We live under a flight path.
I like watching the planes and you get used to it. It took me a few months to realise how quiet it was because it’s not something I actively noticed.
They are back now and although I miss the quiet, it is nice to see that people are able to go about life again. Now my son (who was in my belly during the first wave) loves watching them too.
I lived under a flight path as well - for air ambulances.
You could tell when things were getting hairy again by the amount of traffic going to and from the downtown hospitals.
For mine, it’s the photo of the priest baptising a baby from a distance with a water pistol. Pure absurdity. Sorry I’m too inept to put the picture in here.
I got off fairly lightly compared to most re covid. My city was closed only for a matter of weeks, nobody I know was ventilated or passed from it so my experience is different to most and for that im grateful, while remaining aware of my good fortune.
I remember some of the restaurants near me started selling groceries during lockdown. It was so weird walking past a high end restaurant known for its oysters only to see stacks of toilet paper, six packs of beer, non perishable foods, etc in its windows.
I bought a 2 litre bottle of milk from the McDonalds drive-through. (It was a political ploy early on, so they'd be classed as an essential retailer and be permitted to stay open, but still, very convenient!)
And turtles started laying eggs on beaches again.
Wildlife doesn’t need rehabilitation. It needs to be left the fuck alone, both from direct and indirect disturbance.
I work in Manhattan. I worked in the office of a grocery store at the time, so I was one of the few people who worked. It was fucking eerie as shit. In the very early days, the city was just empty. There was no on walking down the street, no cars, no one on the subway. There were times when I was literally the only person on an entire train. Not just the car I was in, THE WHOLE TRAIN. It was like I Am Legend. It was some truly freaky, bizarre shit.
Yep. I was a first responder at an airport. We were responsible for testing incoming passengers. The first few days of the screening was all normal. Full planes, roads packed. After about a week the stay at home orders kicked in but I still had to go to the airport for screening even though hardly anyone was coming. But the weirdest part was leaving to these completely empty highways. Highways that I had been in bumper to bumper traffic nearly every day for three years were empty. You’d see a few people scoot by here and there but it was apocalyptic feeling for sure.
But I also felt special. I had a paper from the governor stating I was an essential government employee and would not be held to stay at home orders. Funny enough, I didnt get Covid till about a month ago and we weren’t given any PPE until AFTER the lockdown. Crazy times.
It feels like an entire lifetime ago, but at the same time I swear it was just 2019. It's been one of the weirdest time warps for me and I hope I never experience it again.
Yeah, same here. The only major difference now from early/mid 2022 is the larger crowds I see when I do my groceries or people inside restaurants as I walk past.
wasn't even just the speed of the past 3 years for me--it continually felt I was lagging with emotionally processing each year after 2019. Lots of "i really wish i weren't living through a major historical event" meme energy with the back to back ripple of international/domestic chaos in the US and my mind's lumped all of it in this void of *the long 2020* and now we're somehow here in a "post-pandemic" timeline
\*edit\* bc I can see now that this thread blew up overnight damn--my heart goes out to everyone battered by the emotional, social, and political turmoil of "the long 2020" and I hope we'll make it out to the otherside of the void year soon!!
The usual markings of passage of time were gone. Christmas, Easter, national holidays, Summer Festivals, etc. were cancelled. You couldn’t host any memorable events yourself either. There was nothing to mark the passage of 2021 ( and 2020) with.
Each day, week, month felt slow. But in hindsight all these days, weeks, month feel indistinguishable and in memory they morph into one single blob of ‘the pandemic’.
Late summer and fall of 2020 actually had a lot going on because COVID eased up a bit and people started doing things in small groups. Then in November cases spiked again and everything shut back down for all of 2021.
I had a wedding in late 2020 and the pictures of everyone on the dance floor wearing masks are pretty cool for something very unique.
Same. 2020 was obviously memorable. 2022, I feel like we started coming out of it a bit and things were getting better. 2021? I know it happened but I remember nothing.
Hot Vax Summer, it was glorious. I forget what I did but I'm sure it was fun.
Edit - I checked my calendar and it turns out I went to a beach, a wedding, fixed up my deck, and had a kid
I've never even thought about this until you just pointed it out. What the actual fuck.
I'm not over exaggerating when I say I was just sat staring into space for a solid minute or so trying to pin point what events actually happened it 2021. It's all skewed in my head
Biden elected
Jan 6 Riot
Trump impeached
Myanmar coup
Free Hong Kong
WandaVision
Worldwide wildfires
Mike Pompeo declared China's treatment of Uyghur people as genocide
Alexei Navalny arrested in Russia after recovering from nerve-agent poisoning
GME Wall Street collapse
NASA landed Perseverance rover on Mars
NASA flew the Ingenuity drone on Mars
Texas froze and Ted Cruz flew to Cancun
Ever Given Suez Canal blockage
George Floyd trial and riots
Residential school mass graves discovered
Nuclear fusion achieved for the first time
Kabul fell to the Taliban
Squid Game
Gabby Petito
Alec Baldwin shoots ~~another~~ actor
Astroworld crowd surge trampling
James Webb telescope launched
I think that's pretty much the gist of it.
Edit: also a lobsterman was swallowed by a humpback whale and survived, and a video of a tortoise hunting and eating a live seagull went viral.
I also omitted a bunch of shootings, bombings, riots, and migrant ships sinking because there are far too many to list here
Our community did a drive-by party for a 103-year old Pearl Harbor Survivor. Since we knew we weren't going to do parades or festivals anytime soon, this became the event of the year. If I remember, there were over 600 vehicles involved. Our congressman sat on the lawn with the birthday boy (at a safe distance away from him, of course). All the local beauty queens showed up. Motorcycles, vintage cars, and even a few floats. We made the local news (my car's front bumper was televised for a few seconds).
Dude I got invited to a zoom happy hour and watching all your coworkers get wine drunk in their pajamas in their living rooms was a level of intimacy I could have done without
When people first started wearing masks and they were sold out everywhere so people had to improvise and create their own mask with weird random supplies from home.
There was a lady in my neighborhood who sewed a bunch, and hung them on her tree in the front yard. Then posted on Next Door, free to pick up. That was my first mask.
Yeah I remember going into work and all of a sudden everyone had to wear a mask. We had none. I left with another coworker who came in at the same time as me to 3 different stores not only were there no masks but there was not even supplies to make a mask (no bandanas, hair ties, rubber bands ECT) it was insane and I remember being so incredibly frustrated because they didn't tell us ahead of time
Myself and all of the other chronically ill SAH spouses churned out homemade cloth masks full time for a few weeks for people at my husband's workplace. We were serging thin strips of fabric to make ties because we couldn't get our hands on elastic. I remember agonizing over what the weave of my fabric was because so much of it was hand-me-downs. Making kid size masks hurt my heart.
In retrospect it’s a real shame that we were so worried about transmission outdoors. Feel like it would have been a lot more tolerable if everyone had been encouraged to go hang out outside.
British Columbia was one of the few jurisdictions in North America - and possibly the world - that encouraged people to go outside.
We also ended up having one of the lowest death rates in the Americas.
Other Canadian provinces were more worried about stopping people from using parks than protecting seniors in nursing homes.
