Today's Keyboard Smash
Oct. 28th, 2020 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksUhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.........
We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you...ummmm.......panic???
Okay, so, I wrote a thing about my day while I was at work. I will post that below this, just because, but it has been rendered significantly less urgent by the lovely little email printout they slid across my workstation this afternoon.
We have a case of covid at work.
What I know:
1. This person last worked on Friday--yes, the Friday I did overtime, because of fuckin' course--and experienced symptoms that night.
And that's the fucking end of the list! Because the company says they did contact tracing (I believe that as far as I can spit a rat at this point) and determined that no one else needs to quarantine. (Which, hm, this from the people who kept us working when they couldn't source ANY PPE for us at the start of this, so...not super convinced they're prioritizing safety over productivity.) But like...how do you know? No one's asked ME where I was on Friday. How do you know I wasn't exposed to this person? They can't reveal who it is, and I don't even know what department they're from. I have no reason to trust that their contact tracing efforts amount to a hill of beans. I haven't been, shall we say, impressed by their efforts up to this point, after all.
But here's the really fun thing. One person from my team has been out all week. I don't know if this was planned time off--I'm going to check the schedule tomorrow to try to determine that--and even if it wasn't, it might have nothing to do with all this. I suppose I'll have a better idea if that person remains out all next week as well, keeping them out for the fortnight ordered after diagnosis.
This person? It's the one I was covering breaks and lunch for all that week. Every day. So. You know. Not loving the implications of that.
Not sure if I should go get tested. Not sure if I should wait. Not sure if I should just, idk, burst into flames like a goddamn demon tomorrow when we have to attend our yearly health care informational panel, shrieking in thousands of discordant voices about the failings of this company, with a brief aside about the generally lamentable state of the world followed by a guitar solo. I'm keeping my options open, you know.
Fuck.
---
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress...
We're extremely Russian here (or at least Russian as framed by Marvel fandom), insofar as we live by the motto "trust but verify." This could, more realistically, be presented as "trust nothing," but being only theoretical Russians, we may not be able to muster quite that level of bleak cynicism. To wit:
The next round of one of the developmental jobs I ran this past month just started up. I was asked if the door always forced you to manually reset before running the next cycle. Oh yes. All through that work order. Why?
Turns out that was an incorrect setting and a five-minute fix. Now it opens automatically and closes with a single button push. As it should.
Why did I spend weeks enduring this (apparently unnecessary) inconvenience? Because the engineer who trained me for five minutes on it said that was just how it was. And I listened. Like an idiot.
I note with interest that none of the other people running it--say, swing shift, including the operator with 25 years' experience--saw fit to question this state of affairs. So I'm not the only idiot, I guess.
What this means, though, is that I get to say one more time* to see the month out:
FUCKING ENGINEERS, YO!
*I am tempting fate here, because there's one more workday for me before the end of the month. They could find a way.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you...ummmm.......panic???
Okay, so, I wrote a thing about my day while I was at work. I will post that below this, just because, but it has been rendered significantly less urgent by the lovely little email printout they slid across my workstation this afternoon.
We have a case of covid at work.
What I know:
1. This person last worked on Friday--yes, the Friday I did overtime, because of fuckin' course--and experienced symptoms that night.
And that's the fucking end of the list! Because the company says they did contact tracing (I believe that as far as I can spit a rat at this point) and determined that no one else needs to quarantine. (Which, hm, this from the people who kept us working when they couldn't source ANY PPE for us at the start of this, so...not super convinced they're prioritizing safety over productivity.) But like...how do you know? No one's asked ME where I was on Friday. How do you know I wasn't exposed to this person? They can't reveal who it is, and I don't even know what department they're from. I have no reason to trust that their contact tracing efforts amount to a hill of beans. I haven't been, shall we say, impressed by their efforts up to this point, after all.
But here's the really fun thing. One person from my team has been out all week. I don't know if this was planned time off--I'm going to check the schedule tomorrow to try to determine that--and even if it wasn't, it might have nothing to do with all this. I suppose I'll have a better idea if that person remains out all next week as well, keeping them out for the fortnight ordered after diagnosis.
This person? It's the one I was covering breaks and lunch for all that week. Every day. So. You know. Not loving the implications of that.
Not sure if I should go get tested. Not sure if I should wait. Not sure if I should just, idk, burst into flames like a goddamn demon tomorrow when we have to attend our yearly health care informational panel, shrieking in thousands of discordant voices about the failings of this company, with a brief aside about the generally lamentable state of the world followed by a guitar solo. I'm keeping my options open, you know.
Fuck.
---
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress...
We're extremely Russian here (or at least Russian as framed by Marvel fandom), insofar as we live by the motto "trust but verify." This could, more realistically, be presented as "trust nothing," but being only theoretical Russians, we may not be able to muster quite that level of bleak cynicism. To wit:
The next round of one of the developmental jobs I ran this past month just started up. I was asked if the door always forced you to manually reset before running the next cycle. Oh yes. All through that work order. Why?
Turns out that was an incorrect setting and a five-minute fix. Now it opens automatically and closes with a single button push. As it should.
Why did I spend weeks enduring this (apparently unnecessary) inconvenience? Because the engineer who trained me for five minutes on it said that was just how it was. And I listened. Like an idiot.
I note with interest that none of the other people running it--say, swing shift, including the operator with 25 years' experience--saw fit to question this state of affairs. So I'm not the only idiot, I guess.
What this means, though, is that I get to say one more time* to see the month out:
FUCKING ENGINEERS, YO!
*I am tempting fate here, because there's one more workday for me before the end of the month. They could find a way.
