To think some people are ‘enjoying’ the pandemic

[Flynnqwer]

I’ve noticed an attitude amongst some people where they’re nothing short of praying for a new, more lethal, variant.

I’ve noticed it amongst people I work with and people I do a hobby with. Any discussion about going back to our workplace (we can work from home but not easily or particularly effectively) once the Government ends the restrictions on waiting from home, or back to our hobby in real life instead of on Zoom (the hobby is controlled by a central board who are following the WFH advice until it is lifted) are met with cries of ‘No! We can’t do that! It’s dangerous!’ and it anyone points out that, thankfully, it looks like the vaccination programme is working and Omicron is less severe, they come back with ‘but what if there’s a more lethal strain that appears and kills millions?’

My workplace has one element which has legally got to be done in person. I have had emails today from managers begging us to cancel said work thing and do it online. We cannot do it on line lawfully (it’s along the lines of witnessing signatures). We have told them no, we must go into the building for an hour to fulfil this function. They are saying that that is breaking the working from home directive, that it’s unsafe, and what if a deadly variant is discovered? Then we’d have to find a way around the law.

AIBU that some people are actively hoping that the situation worsens and we are locked back down? Why would anyone want this to happen?

Wills can be legally recognized by video witnessing.
I think working from home is wonderful but I've done it since 2002.

Ask for their risk assessment.

@Staffy1

How do you translate fear of covid and possible new, more lethal strains to loving the pandemic and praying for it to get worse? If they don’t want to go back to mixing with all and sundry as it is because they are worried about getting covid then surely they would be happier with no pandemic or covid.

Ok, but why do you have to be so happy about it?

I don't think it's locojg lockdowns as such but a lot of people love the feverish activity of rolling new updates. I have friends who know all the case numbers and projections and it's the main thing they talk about. They love the drama.

I think a lot of people enjoyed wfh and furlough initially, wfh was handy when the schools were shut etc and I have some friends who enjoyed being off and still getting paid. However at that time it was really boring as you couldn't go to the gym, shops, seeing friends, eat out etc Now that we can do all that again people are enjoying the benefits of wfh as they can pop out for lunch, see friends, go to the gym, get bits of housework done etc
And of course many that have to go back to work would love the luxury of paid time off again.
I think people are forgetting how miserable the first Lockdown was and that's why they're hoping for a chance to stay off work. I guess some people are antisocial and enjoy daytime telly but I think they're in the minority.

Kanaloa

confused

What machines are passing Covid?

I am talking about machines that aid ventilation prevented covid, not getting covid from machines.

I have worked throughout the lock downs and it is normal for me to be out and about meeting people face to face albeit masked up and distanced to some extent. For some people who have been WFH or shielding, coming out into the world again when the "monster" they are hiding from hasn't gone but is mutating and changing is scary. I do come into contact with some of these people who are so scared, they are just a little short of a full HAZMAT suit. It isn't a case of them enjoying the pandemic and wanting it to continue, it is a case of being scared and fear of the unknown. Every variant has been described in the media as most transmissible and more deadly than the last. It isn't enjoyment, it's fear.

@IWishIHadNotDoneIt

Such people will require deprogramming, possibly for years.

We're unlikely to ever return to the office full time, my team probably will only really return occasionally, unless the organisation puts rules in place that force it, because all our senior team prefer WFH and the work is getting done just as well WFH. Part of my role can't be done remotely so I get some face to face time.

Other teams have senior managers desperate to get people back into the office because the work either isn't getting done (or done fast/well enough) or they want to micromanage which is hard to do remotely, we're encouraged to work more flexibility and some managers would prefer everyone clocking in and out and constantly supervised.

@PinkPiranha11

Totally agree OP. Some people love the “rules” the snitching, having a sense of purpose. I think once it’s “back to normal” a lot of people won’t know how to live normally again and will be very bored, nothing to complain about. Plus I know a lot of people who have absolutely rinsed this for lots of time off work. My friend in the civil service said everyone books their jabs on a Monday or Tuesday, hoping to feel unwell and then have a day or two off work. By contrast all the self employed people I know (me included) have had them on a Friday, praying that you’ll be fine by Monday to carry on working. Says it all.