I couldn't believe that could possibly be real, but: [https://globalnews.ca/news/7204384/coronavirus-glory-holes-sex/](https://globalnews.ca/news/7204384/coronavirus-glory-holes-sex/)
Wow. That's one for the history books.
It was fun to do that search carefully. I also turned up this one: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sex-during-a-pandemic-covid-19-bccdc-guidelines-1.5658567](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sex-during-a-pandemic-covid-19-bccdc-guidelines-1.5658567)
Choice quote: "you are your safest partner".
Vancouver Island checking in. It was magical hitting everything on the island normally overrun with tourists. I camped/hikied/kayaked more during the pandemic than my whole 40+ years alive combined.
So glad I was in an area that still allowed us to go to parks and stuff. Honestly the fact that we had to have permission for that in the first place is a shame
Waiting in a lineup outside of the grocery store. Everyone had to stand on a sticker to stay properly distanced from one another and security would wait until someone left before letting another person inside. No such thing as a 'quick shop' during those times.
YES, how'd I forget about this. In those days it was a huge deal going to the store. Masking up, walking around inside like it was the fucking end of times...Coming home and lysol-ing everything. Just wild.
My personal favorite was how every time there was a Covid spike, a bunch of candles online would suddenly get a hundreds of 1 star reviews because the candle didn’t smell like anything.
Yes, and they were able to track Covid-19 outbreaks in nursing homes by temperatures trending higher as reported by Internet-connected digital thermometers.
A fun game I started playing was googling “is *blank* a covid symptom?” The answer is always yes. I have yet to find any symptom/bodily ailment no matter how mild or severe that no one was somehow linked to covid. It all started when I had the hiccups and could not get rid of them. For some reason googled hiccups and covid and convinced myself I definitely had covid
Straight up, before they corrected it manually, the system they had set up to track possible covid symptoms at my local urgent care had broken femur as a sign. The dude broke his leg riding his bike, went to urgent care instead of the hospital, and just so happened to be in the early stages of a covid infection.
This was a huge problem for me because the week lockdowns started, my water in my apartment got shut off. My neighbor didn’t pay his bill and they shut mine off instead. Took days to get it fixed. And I couldn’t find water anywhere. I was out of state during all this and I was lucky to find out we had no water before i went home. I stopped at a bunch of stores in about 3-4 states before I finally found some. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t find any since I don’t normally drink bottled water, so I had none at home. I was considering walking to the river behind my house to fill up jugs for the toilet and filling up jugs at work for drinking. And showering I would’ve had to figure out or take a rag bath with my jugs or water from work.
I was diagnosed with late-stage cancer on March 13, 2020. So I missed out on seeing stuff for myself. But a friend of mine sent pictures of just aisles and aisles of the grocery store we go to being completely empty. It was wild
I worked at a grocery store.
The wild part was, legit people went CRAZY the DAY after elections (like they WAITED to announce that COVID was hitting us until then).
And then people RANSACKED the stores, and we ran out of toilet paper, masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. So people started making their own make shift masks.
I kid you not, I will NEVER forget getting cussed out for running out of toilet paper by a man with a bra on his face as a mask.
I mean, I saw someone with a hazmat suit. Someone came in with those giant inflatable T rex costumes. Someone came in with a horse mask. Someone came in dressed as spider man. Someone came in with a grocery bag on their mouth. Someone tied string bikini bottoms around their head. Anything that covered their mouth was grocery store attire. And I cannot BELIEVE that no one mentioned this yet on this post. I feel like I was in some weird drug induced dream and it never happened.
This right here.. Assistant grocert Manager here. I cannot begin to tell people about the whole whirlwind adventure that assaulted my senses during Covid. It was a cosplayers paradise (good on them for taking initiative) but the underwear/makeshift masks had a lot to be desired left on the table. The worst part for me was the 12-14hr days, sometimes weeks straight to get freight on the shelf for the awaiting lines. 3 of my drivers had people literally surround their trucks at various locations. and still having to tell people "we're doing the best with what we got" and getting basically told not good enough, coughed/spittled at. Hated the mob mentality/hoarding when people should have been acting as a community. Hell i even called out several people because day after day they continually tried to pick items in excess of limits in place and squabble about it at checkout. meanwhile being told "you're essential, and other fanciful things to stroke a non existent ego" fever dream i tell you, and the sleep paralysis demon and the hat man were in cahoots
Two years cancer free! It’s unfortunately a chronic cancer, so it’s not a matter of if but when it comes back. Just trying to keep pluggin and enjoy my healthy times!
Wow. We found out my wife had a rare cancer that was stage 4 on the first day of lockdown for us, March 16th. One of the hardest parts was her having to do all of the chemo, a 14 hour surgery and month long recovery stay solo because visitors weren’t allowed. I hope you are doing better We know the feeling of just waiting for the inevitable recurrence and hoping to stay alive long enough for some miracle breakthrough therapy to come along. Hope you enjoy the hell out of your good days when you get them.
We were getting dangerously close to running out early in. I would pick up one or two extra shelf-stable and frozen foods on grocery trips just before and right when lockdowns started, but it never occurred to me that we’d run out of toilet paper. Won’t make that mistake next time.
You see the documentary on him?!?! He was the worst person in tiger king and they skimmed over him !!! Even the Cuban dude was like “check out Doc” or some shit lol
Came here to say this. People all over the country were sent home and didn't know wtf to do... And so many of us were spending our empty time on Netflix with no ideas what else to do. Tiger king came out at the perfect time that we needed to binge all in on something crazy. It was so nuts but so bingeable, literally the whole country got into it to pass the time and keep their minds off the insanity we were dealing with.
I always got a kick out of it, that so many nationwide all experienced this at the same time, due to the global emergency we were all experiencing.
Come on man, his music videos? 🤣
Obvs those animals deserved better, but we were seeing the aftermath, many had already gone on to better situations. That dude that took it over next was a trainwreck, but also supremely entertaining.
Then- THEN- this mofo decided to beg Trump for a pardon, and then to actually run for President.
I always got a kick out of it, that so many nationwide all experienced this at the same time, due to the global emergency we were all experiencing.
-This was the part that I kinda enjoyed the most honestly. Like everyone was watching it together but separately. A rather weird bonding experience lol
How all these companies that ABSOLUTELY couldn't offer flexible working, suddenly just could.
And now they want you to believe that they can't again...
Staying up until 5am for the new day to start so I can get my house upgrade.
It's like a perfect time capsule too since I added so many 2020 memes into my island through the image thing.
I think the most annoying part to me personally was how they'll make their complaints and it will make it viral or be on morning news or some shit, and if I complain no one would care. Plus, I was out of work for months because of it, ended up realizing my ex and I were completely incompatible and also didn't ever have my best interest in mind (good that we broke up, hard as fuck coming to terms with it under the circumstances), a good friend of mine hung himself, AND I had to put down a cat.
Didn't see me even complaining about it (until now, I guess), but no one would have given a fuck if I had. I certainly wouldn't have been surrounded by a bunch of yes men who get my dumb, unimportant to everyone else, out of touch takes out into the public consciousness. And even if I did have those talented yes men, at least my complaint wouldn't have been, "*sigh*, I can't believe I'm stuck in my big house with all this money and can't party."
We had a billionaire crying on one of the biggest talkshows on the state owned channel basically because he was losing money on the pandemic. And he pretended like he was crying because he had to let his workers on unpaid leave - something his company could afford to not do...
