InsaneJournal

megpie71 (megpie71) wrote, @ 2020-03-22 12:07:00

Current mood:

working

COVID-19 - Where I am, What I'm Doing
Okay, this is getting tagged "COVID-19" in the title and in the tags so people who are busy trying to curate their reading lists (e.g. me!) can avoid it if they feel the need.

What this is: a quick run-down of my situation with regards to COVID-19, and why I'm not talking about certain topics.

I work at a disability support organisation - one of the biggest in Western Australia. I work for their Quality and Governance team, as the Support Officer, which basically means I'm the one who keeps the registers up to date, and gets to be a bit of a "radar" for problems on the horizon. I also provide clerical support, and do all kinds of odd incidental bits and pieces so the rest of the team can be concentrating on their roles.

In this organisation, the Quality and Governance team (or more essentially, our manager) has been tasked with the job of basically coordinating the practical side of the organisation's response to the whole COVID-19 crisis - getting things ready for when the manure hits the windmill, getting things in place so we can continue offering support to our customers (many of whom rely on us for things like daily care worker support) for as long as logistically possible, and ensuring the safety of both customers and staff as much as is realistically feasible. Which means for most of the past four weeks, and particularly for the past two, we've been running around all over the joint as though our collective hair were on fire, and our jobs most definitely can NOT be done from home (it's very difficult to do a stocktake of how much PPE you have on hand for staff when you're in a completely different suburb to the stock you're supposed to be counting).

It's been, as a colleague put it, "an interesting week".

What this means in a practical sense is: I'm not isolating myself at home, or at least, not any more than usual. I'm going in to work four days a week, as normal (and the one thing COVID-19 is doing for me is making a virtue out of the necessity of driving myself to and from work as the sole occupant of the car; we're in a lousy spot for public transport). I go straight to work, and drive straight home from work (particularly since the local council shut down the swimming pool out of concerns for public health), and don't associate with many people outside of work. Used to be I didn't even go to the supermarkets - I'd do my ordering online, and get the staff to pull it from the shelves for me, then send my partner (who is a part-time uni student, and unemployed at the moment) off to pick it up from the shops. Basically, when it comes to community spread of COVID-19, I'm probably pretty well placed to avoid it, providing nobody at work gets it.

So I'm not going to be talking about how terrible it is to be stuck at home doing nothing (I mean, seriously, I was unemployed for the better part of 10 years before getting this job. I am well and truly adapted to "stuck at home doing nothing"). There may, instead, be bitching about how annoying it is to be stuck at work.

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