\n"}People who are in self quarantine really have no idea how weird it is to be a base level essential worker through this whole thing. I don\u2019t mean a doctor or a nurse or someone else working round the clock to put a stop to it or find a cure. I mean a truck driver or a gas station attendant or a retail clerk. Because everything is basically normal, only a little bit off, and then again not as off as it should be.
\nEvery day I get up. I go to work. I sell people things. There are fewer people coming through and they\u2019re buying more because they\u2019re stocking up or they haven\u2019t been shopping in a month, but there are still lines, like always. There\u2019s plexiglass between the cashiers and the customers, and no dividers, and we have to continually yell at people not to put their items on the belt until we\u2019ve finished the previous transaction, and they ignore us or argue with us, same as always. The more rules we have, the more rules there are for people to ignore. And the longer it goes on, the more normal it gets. Pretty much no one thanks us for coming in to work anymore. People are starting to act like we should never, ever run out of an item. It\u2019s just blanket assumed that we will have hand sanitizer and soap and toilet paper and people are shocked when we say we\u2019re out.\u00a0 But there are still ads on the TV in the break room telling us all to stay home and the more the customers ignore social distancing, the more management puts pressure on us to set a good example, until we\u2019re expected to follow standards that are physically impossible.
\nThe longer this goes on, the less \u2018essential\u2019 I feel.
\nAnd then I come home and get online as always and there are all of these people asking what you\u2019re doing while you\u2019re stuck in quarantine and coming up with fun things to do when you\u2019re in quarantine and talking about what you\u2019re going to do when this whole thing is over and you can finally, finally leave your house. Everyone just seems to assume that you, the person reading their words, are in quarantine, because everyone\u2019s in quarantine. It\u2019s like this big, international, universal experience that you\u2019re not a part of.
\nIt feels like fifteen years from now everyone in the world will be looking at each other and asking \u201cRemember what it was like to be cooped up in the house? Wasn\u2019t it awful?\u201d and I\u2019ll just be sitting there going \u201c\u2026\u2026.no, I don\u2019t. I didn\u2019t do that.\u201d And people will look at me and wonder how I could not know.
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