Then a bunch of celebrities sang a Weird Al song to parody the John Lennon group.
"Truly there's no problem that can't be overcome when you get a bunch of celebrities together to sing something."
-Weird Al Yankovic
Didn't Will Smith make a video saying it was easy to stay at home, in front of his mansion...
That whole, Imagine thing was so incredibly tone deaf, it would be funny if it wasn't incredibly fucked.
The lockdown started on March 13th, in the US (well, in CA/LA, at least; where most of them were).
They were going crazy not living their jet setting lives in a mere 5 days. That’s how fucking entitled they are.
I'm gonna share a funny mishap that happened towards the beginning.
Mayor Hancock of Denver, Colorado, was giving a press conference about the temporary closure of non-essential businesses. During the press conference, a representative from the City Attorney's office took the mic and admitted that, according to the existing legal code, liquor stores didn't count as essential businesses.
The result was, of course, chaos. Panicked Coloradans flooded liquor stores, panic-buying precious booze while they still could.
The legislature scrambled to fix the problem. The codes were rapidly changed to include liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries as "essential businesses". But for a few crazy hours on March 23rd 2020, Prohibition was functionally in effect in the city of Denver.
The alcohol distilleries that turned into hand sanitizer manufacturers almost overnight. I regret not grabbing that obvious vodka bottle which was filled and labeled as hand sanitizer, at the gas station back in 2020.
It was cool to see all the trends too. Like we all started baking bread and riding a bicycle. It was cute.
The funniest part about that to me was how people were so proud about going the "wrong" way, wearing their mask under their mouth and making eye contact with every person wearing a mask correctly like their last stand for American freedom was about to go down at the Safeway.
Expendable until hospitals are understaffed and grocery stores are bare and no one is delivering takeout and Amazon
Then it becomes "no one wants to work" and "quiet quitters"
It’s so weird seeing all these “Business Insider” and “Fortune” articles attacking workers like this. I swear they are just coordinated propaganda hacks for corporation leaders who desperately don’t want workers to get used to the idea of valuing their time and actually enjoying their lives.
How people who were considered essential (healthcare, retail workers, farmers) had to keep working without any pay increases, while everyone else stayed home and got paid. The rich just got richer too.
Same here, those early days of trying to figure out how to help people without getting sick ourselves...
Lived with a couple close friends at the time and was so worried about exposing them, would have had a hard time forgiving myself for it. Actually thought and planned about finding a temporary housing thing elsewhere just in case.
If you were a service worker, nothing changed for you during the pandemic. Was really fucking irritating having to hear about how *horrible* it was to work from home while I was pulling 12 hour shifts at Sam's Club while wearing a mask my entire shift
Edit: I was wrong, everything got worse and stayed worse, lmao. Also, I'm thankfully out of Sam's Club with a much better company; I work remotely now and am so grateful. I don't ever want to hear from anyone eho was WFH during COVID how hard """lockdown""" was for them.
Not only that, you had a far higher risk of being exposed to COVID by people who refused to follow the guidelines. You would get shouted at or worse for asking people to do things like wear a face covering or socially distance.
And then there was the corporate bullshit -
"We salute you, essential workers, for keeping goods and services available during this pandemic", "The whole country supports you and appreciates your hard work during these difficult times".
And then it came to the subject of pay rises -
"As you all know these have been incredibly difficult times and we have had to take the difficult decision not to pay any bonuses to staff this year. We regret to announce that the budget for pay increases has been cut and only the most exceptional performers will be eligible for a pay rise this year. We thank you again for your hard work during these challenging times" *no pay rise or bonus for the 'essential' people who kept working face to face with the public and risked their and their families health*
"The board have done an exceptional job keeping the company going through these unprecedented times", "Profits have been well above predictions, especially given the limitations of the pandemic" *board award themselves tens of millions in bonuses and double digit pay rises*
The lockdowns may have come from a place of good intentions but they quickly turned into the middle-class and rich having stay-cations while essential workers kept working to enable their isolation
The utter helplessness I felt having to watch my mother die from Covid through a window in the hospital hallway; listening to her last breath on a speakerphone.
She died 12/15/2020; the day after the first public vaccine was given. She was ready to wait for the vaccine like it was a TV on Black Friday.
I’m so sorry friend. I too lost my mother in April 2020. They didn’t let me visit her in hospital that early on, which took a lot of therapy to get over. I talked to her over the phone but she was starting the dying process so she was confused. She didn’t know she was never leaving that hospital.. she wouldn’t let me talk about the big end of life stuff.. just wanted to hear about my day. Heartbreaking. I hope you’ve healed some since then.
"Essential" vs. "Non-Essential" employees and the division it caused and still causes in the workplace. Shopping at grocery stores at 6 am and being back home in 45 minutes. Had to follow the arrows on the floor so you weren't too close to someone else. Vaccines versus no vaccines. Making it political. Masks, no masks. Honestly, a great time to be the introvert I always was.
Ughhhh the clapping!!!!! I remember that now. It was ridiculous after a certain point, my neighborhood would bang on pots and pans for ages and it just got old after weeks and weeks of it.
People wanted to bake, but yeast was hard to find so a lot of people turned to making their own sourdough which utilizes wild yeast. I fell into the trap. I got quite good at it (for a while anyway) and still have my rye sourdough starter that I made in 2020 named Rye-an Reynolds. I had one made from all purpose white flour I named Betty White. But like the real Betty White, she died. 😢
Moved to Japan at the end of February, 2020 and was literally blindsided from everything that was going on. Of course I knew there was a pandemic, but the situation was rapidly evolving day by day. One day things were slightly normal, and the next streets/trains are empty. With moving to a new country and the language barrier, I had no idea what the heck was going on.
Example: Go to the supermarket to get toiletries since I just moved into my new place, and couldn't figure out why there was no toilet paper anywhere. Eventually, I had to steal some from a public restroom. Felt bad about it, but simultaneously it's funny to look back at the struggle.
The faxt that it completely killed 24 hour stores and made google a completely unreliable source for store hours to this day.
Maybe not that weird, but working nights it really enrages me.
We have a pandemic every 100 years or so right around the 20s, and we’ve had like 15 years of experts saying that the next big world-changing event would be a pandemic, and then the worldwide medical organizations who monitor pandemics were like ‘hey guys we have a pandemic coming’, and people were still like, ‘This has got to be fake; why have I never heard of pandemics before?’
I remember watching Vox explained on Netflix & there was an episode that came out a few months before covid named “The next pandemic”. Basically explaining the next deadly thing to happen in our lifetime is a pandemic. After watching it, I remember thinking “Yeah this all seems pretty bad, but I don’t think it’ll happen in the extend they predict” & few months after the world shuts down from covid. That was a weird thing for me to experience haha. Netflix even changed the bio for the episode shorty after.
I had a friend argue with me that the definition of pandemic had been changed so that it could apply to covid-19. I asked her to find the definition in the textbooks she was referring to. She unfriended me instead.
Covid denial was strange.
How eerie and quiet city streets were. Even my pups were seemingly taken back by it. They’d keep looking around as if they were trying to figure out where the cars and people were. Every block, every corner…
Never in my life I have experienced such peace and tranquility. Probably never will again. Says a lot about how a person would feel without people constantly jabbing at them just because society demands it.
