Catchy Name Needed

I saw an article the other day that talked about international pandemic slang (it's here but it's behind a paywall, I think I got to it from a newsletter or something!). It was pretty interesting - mostly it had to do with workplace slang. I am not in the work-from-home world so I don't know much about this stuff - I hadn't even heard the English-language ones like "zumping" for firing (or breaking up) via Zoom. Some of the international ones were pretty intriguing. In Japan they use kubikiri - which literally means decapitation - for being laid off. In China a slang term for firing is chao yougu, which means "to fry squid." They said it comes from workers living in dormitories rolling up their quilts when they left. (I'm unclear on that one, I guess a fried squid curls up? I don't eat seafood other than just fish so I have no idea, but it's still interesting. Apparently it also gets used for quitting - you can say "I fried my own squid" in that case.)

Anyway, I started trying to think if we had any pandemic slang of our own. I really can't think of much, other than that we talk about "the old world" for life before the pandemic. (I doubt we're the only ones to use that, but for my workplace, I think that partly came from a presentation about a software update we all had to sit through where they kept saying "in the new world" regarding the new version. We used to make fun of that a lot.)

(That makes me think of a phrase that stuck in my head from somewhere: "But that was long ago, and in another country." I tried to look it up and all it comes up with is Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, which isn't the same quote. I don't know. I may be conflating some things. I certainly never read The Jew of Malta though!)

I apparently haven't posted here since that week I stayed home sick back in March. Man, that seems like eons ago. Usually I think time goes whooshing by incredibly fast, but pandemic time seems to have changed that. The first couple of months, especially, seemed to crawl by. I've heard other people say that too, but I wasn't even cooped up at home all the time, so I found it a bit surprising. (I'm sure I said some of this way back when, but I'll repeat it since I'm sure not everybody remembers what I said months ago!)

Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.

So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.

Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)

Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)

I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.