#be proactive

It doesn’t have to be that way. COVID is not an inevitability to just passively accept, it is a life changing disease (every time) that you should use every tool and tactic at your disposal to avoid.

You already know what to do. If you haven’t received the updated vaccine, do that. (It’s not a booster, it’s an update, in the same way the annual flu shot is updated.) Mask, any time you’re near people you don’t live with or where anyone else has been in the last 30 minutes. (This includes outdoor spaces, like picking up a no contact delivery or pumping gasoline.) Avoid crowds. Now is not the time for concerts and hockey games or even a leisurely stroll around Target to browse. Clean your air and demand clean air in your workplace and your kids’ schools and anywhere anyone in your family has to spend time.

If 1 in 3 Americans contract the virus on this wave, that means that another half million people are likely going to die, mostly elderly and high risk. (Like me.)

It also means that 11 million people — or more — are going to be disabled, at least short term, when this is done, and there are no reliable predictors for who does and does not develop post-COVID disability.

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” -William James

So, there’s a homeless camp tucked between the company’s property and about three other businesses that are bordering us. They’re on land that’s technically owned by a railroad company but there’s a creek right there so the railroad kind of curves around/with the water, and leaves a decent sized chunk of land for people to…do their thing. They aren’t bothering anyone, and they aren’t making a mess that affects or bothers anyone, so no one’s really done anything about it.

However. Today Materials Manager found one of them (a lady) wandering through our equipment yard “very disoriented and reeking of alcohol” and called Shop Foreman for backup. Shop Foreman asked me and Work Child 1 to go help (WC1 is fluent in Spanish, me so she might feel safer with another female present) and she asked us to call her an ambulance. WC1 called 911 and stayed with her, Materials Manager went and grabbed her some water and napkins, I went and told HR Lady what was going on.

All told, it took about 20 minutes from the time she was found (Materials Manager thought she was just one of the office girls taking a walk until he saw her trying to climb into a bobcat) until she was loaded into the ambulance and being driven out. She was very placid, just obviously completely out of it, and Materials Manager got her to drink some water and put some wet napkins on the back of her neck while she sat in the shade.

Now. For the last week, we’ve been expecting our out of state department director to come in TODAY. The one from corporate who gave me permission to prank as much as I want to (he knows I keep it within reason). He walks in literally less than ten minutes after everything has gone down. And the first fucking thing out of my mouth is this:

“Hey Phil! You JUST missed all of the excitement!”

I then proceeded to fill Phil in, right as my boss and Materials Manager are walking out of their debriefing of the events. And my boss is just…such a champion, because he opens with;

“Well, now that you’re all caught up, we should go brain storm on security measures.”

So within an hour they’ve put together a plan to keep people from getting into the equipment yard (basically just blocking off the holes in our fences and doing a weekly perimeter walk) and sent out a company wide email of safety measures. All of which doesn’t involve evicting the homeless camp, or calling the police, but simply keeping them out of our yard so that they (and our equipment) stay safe.

You Have To Be Proactive

If there is anything I have learnt so far about being an adult, it is that you have to take action to make things happen. School and college are a protective bubble which will burst sooner or later.

All you will be left with is a false sense of security. So you need to take the reigns in your hands. You have to do things for yourself, you have to look out for yourself, you have to take responsibility for yourself.