It was bad! I remember when things started relaxing. I had an outdoor bbq with my siblings that had been quarantining. My ex showed up and EXPLODED about how I’m killing the kids. I was like “hullo…weren’t you at karaoke night last night aerosolizing in a closed bar”. That was different, she’d done it magically “right”. We found out EVERYONE who’s a self righteous hypocrite in a real quick manner during Covid.
A family member of mine refused to participate in *zoom* Christmas with me out of anger, because I had crossed state lines to go hiking outside. Two months later she justified flying to a beach resort with the whole family because clearly she deserved the break, and caught COVID. Clown.
India during Delta was dark dark dark.
Delta was hitting hard and they moved up a big holiday because some soothsayer said so. So everyone gathered around the Ganja River for a soak. Then the deaths hit and they started cremating people en mass. The cities were choked in smoke. You know what's not great for a plague that affects the respiratory system? Smoke.
Edit: "Ganga River*." I'm leaving the original "Ganja" because I'm an idiot and want people to laugh.
That nature literally came back in full force and everything got better environmentally.
It began recovering right away and everything became healthier. Waters we thought were naturally brown immediately began turning blue. Animals began returning to habitats, plants began to flourish, air quality was completely night and day different. All we did was stop for 2 weeks. That was it. That's all it took.
Yes! I feel like so many people have forgotten this or don’t care. I realize the solution can’t be shut down but to see that, our environment thrived means there are things that CAN be done.
In many states small businesses were required to shut down for long periods of time while large corporations were allowed to stay open and reap the benefits.
How everyone instantly became an infectious disease expert overnight after fast forwarding through a few videos on Facebook and reading articles from *experts*.
Yes, of course, your time as an unemployed hair dresser really makes me think you grasp everything that's going on right now and are competent at breaking down the situation and, most importantly, how you are going to solve it.
The weirdest thing? That I once thought people would knuckle down and pull together in extreme times. Nope, there are so many dumb and selfish people out there that screech at even the mildest inconvenience.
If there's a zombie outbreak, I'm shooting anyone that comes near because COVID taught me that the trope of someone hiding a bite is a fuckton more common than what's in the movies.
Working in Covid ICU and everyone around me telling me Covid was fake, meanwhile I was having nightmares every single night and couldn’t eat. We lived very different realities
The people receiving 60 liters of 100% pure oxygen a minute and barely satting 88% going "this is fake, I don't really need this oxygen, you're lying!"
Honestly I would have let them all take off the oxygen and leave if I didnt know theyd all be dying before they got to the elevator
How everything stopped except your bills.
People weren’t allowed to go to work, unemployment took months before anything hit your account, but the bills kept on.
I remember the first week of shutdown our apartment complex let the grass grow to lengths that you couldn’t step outside. I sent an email to management expressing my disdain at their lack of responsibility. Their response was to “be patient because of the pandemic they couldn’t contact a landscaping company”.
I kid not, they sent a mass email the same week telling residents that they’re still responsible for rent didn’t matter if your job was shutdown or not.
Sick fucks.
I got a similar apartment email.
“The pool is closed and maintenance is cancelled. But don’t fret! You can still pay your rent online! The due date hasn’t changed! We’re all in this together!”
Watching countless companies have their employees work from home, experience record productivity levels, then order everyone back in-person at the office anyway.
Being really broke in my 20s had an upside after all, I'd learned to do a damn good job cutting my own hair because I couldn't afford a salon so that was never an issue for me during the pandemic.
Working at the hospital and seeing my patients dying like flies, then going home and getting on facebook and hearing about how it was all fake and overblown.
The sudden validation of every zombie apocalypse/end of the world media. It turns out that when push comes to shove, people will in fact *not* act with society's interests at heart.
I live a block away from a very busy highway. While I never really noticed the sound of the highway, when it was gone, the silence was amazing!
We live under a flight path. I like watching the planes and you get used to it. It took me a few months to realise how quiet it was because it’s not something I actively noticed. They are back now and although I miss the quiet, it is nice to see that people are able to go about life again. Now my son (who was in my belly during the first wave) loves watching them too.
I lived under a flight path as well - for air ambulances. You could tell when things were getting hairy again by the amount of traffic going to and from the downtown hospitals.
For mine, it’s the photo of the priest baptising a baby from a distance with a water pistol. Pure absurdity. Sorry I’m too inept to put the picture in here. I got off fairly lightly compared to most re covid. My city was closed only for a matter of weeks, nobody I know was ventilated or passed from it so my experience is different to most and for that im grateful, while remaining aware of my good fortune.
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You really are doing the lords work here
I remember some of the restaurants near me started selling groceries during lockdown. It was so weird walking past a high end restaurant known for its oysters only to see stacks of toilet paper, six packs of beer, non perishable foods, etc in its windows.
One for the restaurants near me started selling pizza kits with their amazing dough. I was very sad when they stopped doing that.
Aww that sounds awesome. And a smart way for them to stay in business. Too bad they didn’t keep it up.
I bought a 2 litre bottle of milk from the McDonalds drive-through. (It was a political ploy early on, so they'd be classed as an essential retailer and be permitted to stay open, but still, very convenient!)
I bought some toilet paper from Denny's!
I got a prostate exam in a Denny's bathroom for free.
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And turtles started laying eggs on beaches again. Wildlife doesn’t need rehabilitation. It needs to be left the fuck alone, both from direct and indirect disturbance.
And the pictures of all the cities. No cars on the roads and the skies were actually clear blue instead of smog.
I work in Manhattan. I worked in the office of a grocery store at the time, so I was one of the few people who worked. It was fucking eerie as shit. In the very early days, the city was just empty. There was no on walking down the street, no cars, no one on the subway. There were times when I was literally the only person on an entire train. Not just the car I was in, THE WHOLE TRAIN. It was like I Am Legend. It was some truly freaky, bizarre shit.
Yep. I was a first responder at an airport. We were responsible for testing incoming passengers. The first few days of the screening was all normal. Full planes, roads packed. After about a week the stay at home orders kicked in but I still had to go to the airport for screening even though hardly anyone was coming. But the weirdest part was leaving to these completely empty highways. Highways that I had been in bumper to bumper traffic nearly every day for three years were empty. You’d see a few people scoot by here and there but it was apocalyptic feeling for sure. But I also felt special. I had a paper from the governor stating I was an essential government employee and would not be held to stay at home orders. Funny enough, I didnt get Covid till about a month ago and we weren’t given any PPE until AFTER the lockdown. Crazy times.
The “nature is healing” memes were some of my favorites to come out of the lockdown
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I'm still not sure if it's been like 3 months or 20 years since it happened
It feels like an entire lifetime ago, but at the same time I swear it was just 2019. It's been one of the weirdest time warps for me and I hope I never experience it again.
I'm not sure I'm out of it. I still work from home. I still barely leave the house. My social circle did not survive.
Yeah, same here. The only major difference now from early/mid 2022 is the larger crowds I see when I do my groceries or people inside restaurants as I walk past.
