Thursday Report

[moon_custafer]

 So, Toronto’s back in lockdown (but my workplace, as a manufacturer, is considered essential, so I’m still going in), and one restaurant owner has decided to defy the order to go takeout only, and after a couple of days of argument and protests all covered by the local news, I see he’s just been arrested. The frustrating thing is that I do think small business need more government help if they’re going to survive this; I just don’t think defying safety orders is a good response. The <i>really</i> frustrating thing is that I have to spend my breaks seeing this unfold on tv, knowing that at least two of my co-workers think covid is a hoax and are probably cheering this guy’s actions while I carefully sit >6 feet from everybody (admittedly that’s not hard for me, I’m not that sociable).

Currently taking refuge in my screen and headphones.

Comments

[sovay]

Currently taking refuge in my screen and headphones.

*hugs*

[moon_custafer]

Thanks

Sympathies

[palain-7.livejournal.com]

is considered essential - Yes, as a Laundry Lord, my minions in the laundry business are considered essential services as well. Plague may come and go but you still have to wash your unmentionables and inexplicables. Indeed, keeping these things clean is probably even more important in these conditions. One of my nightmare scenarios is that one of my drivers will be diagnosed with COVID-19 and I'll have to e-mail all 30 households that he's visited in the last two weeks. Annoyingly we Essentials don't get any better access to PPE or tests as we are at the same level as the grocery store workers on the bottom of the ladder.

Yes, people who've been taken over by obnoxious Nyarlathotep-ish memes are very stressful. It's rather depressing that so much of humanity has such flimsy firewalls that idiotic conspiracy theories can get through. People don't read enough comic books! Any comic book nerd could tell you that the current crop of tin foil hat ideologies wouldn't pass muster in a Marvel comic.

Re: Sympathies

[moon_custafer]

Any comic book nerd could tell you that the current crop of tin foil hat ideologies wouldn't pass muster in a Marvel comic.

I always say that the Sklodowska/Curie/Joliot clan being now in its fourth or fifth generation of extremely smart people marrying each other and having children while working with radioactive elements, and none of them having mutant superpowers yet, is the saddest evidence that we are not living in a Marvel comic.

Re: Not in a Marvel Comic

[palain-7.livejournal.com]

Sadly true* but my original comment was referring to Marvel Comics in an out-of-Universe sense in that the letters pages would have ripped any plotline which was based on things like Q-Anon because of all the gapping plot holes. I doubt if anyone could even win a No Prize by explaining them away.

* Although see "Marvels" where a young JJJ is interviewing some Kansas farmer who's wife is saying "No, he hasn't worked much since Professor X merged all our minds to fight that Z'Nox invasion fleet. It really freaked him out."

Re: Sympathies

[moon_custafer]

as a Laundry Lord,

Are you the dispatcher (I’m picturing you issuing commands from a balcony while wrapped in a freshly-laundered bedsheet toga), or do you maintain some sort of map/schedule software that tells them where they need to go?

Imperious lauandi

[palain-7.livejournal.com]

I’m picturing you issuing commands from a balcony while wrapped in a freshly-laundered bedsheet toga

A wonderful and very apt metaphor! I'm, in effect, the Toronto Praetor. I do all the dispatching, write the script for the info-mercial (shooting now on hold due to the pandemic), hire and fire people, cut deals with the laundries and so on and so on. There is a map/scheduling app but it's very much a work in progress and we deliberately but me in between it and the drivers as a organic circuit breaker. We eschewed the Uber model of the tyranny and Artificial Stupidity of the Algorithm. A refutation of the Uber-mensch model.