I meant to get this out around the anniversary of the world grinding to massive hault, but life has a fucking habit of taking your well laid plans and smashing it with a sledgehammer.
As I walk these streets long forgotten sounds funnel into my ears marking a far cry where we were just about a year ago. The 7:00 PM clang of pots and pans have given way to the sounds of children and dogs running free in the nearby park. All the doomsday speak that filled every screen or piece of paper worth reading, signaling an onslaught for the ages, has given way to a blinding fact, we are still here.
The phrase “it was the best of times it was the worst of times” is already taken so I think for this instance I’m just going to say, it was a shitty time. Around this moment last year I was about 6 hours away from boarding a plane to Chicago for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade with my girlfriend and friends, only to watch the world seemingly stop spinning on its axis. I had watched the buildup of COVID through a computer screen as the Reddit conspiracy page went absolutely fucking mad with word of a new virus emerging deep within China’s borders towards the end of 2019. Weeks passed as ridiculous report after ridiculous report came to the surface only, as ridiculous as they were, there was a truth; people were dying and we had no idea what this was.
I can vividly recall saying to a coworker, “This is literally how World War Z started. I mean the book not Brad Pitt’s shitty movie, time to lock and load”. We both watched the webpages scroll by, updating each other on any new information getting posted in the virtual barrage that is sorting Reddit by “New”. I can recall looking on American news channels and seeing next to nothing, those initial January days hiding what was about to come our way, the fucking balls we ever had for thinking it wouldn’t.
In what felt like a blink of an eye, COVID swept through Europe. I’m pretty sure I had taken a mental health weekend attempting to break from following this when the first post I saw on Reddit was a meme about how the virus had now traveled it’s way to the next target. The Europe expansion felt marginally slower than what I had watched take a small corner of Reddit by storm. Just before my intended vacation I had drafted and issued a document for review on all job sites informing as many as possible across our company, of what consistent facts I could find at the time. We didn’t have a fucking clue what was coming as an industry, a company, or as human beings.
We cancelled our trip on March 11th, as I watched a small red dot begin to grow on the John Hopkins global COVID-19 tracker over the Chicago area. Other towns and cities had already begun cancelling their respective holiday parades and we had watched with interest to see what Chicago was going to do. With their last minute cancellation in place, our vacation ruined, what else were we to do the following day but have a drink with friends.
We met two friends for a boozy ass brunch the following day fully believing this was going to pass and refusing to let it fully ruin having a vacation after all, if we couldn’t go anywhere I wasn’t giving those days back to my company I was going to enjoy them. Slightly tuned up, we watched the press conference that afternoon as we continued drinking into a long evening. My memory’s a little fuzzy on this day, but there was an odd stillness in the air. It felt oppressive, like a blanket was being held over the entire town in a smothering hug.
The next day was bright and sunny like any other March day we’ve come to known in the Northeast. My girlfriend and I lay in our apartment recovering from the obscene hangovers we both had. Her company had issued a statement the previous day telling all employees they were being directed to work from home on this lovely Friday, and finally the official e-mail came through. “All employees are to work from home until further notice”. Friday March 13th 2020, the new normal.
That Saturday would hold bolder news. Looking back on it we were gathered amongst friends in what could have been any other weekend night, but this was different. I think we all knew, but didn’t want to say it. We didn’t know if we would see each other again after this. By this point we had heard of the lockdowns afar and there, in our comfort zones, we were rocked with a dose of reality. A curfew would be going into effect the next day beginning at eight o’clock PM along with messages of “Don’t leave your house” and “Wash your hands, wear a mask”, and so on and so forth. The walk home was, well since there’s no better term for it, eerie. There was a deafening silence seemingly emanating from the buildings and streets themselves, as if the town had become a vacuum and swallowed all of the noise into a void.
I went golfing the next morning. I mean fuck it if I’m not going to be allowed out of the house potentially I’m at least getting one round in. My game needs all the help it can get I don’t need COVID-19 to help me get worse. Anyway, I played my round, I went home, and waited. Eight o’clock PM; nothing is moving, even the wind seemed cautious to blow.
The following weeks would consist of meeting, after meeting, after meeting between me, executives, and other managers across the nation. People were shouting things out that they had read here and there and those trying to seem like they had it under control or even worse, that they had answers. The fact of the matter is, in those early weeks we didn’t have a fucking clue what was happening regardless of what anyone in construction says. We might have prepped, but that doesn’t mean we knew what the hell we were doing. There was confusion, there was chaos, and there was something you didn’t see a lot of; fear.
That was what shook me the most, hardened men and women who spat in the face of danger on a regular basis, absolutely shaking in their boots. When the decision came that we were “Essential Services” I was honestly quite surprised. Coworkers and myself had joked we’d be getting two week vacations like the rest of corporate America, but there we were being dragged into reality, kicking and screaming. One day maybe I’ll talk about this more but COVID exposed a massive problem in construction, especially on federal projects that I’d be willing to bet no one wants to talk about. You see, no alphabet agency is going to tell the contractor to stop because they’ll still have to pay the contractor without actual work being performed. In turn, no contractor is going to stop working because the alphabet agency is going to hold them liable for delays. If so facto, hereto for, you see the problem right? Nobody wanted to make that decision, nobody wanted to put the production aside and simply do what we should have done regardless of the impacts. Looking in hindsight we could’ve come back after the initial two weeks ready kick it in the ass, but we lost the ability to regroup, to stop to think, to plan what our next attack was going to be. Eventually some construction stopped for the better, but us? We kept right on rolling.
Stepping outside my office in upstate New York those first few months was a feeling I will never forget. Between the endless number of COVID specific meetings, I would try to put down the phone, walk outside and take a lap around the building. I needed to clear my head continually, regulations and recommendations were changing by the hour and there was no way to keep up with it. We started having morning and afternoon meetings just to see what changed in hours in between. More often than not, something had. “Do this! No! Do that!”. Utterly fucking exhausting. While walking around the brick warehouse, there was a weird sense of calm masking this overlying problem tearing through the nation, and at times I fully expected to come home to a city in flames with toilet paper becoming the new currency.
We all had different experiences in those days, some were worse than others and some barely even felt the sting of COVID. There was something in the beginning we always seem to lose. There was hope. There was a belief that we truly were in this together as we slammed pots and pans with wooden spoons every night in honor of the front line workers echoing through city street in one defiant FUCK YOU. We were terrified, but through that came positivity, neighbor helping neighbor, people thriving when they were able to work from home, scores checked into rehab since the opium market dried up while China remained in lock down.
We had hope and what did we do as modern day Americans? Took a good thing and fucking ruined it. I don’t want this to be political but I have to touch on it because out of everything this is what annoyed me the most. We had a chance. We had an opportunity, to be so much better than we were yet we let our political ideas get in the fucking way time and time again. For once we could have just shut the fuck up, helped each other regardless of what we thought, but we didn’t, we couldn’t get out of our own goddam way and we entirely botched a moment that could have united us, possibly deeper than we ever have been before.
March 2021 reared it’s head like a drunk cousin with a gambling addiction who needs a place to crash for a “few days”. Who knows what this new month in a new year will bring us, maybe a booming economy, or maybe zombies, honestly I’m just waiting for aliens at this point. The world will sit by patiently watching for the next sign of what’s to come, and when it comes, we must remember to truly face it together.