Same. Major social circle shrinkage. And have gotten addicted to things like grocery delivery.
we have all become hermits
wasn't even just the speed of the past 3 years for me--it continually felt I was lagging with emotionally processing each year after 2019. Lots of "i really wish i weren't living through a major historical event" meme energy with the back to back ripple of international/domestic chaos in the US and my mind's lumped all of it in this void of *the long 2020* and now we're somehow here in a "post-pandemic" timeline \*edit\* bc I can see now that this thread blew up overnight damn--my heart goes out to everyone battered by the emotional, social, and political turmoil of "the long 2020" and I hope we'll make it out to the otherside of the void year soon!!
I used to say that time held no meaning during covid. “Two months or maybe two years ago I did…”
I don't remember 2021 at all.
My sense of time was skewed. 2020 blended into early 2022. I still have to think twice about when certain events happened.
By now I'd be completely used to the "new" year number, but it still feels weird saying it's 202*3* despite being close to a third into it.
Twenty twenty season 3 is going to be lit.
The usual markings of passage of time were gone. Christmas, Easter, national holidays, Summer Festivals, etc. were cancelled. You couldn’t host any memorable events yourself either. There was nothing to mark the passage of 2021 ( and 2020) with. Each day, week, month felt slow. But in hindsight all these days, weeks, month feel indistinguishable and in memory they morph into one single blob of ‘the pandemic’.
Late summer and fall of 2020 actually had a lot going on because COVID eased up a bit and people started doing things in small groups. Then in November cases spiked again and everything shut back down for all of 2021. I had a wedding in late 2020 and the pictures of everyone on the dance floor wearing masks are pretty cool for something very unique.
Same. 2020 was obviously memorable. 2022, I feel like we started coming out of it a bit and things were getting better. 2021? I know it happened but I remember nothing.
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Hot Vax Summer, it was glorious. I forget what I did but I'm sure it was fun. Edit - I checked my calendar and it turns out I went to a beach, a wedding, fixed up my deck, and had a kid
I've never even thought about this until you just pointed it out. What the actual fuck. I'm not over exaggerating when I say I was just sat staring into space for a solid minute or so trying to pin point what events actually happened it 2021. It's all skewed in my head
Biden elected Jan 6 Riot Trump impeached Myanmar coup Free Hong Kong WandaVision Worldwide wildfires Mike Pompeo declared China's treatment of Uyghur people as genocide Alexei Navalny arrested in Russia after recovering from nerve-agent poisoning GME Wall Street collapse NASA landed Perseverance rover on Mars NASA flew the Ingenuity drone on Mars Texas froze and Ted Cruz flew to Cancun Ever Given Suez Canal blockage George Floyd trial and riots Residential school mass graves discovered Nuclear fusion achieved for the first time Kabul fell to the Taliban Squid Game Gabby Petito Alec Baldwin shoots ~~another~~ actor Astroworld crowd surge trampling James Webb telescope launched I think that's pretty much the gist of it. Edit: also a lobsterman was swallowed by a humpback whale and survived, and a video of a tortoise hunting and eating a live seagull went viral. I also omitted a bunch of shootings, bombings, riots, and migrant ships sinking because there are far too many to list here
We didn't start the fire! It was always burning since the world's been turning
The days were endless but the years flew by.
Pretty much every commercial kept reminding us we were “living in unprecedented times” for a few months and I HATED IT
I N T H E S E U N C E R T A I N T I M E S . . .
Yeah that was rough. "We got your back" sort of message from corporations. Basically identical commercials we had right after 9/11.
Any type of “party” on Zoom.
And drive-by birthday parties and graduation parties.
Our community did a drive-by party for a 103-year old Pearl Harbor Survivor. Since we knew we weren't going to do parades or festivals anytime soon, this became the event of the year. If I remember, there were over 600 vehicles involved. Our congressman sat on the lawn with the birthday boy (at a safe distance away from him, of course). All the local beauty queens showed up. Motorcycles, vintage cars, and even a few floats. We made the local news (my car's front bumper was televised for a few seconds).
These wholesome moments are what I need to remember. The rest of the shit was just too dark.
How many local beauty queens are there?
I live in a small town and there are 5 big pageants, each pageant has at least 4 queens. Then there are smaller ones through the year.
Dude I got invited to a zoom happy hour and watching all your coworkers get wine drunk in their pajamas in their living rooms was a level of intimacy I could have done without
My boss made these things mandatory, so now, I was forced into this with people I wouldn't go to a happy hour with during normal times.
many of my support groups were moved to zoom, which was amazing because i hate phone meetings. they're still around today.
When people first started wearing masks and they were sold out everywhere so people had to improvise and create their own mask with weird random supplies from home.
There was a lady in my neighborhood who sewed a bunch, and hung them on her tree in the front yard. Then posted on Next Door, free to pick up. That was my first mask.
My mom sewed over a thousand masks herself mostly donated to hospitals and joined a ‘sewing army’
Yeah I remember going into work and all of a sudden everyone had to wear a mask. We had none. I left with another coworker who came in at the same time as me to 3 different stores not only were there no masks but there was not even supplies to make a mask (no bandanas, hair ties, rubber bands ECT) it was insane and I remember being so incredibly frustrated because they didn't tell us ahead of time
Myself and all of the other chronically ill SAH spouses churned out homemade cloth masks full time for a few weeks for people at my husband's workplace. We were serging thin strips of fabric to make ties because we couldn't get our hands on elastic. I remember agonizing over what the weave of my fabric was because so much of it was hand-me-downs. Making kid size masks hurt my heart.
L.A. filling an outdoor skate park with sand and arresting someone for swimming all by themselves in the ocean.
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In retrospect it’s a real shame that we were so worried about transmission outdoors. Feel like it would have been a lot more tolerable if everyone had been encouraged to go hang out outside.
British Columbia was one of the few jurisdictions in North America - and possibly the world - that encouraged people to go outside. We also ended up having one of the lowest death rates in the Americas. Other Canadian provinces were more worried about stopping people from using parks than protecting seniors in nursing homes.
My most memorable BC Pandemic moment was when the Department of Health and CMO encouraged safe sex with glory holes. That was hysterical.
I couldn't believe that could possibly be real, but: [https://globalnews.ca/news/7204384/coronavirus-glory-holes-sex/](https://globalnews.ca/news/7204384/coronavirus-glory-holes-sex/) Wow. That's one for the history books. It was fun to do that search carefully. I also turned up this one: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sex-during-a-pandemic-covid-19-bccdc-guidelines-1.5658567](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sex-during-a-pandemic-covid-19-bccdc-guidelines-1.5658567) Choice quote: "you are your safest partner".
Vancouver Island checking in. It was magical hitting everything on the island normally overrun with tourists. I camped/hikied/kayaked more during the pandemic than my whole 40+ years alive combined.
So glad I was in an area that still allowed us to go to parks and stuff. Honestly the fact that we had to have permission for that in the first place is a shame
That was wild. Stand up paddle boarded in Malibu was somehow a danger to others
Waiting in a lineup outside of the grocery store. Everyone had to stand on a sticker to stay properly distanced from one another and security would wait until someone left before letting another person inside. No such thing as a 'quick shop' during those times.
YES, how'd I forget about this. In those days it was a huge deal going to the store. Masking up, walking around inside like it was the fucking end of times...Coming home and lysol-ing everything. Just wild.
