COVID cringe memories (light hearted)

[Floogal]

Looking back at the pandemic, especially at its height in 2020, what made your toes curl?

1. "Imagine". Enough said.
2. The Marsh family.
3. On the local news, footage was shown of the Thursday clap (may or June). There was a parade of bhangra drummers and smarmy bratty kids doing the irritating floss dance. Was that point the 'applause' was seen as having had it's day.

I know some people may mention the dancing nurses, I only saw tiny clips on the news. Even that made me cringe.

Yeah all the stupid clapping. Then the same clapping people wanted the nurses to lose their jobs and die (probably) for being against the vaccine mandates.

Oh, this! I rarely agree with every single word of a post, but yes

It might have already been aired, but I'll just add how everyone thought that Covid was 'a leveller' for about 3 days before we all realised that wealthy households with a garden, endless educational resources and access to an organic fruit and veg van were probably a tad better off than a single parent with little money, home educating three children in a tiny flat with no outside space.

Well, to be fair, it had never been the 75th anniversary of VE Day before, and it never will be again!

I saw a young asda worker (about 17) getting shoved to the ground because the crowd wanted the toilet paper on the pallet he was bringing onto the shop floor. Absolute madness.

Never used my NHS badge, couldn't face it, just queued like everyone else. Didn't feel I was different or better because of the work I did.

The taping up of benches and play equipment and people reporting people for sitting down on a bench or having a visitor.

The infamous Barnard Castle test drive.

I recall seeing a news item about this lovely single dad and his two little boys who lived in a tiny flat and there was footage of them all walking past the chained up swings and feeling so sorry for them

I might be making this up but I’m sure I saw people wearing mesh face masks. What’s the bloody point!?

My favourite batshittery was when i went to a wedding (so it must have been fairly well into the insanity) and the vicar had a 2m cane and used it to keep him apart from anyone. Literally. Holding it out in the middle of the service if anyone came near him. It made me seriously question God.

I also obviously appreciated the clapping. I never participated but did notice it progressed to fireworks after a while - pretty impressive.

Scotch eggs will always remain a favourite along with the arrows and the plastic screens with really large gaps at the side, that erm, air can get through.

Next slide please will remain etched in my brain for every business meeting I will ever have.

And it's weird, whenever I hear the phrase 'saving lives' these days I have a visceral and automatic allergic reaction, which is unfortunate because I don't really want to kill people, but seemingly also don't want to be involved with Saving Lives either.

Eat out to help out

At the start of covid when the claps were a big thing, i worked on a post surgery ward, most patients were self caring, able to mobilise, they were in purely for IV antibiotics etc. Because all elective surgeries were cancelled, just emergency procedures were taking places, the ward was quieter than normal, only 12 patients on the ward. Our ward was the only non-covid ward in the surgical dept left so we were in our own little hospital bubble of sort.

Anyway, one nightshift, all the patients got together, and at 8pm on the dot, they all came to the nurses station and stood there clapping and cheering and wooping at us for a solid 5 minutes.

It was the single most cringey thing ever to happen. I didnt know what to do or say. I hated the claps in general, but 12 of them clapping right at me, another nurse and a healthcare, it was just mortifying.

Oy! That was my thread! It was supposed to be lighthearted as in why would a woman buy only 2 cucumbers, why is that essential, snigger. However, I started it when a bit drunk, went away and forgot about it, and came back to pages of people thinking I was being serious and giving me a right old slating. Ah the joy of Mumsnet!

Oh, and people actually using that stupid app and paying attention if it pinged - some of us never even downloaded it.
Not to mention the odd folk who are actually still testing......
Sometimes collective insanity is just baffling.

The whole thing feels like a dream / distant memory now, bizarrely. It’s hard to believe it was only 2 years ago.

At the same time there are people still attributing things to Covid that are clearly nothing to do with Covid now. Like the price of 2024 holidays - “oh it’s because of all the people who had holidays cancelled due to Covid”. Clearly most people who had holidays cancelled in 2020 managed to go on them in 2021, 2022 or 2023!

Fucking CLAPPING.

Re: masks. I was at the gym this morning and a bloke who was probably about 70 was sitting on one of the resistance machines wearing a mask. UNDER his nose.

I mean, WHAT?

I love the Marsh family, though admittedly I've only been aware of them for the last year or so, rather than during the height of the pandemic. They've done some great political parodies!

I think the most cringeworthy thing to me was people being smug about how lockdown made them lead more Simple Lives and learn about what was really important in life, etc. These obviously weren't people with serious fears, either medical or economic.

The other thing that made me cringe was the constant use of the word 'unprecedented'. Not if one had been a chronically ill teenager with (as one would now say) a CEV parent, it wasn't unprecedented. More like going back to the worst times of my youth. And of course, it was what life (or often death) was like for people during the many epidemics of the past, before vaccines and antibiotics.

The Facebook frame "I can't stay at home, I'm a keyworker"!

Every email, text message, phone call ending with "stay safe"

The Post Office busybody..

Our PO is in Asda so I had a small trolley, on seeing absolutely no one at the counters or waiting I went in through the short straight 'out' aisle (you know the roped off bits, rather than the snaking 'in' aisle

Crikey you would of thought I had coughed spit etc over the woman on the counter. She gave me a huge telling off under the guise of 'keeping us safe'. An extremely condescending lecture

I told her I would not of done had the place not been deserted but she just kept on parroting 'keeping us safe, keeping us safe'

Soooo many irrational people were on here then! I remember one person getting their arse handed to them because they had the temerity to purchase a (non essential!!) newspaper at the same time as essential loaf of bread....

The fact we all became pseudo-scientists discussing the R Value

Alas! Boris Johnson's unintelligble lockdown annoucements

We went on holiday during one of the periods it was allowed, tested to go, tested to come home and then isolated.
Both me and DH were having daily calls to check we were isolating, I offered to pass the phone over but they had to do 2 separate calls. Then we had a call to say someone on our flight home had tested positive so we had to quarantine. When I explained we were already isolating the person on the phone kept saying “no, you must quarantine”
Then we had 2 calls a day each - one to ask if we were isolating and one to ask if we were quarantining

Someone working in Morrisons had this....half the town got a ping

The clapping was bad but cringe for me was those that stood out bashing a pan. Our street became like a fight for the title of Biggest Virtue Signaler and the prize went to the loudest.

Everyone going on their one permitted daily walk.

Police stopping people in our village to make sure their reason for being there was necessary. I got stopped twice on my way to work and had to explain that no, I was not off for a nice stoll in the Yorkshire Dales at 6am, I was indeed going to work.

Having to spend hours making paper packs of work to send home to my classes, which I couldn't mark incase the paper was contaminated.