision including the Jack Parr and Red Skelton shows and author of The Speakers Handbook of Humor, said: 
In prehistoric times, mankind often had only two choices in crisis situations: fight or flee. In modern times, humor offers us a third alternative; fight, flee – or laugh.
Unfortunately it’s the amateur comedy writers who feel they know just the right clip to exploit to keep is laughing through the crisis. They don’t.
20200615_201912That virus thing: Again, I don’t know what the conditions are around you but around me I’m expecting all heck to break loose in another week or two. Record positive results and hospitalizations have been recorded in Texas, Florida, California, and both Carolinas, where quarantines were lifted, beaches opened, and social distancing ignored. I know it is politically incorrect to say but you can’t not expect there to be some virulent response to the amassed masses no matter how righteous the cause. The virus doesn’t care.
 
Yep, all of the above are alive and kicking. In fact, the only thing that seems to be in short supply is some love for a fellow human. How about it, can you spare a cup of love?
 
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Undressed for Success

Michael Leave a comment
Over the last few days I’ve been scrolling through various social media platforms because, well, because I’ve always had that kind of time, and I’m picking up on a disconcerting trend. Clothing options are getting scary.
 
I know you’ve seen the posts, “Its 9am. Time to change from my night PJs to my day PJs!” or similar and probably from people who used to be the closest things to fashions plates outside of Project Runway. Now they’re all giving new meaning to “not being a slave to fashion” and in serious jeopardy of being busted by the fashion police. 
 
Work fashions have always been a little out of the average dresser’s realm of understanding. How dressy is dressy? How casual is casual? What can and can’t I get away with? are more likely the questions rather than, oh let’s say, Are my seams straight?   
 
I’ve always worked in health care, almost always in some healthcare facility – hospital, rehab center, nursing home. Over forty years I’ve seen it all. When I started, nurses still wore whites. Not white. Whites. Some even with caps. All with their pins. Scrubs were worn in the OR and never over outside those automatic doors without an accompanying white coat. Down in the pharmacy where I was the uniform of the day for males was shirt and tie, the ladies had blouses and skirts or slacks with short white consultation jackets for staff pharmacists and long white lab coats for supervisors and department heads. Except for those working the IV rooms. There it was either lab coats over scrubs or gowns over street clothes. There was similar garb in the other ancillary departments, x-ray, respiratory, and the various therapies. Non-clinicians like admissions and administration wore suits. Period.
 
That was the routine six days a week. Friday was different. Ah, you are thinking, Casual Friday. Nope. Not then. Work was no place to be casual. Fridays were dress up days. Everybody came in if not dressed to the nines, to the 7-1/2s at least. As soon as the figurative whistle blew, administration, staff, and support proceeded en masse to the nearest adult watering hole. 
 
Somewhere along the way Dressup Friday yielded to Casual Friday but Saturday through Thursday work fashion remained as it was. I’m not sure when that happened. I don’t recall being part of the movement so I think it must have shifted during my years in the service when the army rather than the calendar dictated our dress. But I don’t think it was very much before I returned to civilian life and its itinerant dress because people were not yet debating how casual casual could get. At the time khaki pretty much defined casual. Men shed their ties and may have just opened a collar or taken an extra step to a structured “sport shirt.” Women adopted khaki lower halves either as skirts or slacks and typically pulled a sweater over an open blouse and called that casual. It would be years before anybody even considered denim acceptable and then it was only black, never blue. 
 
Somehow from that we made it to daytime versus night pajamas. Considering in today’s hospital world everybody including the guy patrolling the parking garage is in scrubs and scrubs are just a hop, skip, and tied waistband from pajamas, it was only a matter of time until people started showing up at work looking like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise. Only now the screen in front of the helmsman and navigator displays not a possible incursion of the Neutral Zone but instead the morning Zoom meeting.
 
Live long and prosper! Casually.
 
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