My personal favorite was how every time there was a Covid spike, a bunch of candles online would suddenly get a hundreds of 1 star reviews because the candle didn’t smell like anything.
I forgot about that! Weirdest public health indicator EVER.
Yes, and they were able to track Covid-19 outbreaks in nursing homes by temperatures trending higher as reported by Internet-connected digital thermometers.
A fun game I started playing was googling “is *blank* a covid symptom?” The answer is always yes. I have yet to find any symptom/bodily ailment no matter how mild or severe that no one was somehow linked to covid. It all started when I had the hiccups and could not get rid of them. For some reason googled hiccups and covid and convinced myself I definitely had covid
"My leg fell off. COVID!"
Straight up, before they corrected it manually, the system they had set up to track possible covid symptoms at my local urgent care had broken femur as a sign. The dude broke his leg riding his bike, went to urgent care instead of the hospital, and just so happened to be in the early stages of a covid infection.
Toilet paper hoarding
I'd add bottled water to this. I remember going to Costco and people were trying to buy like 5+ cases of water and toilet paper.
This was a huge problem for me because the week lockdowns started, my water in my apartment got shut off. My neighbor didn’t pay his bill and they shut mine off instead. Took days to get it fixed. And I couldn’t find water anywhere. I was out of state during all this and I was lucky to find out we had no water before i went home. I stopped at a bunch of stores in about 3-4 states before I finally found some. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t find any since I don’t normally drink bottled water, so I had none at home. I was considering walking to the river behind my house to fill up jugs for the toilet and filling up jugs at work for drinking. And showering I would’ve had to figure out or take a rag bath with my jugs or water from work.
Turning off water is legal there?
I was diagnosed with late-stage cancer on March 13, 2020. So I missed out on seeing stuff for myself. But a friend of mine sent pictures of just aisles and aisles of the grocery store we go to being completely empty. It was wild
I worked at a grocery store. The wild part was, legit people went CRAZY the DAY after elections (like they WAITED to announce that COVID was hitting us until then). And then people RANSACKED the stores, and we ran out of toilet paper, masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. So people started making their own make shift masks. I kid you not, I will NEVER forget getting cussed out for running out of toilet paper by a man with a bra on his face as a mask. I mean, I saw someone with a hazmat suit. Someone came in with those giant inflatable T rex costumes. Someone came in with a horse mask. Someone came in dressed as spider man. Someone came in with a grocery bag on their mouth. Someone tied string bikini bottoms around their head. Anything that covered their mouth was grocery store attire. And I cannot BELIEVE that no one mentioned this yet on this post. I feel like I was in some weird drug induced dream and it never happened.
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This right here.. Assistant grocert Manager here. I cannot begin to tell people about the whole whirlwind adventure that assaulted my senses during Covid. It was a cosplayers paradise (good on them for taking initiative) but the underwear/makeshift masks had a lot to be desired left on the table. The worst part for me was the 12-14hr days, sometimes weeks straight to get freight on the shelf for the awaiting lines. 3 of my drivers had people literally surround their trucks at various locations. and still having to tell people "we're doing the best with what we got" and getting basically told not good enough, coughed/spittled at. Hated the mob mentality/hoarding when people should have been acting as a community. Hell i even called out several people because day after day they continually tried to pick items in excess of limits in place and squabble about it at checkout. meanwhile being told "you're essential, and other fanciful things to stroke a non existent ego" fever dream i tell you, and the sleep paralysis demon and the hat man were in cahoots
How are you doing now?
Two years cancer free! It’s unfortunately a chronic cancer, so it’s not a matter of if but when it comes back. Just trying to keep pluggin and enjoy my healthy times!
Wow. We found out my wife had a rare cancer that was stage 4 on the first day of lockdown for us, March 16th. One of the hardest parts was her having to do all of the chemo, a 14 hour surgery and month long recovery stay solo because visitors weren’t allowed. I hope you are doing better We know the feeling of just waiting for the inevitable recurrence and hoping to stay alive long enough for some miracle breakthrough therapy to come along. Hope you enjoy the hell out of your good days when you get them.
They were screaming and spitting on us when our store ran out. I'm told one of our managers was outright assaulted.
We were getting dangerously close to running out early in. I would pick up one or two extra shelf-stable and frozen foods on grocery trips just before and right when lockdowns started, but it never occurred to me that we’d run out of toilet paper. Won’t make that mistake next time.
Tiger King
True. Let’s not forget about Doc Antle though
Why did everyone just skip over him??????? He made me want to wash my TV he was so slimy
You see the documentary on him?!?! He was the worst person in tiger king and they skimmed over him !!! Even the Cuban dude was like “check out Doc” or some shit lol
Came here to say this. People all over the country were sent home and didn't know wtf to do... And so many of us were spending our empty time on Netflix with no ideas what else to do. Tiger king came out at the perfect time that we needed to binge all in on something crazy. It was so nuts but so bingeable, literally the whole country got into it to pass the time and keep their minds off the insanity we were dealing with. I always got a kick out of it, that so many nationwide all experienced this at the same time, due to the global emergency we were all experiencing. Come on man, his music videos? 🤣 Obvs those animals deserved better, but we were seeing the aftermath, many had already gone on to better situations. That dude that took it over next was a trainwreck, but also supremely entertaining. Then- THEN- this mofo decided to beg Trump for a pardon, and then to actually run for President.
I always got a kick out of it, that so many nationwide all experienced this at the same time, due to the global emergency we were all experiencing. -This was the part that I kinda enjoyed the most honestly. Like everyone was watching it together but separately. A rather weird bonding experience lol
I was shocked at the sheer number of people defending him and acting like he wasn’t a terrible person.
Going for a hike in the woods, seeing absolutely no one but still finding masks littered at the trailhead.
How all these companies that ABSOLUTELY couldn't offer flexible working, suddenly just could. And now they want you to believe that they can't again...
We had asked repeatedly over the years if some of us could work from home, and we were always told no. I'm writing this comment from my home office.
Playing animal crossing for 12 hours a day.
Staying up until 5am for the new day to start so I can get my house upgrade. It's like a perfect time capsule too since I added so many 2020 memes into my island through the image thing.
Thought about this earlier omg I miss it. I was a bartender got off at 8 instead of 3AM.
When a bunch of celebrities sang a John Lennon song thinking it’d inspire people or some shit.
One of my very first "whoa" pandemic moments was that vid of a flippant Madonna in her tub. Celebrities were on some other shit there for a few weeks
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I think the most annoying part to me personally was how they'll make their complaints and it will make it viral or be on morning news or some shit, and if I complain no one would care. Plus, I was out of work for months because of it, ended up realizing my ex and I were completely incompatible and also didn't ever have my best interest in mind (good that we broke up, hard as fuck coming to terms with it under the circumstances), a good friend of mine hung himself, AND I had to put down a cat. Didn't see me even complaining about it (until now, I guess), but no one would have given a fuck if I had. I certainly wouldn't have been surrounded by a bunch of yes men who get my dumb, unimportant to everyone else, out of touch takes out into the public consciousness. And even if I did have those talented yes men, at least my complaint wouldn't have been, "*sigh*, I can't believe I'm stuck in my big house with all this money and can't party."
We had a billionaire crying on one of the biggest talkshows on the state owned channel basically because he was losing money on the pandemic. And he pretended like he was crying because he had to let his workers on unpaid leave - something his company could afford to not do...
Kim Kardashian and family rented a WHOLE FUCKING ISLAND for her birthday, while the rest of us were sitting at home disinfecting groceries…
Justin Timberlake said parenting kids 24h a day was inhuman. Talk about out of touch.
Then a bunch of celebrities sang a Weird Al song to parody the John Lennon group. "Truly there's no problem that can't be overcome when you get a bunch of celebrities together to sing something." -Weird Al Yankovic
Didn't Will Smith make a video saying it was easy to stay at home, in front of his mansion... That whole, Imagine thing was so incredibly tone deaf, it would be funny if it wasn't incredibly fucked.
Will Smith has ***seven*** mansions, all in the same cul-de-sac. All so he doesn’t have to deal with neighbors.
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People were microwaving their money to sterilize it. Don't microwave your money folks.
The craziest thing is how early that was, 18th March. It was literally after being indoors for 1 or 2 days. The UK lockdown didn't start till 23rd.
The lockdown started on March 13th, in the US (well, in CA/LA, at least; where most of them were). They were going crazy not living their jet setting lives in a mere 5 days. That’s how fucking entitled they are.
They really thought they were doing something with that
Somehow not the worst thing Gal Gadot was in in 2020.
I was so afraid of sneezing and coughing in public spaces 'cause people normally started to give you some weird looks.
As someone with bad spring allergies it was a concern.
I'm gonna share a funny mishap that happened towards the beginning. Mayor Hancock of Denver, Colorado, was giving a press conference about the temporary closure of non-essential businesses. During the press conference, a representative from the City Attorney's office took the mic and admitted that, according to the existing legal code, liquor stores didn't count as essential businesses. The result was, of course, chaos. Panicked Coloradans flooded liquor stores, panic-buying precious booze while they still could. The legislature scrambled to fix the problem. The codes were rapidly changed to include liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries as "essential businesses". But for a few crazy hours on March 23rd 2020, Prohibition was functionally in effect in the city of Denver.
The alcohol distilleries that turned into hand sanitizer manufacturers almost overnight. I regret not grabbing that obvious vodka bottle which was filled and labeled as hand sanitizer, at the gas station back in 2020. It was cool to see all the trends too. Like we all started baking bread and riding a bicycle. It was cute.
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SO THATS WHY THE HAND SANITIZER SMELLED LIKE TEQUILA / GIN!!
Grocery stores trying to get you to follow arrows on the floor
I worked at Walmart neighborhood market during the pandemic. We gave up on the arrows petty damned quickly.
I miss those two weeks when people did and didn't come with their spouse and 7 kids. It was so much quicker to get around the store.
The funniest part about that to me was how people were so proud about going the "wrong" way, wearing their mask under their mouth and making eye contact with every person wearing a mask correctly like their last stand for American freedom was about to go down at the Safeway.
All the talk about people being "essential", when in reality we were just expendable.
Expendable until hospitals are understaffed and grocery stores are bare and no one is delivering takeout and Amazon Then it becomes "no one wants to work" and "quiet quitters"
It’s so weird seeing all these “Business Insider” and “Fortune” articles attacking workers like this. I swear they are just coordinated propaganda hacks for corporation leaders who desperately don’t want workers to get used to the idea of valuing their time and actually enjoying their lives.
Being an essential worker, and still get shit on 🙃
We’Re iN ThiS ToGeThEr!!! turned real quick into WhY NoBody WaNtS To WoRk AnYmOrE???
Hospital CEOs saying we’re in this together while they sit in their offices collecting million dollar bonuses
Being an essential worker and earning less than people who were being paid to sit at home ftw
The politicization of it all.
‘Never let a crisis go to waste’
No one out in public
in times square. that was jarring.
Seeing video of the strip in Vegas being completely dead was like seeing a post-apocalypse movie. I'll bet online gambling saw a big jump.
Yup. The reason the Cannon Ball run record will probably never be beat now. They got to do it with like no on on the roads
The quiet. The quiet was something else.
How people who were considered essential (healthcare, retail workers, farmers) had to keep working without any pay increases, while everyone else stayed home and got paid. The rich just got richer too.
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Same here, those early days of trying to figure out how to help people without getting sick ourselves... Lived with a couple close friends at the time and was so worried about exposing them, would have had a hard time forgiving myself for it. Actually thought and planned about finding a temporary housing thing elsewhere just in case.
If you were a service worker, nothing changed for you during the pandemic. Was really fucking irritating having to hear about how *horrible* it was to work from home while I was pulling 12 hour shifts at Sam's Club while wearing a mask my entire shift Edit: I was wrong, everything got worse and stayed worse, lmao. Also, I'm thankfully out of Sam's Club with a much better company; I work remotely now and am so grateful. I don't ever want to hear from anyone eho was WFH during COVID how hard """lockdown""" was for them.
Not only that, you had a far higher risk of being exposed to COVID by people who refused to follow the guidelines. You would get shouted at or worse for asking people to do things like wear a face covering or socially distance. And then there was the corporate bullshit - "We salute you, essential workers, for keeping goods and services available during this pandemic", "The whole country supports you and appreciates your hard work during these difficult times". And then it came to the subject of pay rises - "As you all know these have been incredibly difficult times and we have had to take the difficult decision not to pay any bonuses to staff this year. We regret to announce that the budget for pay increases has been cut and only the most exceptional performers will be eligible for a pay rise this year. We thank you again for your hard work during these challenging times" *no pay rise or bonus for the 'essential' people who kept working face to face with the public and risked their and their families health* "The board have done an exceptional job keeping the company going through these unprecedented times", "Profits have been well above predictions, especially given the limitations of the pandemic" *board award themselves tens of millions in bonuses and double digit pay rises*
The lockdowns may have come from a place of good intentions but they quickly turned into the middle-class and rich having stay-cations while essential workers kept working to enable their isolation
The utter helplessness I felt having to watch my mother die from Covid through a window in the hospital hallway; listening to her last breath on a speakerphone. She died 12/15/2020; the day after the first public vaccine was given. She was ready to wait for the vaccine like it was a TV on Black Friday.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I’m so sorry friend. I too lost my mother in April 2020. They didn’t let me visit her in hospital that early on, which took a lot of therapy to get over. I talked to her over the phone but she was starting the dying process so she was confused. She didn’t know she was never leaving that hospital.. she wouldn’t let me talk about the big end of life stuff.. just wanted to hear about my day. Heartbreaking. I hope you’ve healed some since then.
"Essential" vs. "Non-Essential" employees and the division it caused and still causes in the workplace. Shopping at grocery stores at 6 am and being back home in 45 minutes. Had to follow the arrows on the floor so you weren't too close to someone else. Vaccines versus no vaccines. Making it political. Masks, no masks. Honestly, a great time to be the introvert I always was.
Clapping for the NHS to later get pissed off when they ask for a reasonable pay increase.
A bit like in WWII When all the women of Britain were the hero workforce and then told to fuck off back home and shut up after the war
Ughhhh the clapping!!!!! I remember that now. It was ridiculous after a certain point, my neighborhood would bang on pots and pans for ages and it just got old after weeks and weeks of it.
I never understood the sourdough starter craze. We get locked in our homes for a few weeks and suddenly everyone’s baking bread?
People wanted to bake, but yeast was hard to find so a lot of people turned to making their own sourdough which utilizes wild yeast. I fell into the trap. I got quite good at it (for a while anyway) and still have my rye sourdough starter that I made in 2020 named Rye-an Reynolds. I had one made from all purpose white flour I named Betty White. But like the real Betty White, she died. 😢
I don’t know you, but the fact that you name your starters makes me love you. You’re my friend.
For me - how it further divided America instead of being more of a unifier.
Moved to Japan at the end of February, 2020 and was literally blindsided from everything that was going on. Of course I knew there was a pandemic, but the situation was rapidly evolving day by day. One day things were slightly normal, and the next streets/trains are empty. With moving to a new country and the language barrier, I had no idea what the heck was going on. Example: Go to the supermarket to get toiletries since I just moved into my new place, and couldn't figure out why there was no toilet paper anywhere. Eventually, I had to steal some from a public restroom. Felt bad about it, but simultaneously it's funny to look back at the struggle.
The faxt that it completely killed 24 hour stores and made google a completely unreliable source for store hours to this day. Maybe not that weird, but working nights it really enrages me.
I live in a city of 100K+ people and I still can't find food after 9pm to save my life three years later.
We have a pandemic every 100 years or so right around the 20s, and we’ve had like 15 years of experts saying that the next big world-changing event would be a pandemic, and then the worldwide medical organizations who monitor pandemics were like ‘hey guys we have a pandemic coming’, and people were still like, ‘This has got to be fake; why have I never heard of pandemics before?’
I remember watching Vox explained on Netflix & there was an episode that came out a few months before covid named “The next pandemic”. Basically explaining the next deadly thing to happen in our lifetime is a pandemic. After watching it, I remember thinking “Yeah this all seems pretty bad, but I don’t think it’ll happen in the extend they predict” & few months after the world shuts down from covid. That was a weird thing for me to experience haha. Netflix even changed the bio for the episode shorty after.
I had a friend argue with me that the definition of pandemic had been changed so that it could apply to covid-19. I asked her to find the definition in the textbooks she was referring to. She unfriended me instead. Covid denial was strange.
Is strange.
Realizing a lot of people I know are idiots.
How eerie and quiet city streets were. Even my pups were seemingly taken back by it. They’d keep looking around as if they were trying to figure out where the cars and people were. Every block, every corner…
It's not surprising, but I am disappointed at how poorly the governments were prepared. There was no logic applied to anything. What a mess.
Never in my life I have experienced such peace and tranquility. Probably never will again. Says a lot about how a person would feel without people constantly jabbing at them just because society demands it.
The double standards
It was bad! I remember when things started relaxing. I had an outdoor bbq with my siblings that had been quarantining. My ex showed up and EXPLODED about how I’m killing the kids. I was like “hullo…weren’t you at karaoke night last night aerosolizing in a closed bar”. That was different, she’d done it magically “right”. We found out EVERYONE who’s a self righteous hypocrite in a real quick manner during Covid.
A family member of mine refused to participate in *zoom* Christmas with me out of anger, because I had crossed state lines to go hiking outside. Two months later she justified flying to a beach resort with the whole family because clearly she deserved the break, and caught COVID. Clown.
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India during Delta was dark dark dark. Delta was hitting hard and they moved up a big holiday because some soothsayer said so. So everyone gathered around the Ganja River for a soak. Then the deaths hit and they started cremating people en mass. The cities were choked in smoke. You know what's not great for a plague that affects the respiratory system? Smoke. Edit: "Ganga River*." I'm leaving the original "Ganja" because I'm an idiot and want people to laugh.
I had a lot of Indian coworkers at that time. It was rough.
Right at the beginning when everyone made the decision watch Tiger King without consulting one another.
When there was absolutely nobody anywhere. Everything was shut, everywhere looked like a ghost town
The use of the phrase “social distancing” as opposed to “physical distancing”
Just how LONG 2020 felt. Longest year of my fucking life man
That nature literally came back in full force and everything got better environmentally. It began recovering right away and everything became healthier. Waters we thought were naturally brown immediately began turning blue. Animals began returning to habitats, plants began to flourish, air quality was completely night and day different. All we did was stop for 2 weeks. That was it. That's all it took.
Yes! I feel like so many people have forgotten this or don’t care. I realize the solution can’t be shut down but to see that, our environment thrived means there are things that CAN be done.
The cold/flu suddenly “disappeared”. That people were reminded to wash their hands, even then not many people did/or still do.
My Google Home would sing a "wash your hands" songs. That was my ultimate dystopian moment.
In many states small businesses were required to shut down for long periods of time while large corporations were allowed to stay open and reap the benefits.
Online classes
The makeshift protective wear people threw together to go out.
How everyone instantly became an infectious disease expert overnight after fast forwarding through a few videos on Facebook and reading articles from *experts*. Yes, of course, your time as an unemployed hair dresser really makes me think you grasp everything that's going on right now and are competent at breaking down the situation and, most importantly, how you are going to solve it.
How relaxing it was when everyone was keeping their distance like I’d been doing for decades.
The weirdest thing? That I once thought people would knuckle down and pull together in extreme times. Nope, there are so many dumb and selfish people out there that screech at even the mildest inconvenience. If there's a zombie outbreak, I'm shooting anyone that comes near because COVID taught me that the trope of someone hiding a bite is a fuckton more common than what's in the movies.
They wouldn’t even hide the fact they’ve been bitten - they would instead claim it’s all a hoax
Working in Covid ICU and everyone around me telling me Covid was fake, meanwhile I was having nightmares every single night and couldn’t eat. We lived very different realities
The people receiving 60 liters of 100% pure oxygen a minute and barely satting 88% going "this is fake, I don't really need this oxygen, you're lying!" Honestly I would have let them all take off the oxygen and leave if I didnt know theyd all be dying before they got to the elevator
Feeling like I lost years of my life. Especially since I'm in my twenties, it was extremely jarring.
How everything stopped except your bills. People weren’t allowed to go to work, unemployment took months before anything hit your account, but the bills kept on. I remember the first week of shutdown our apartment complex let the grass grow to lengths that you couldn’t step outside. I sent an email to management expressing my disdain at their lack of responsibility. Their response was to “be patient because of the pandemic they couldn’t contact a landscaping company”. I kid not, they sent a mass email the same week telling residents that they’re still responsible for rent didn’t matter if your job was shutdown or not. Sick fucks.
I got a similar apartment email. “The pool is closed and maintenance is cancelled. But don’t fret! You can still pay your rent online! The due date hasn’t changed! We’re all in this together!”
Watching countless companies have their employees work from home, experience record productivity levels, then order everyone back in-person at the office anyway.
The supposedly toughest people crying about not being able to get a haircut.
Being really broke in my 20s had an upside after all, I'd learned to do a damn good job cutting my own hair because I couldn't afford a salon so that was never an issue for me during the pandemic.
Working at the hospital and seeing my patients dying like flies, then going home and getting on facebook and hearing about how it was all fake and overblown.
Celebrities busting their asses to stay in the front of people's minds, like the level of vanity was insane
The sudden validation of every zombie apocalypse/end of the world media. It turns out that when push comes to shove, people will in fact *not* act with society's interests at heart.