You've touched on something here! There seem to be a lot of people (myself included) who have felt unwell after their boosters. Just how widespread is this? Plus there's another factor- a lot of people giving the injections in this country aren't doing it properly. The Covid vaccine is supposed to be delivered intra-muscularly, and the practitioner is supposed to pull back the syringe plunger a bit after inserting the needle to make sure they havn't hit a vein. If blood comes back after aspiration, it means the needle is in a blood vessel, and they need to start again. Injecting the vaccine directly into the blood stream has been linked to a number of complications, including heart problems.

@mathanxiety

It’s almost a source of pride to denounce people you have never met

@thepeopleversuswork
I can only agree with this, but not in the sense you clearly meant it.

Denouncing people who are not interested in smiling and making small talk as 'pathologically unsociable' is harsh and completely uncalled for.

The lack of self awareness on this thread has ceased to surprise me.

I stand by this though.

I do understand that some people really struggle with social interaction and I have a great deal of sympathy with these people. I think that lockdowns and WFH have probably helped them a lot.

But while I think its great that people are not being pressured into stressful social situations which they are uncomfortable with, I think the pendulum has swung rather too far in the opposite direction and people are becoming pretty militant about their "right" not to have to interact with others outside their immediate family.

You see tons of threads where people are complaining about having to engage in really pretty anodyne low level behaviour: picking up the phone, smiling, responding to a short politely phrased bit of chat. As if these behaviours were an offence. And somehow linking their reluctance to participate in this behaviour with the intrinsic awfulness of all other people. "I hate people, people have let me down, why should I play ball with people" etc.

I'm sorry, but let's be honest, this is profoundly pathological. Support and empathy for introverts, I'm absolutely fine with. But a situation where people are discouraged from approaching one another for fear of breaching some really hardline code of social conduct driven by a minority of people in society: no, I don't want to live in a society like this.

The bottom line is all of us have to have some level of social engagement at times. Fine if you prefer to limit that to your immediate family most of the time. Fine if you don't like going to parties. Fine if you find offices awful. But making people who are engaging in minor acts of social pleasantry or trying to reach out to you feel guilty or rude, I'm not prepared to live like that.

Nor do I want to live in a world where people are totally atomised and expected to limit themselves to their immediate family and their professional world. COVID has hugely amplified this tendency in people who had leanings towards this and made them feel its somehow OK and normal. It's not normal, and it worries me that a generation of people will grow up to think this is.

People I think you see more posters on here than the reality. As if they are angry about social interactions or want to avoid them they’ll post about it online, whereas majority are fine to interact and find it positive.

This pandemic has played right into my husband’s hands. He can indulge all of his neuroses : germ phobia, avoiding socialising, people not coming to the house, controlling our actions, controlling our money (work has been heavily impacted). From my point of view it has made him a worse version of himself and I know that he will have to be dragged out of this pandemic kicking and screaming. It is incredibly depressing.

@MarshaBradyo

People I think you see more posters on here than the reality. As if they are angry about social interactions or want to avoid them they’ll post about it online, whereas majority are fine to interact and find it positive.

Hi: possibly. I'm getting quite tired of reading posts from people saying: "I don't want ever to see anyone else again except my husband" and "people are all rude and ignorant, why should I wave at them?"

It's bonkers that people can't see how utterly illogical this is for starters: if they met their husband they must at some point have been open to meeting people in a positive way.

Also profoundly depressing and a really awful signal to be sending to children that they should just be looking to avoid the world as far as possible.

It may just be a keyboard warrior thing but I think it needs to be acknowledged as unhealthy.

A friend of mine said to me ‘only the brave are going out. Most people are staying at home’. I find that very sad. She has no health issues and is fully vaccinated. Her son and his girlfriend won’t have her round to their house. She hasn’t been in their house since the pandemic began. This despite the fact they are young and healthy and fully vaccinated too. Her mother in her nineties hasn’t seen her friends for two years and won’t go anywhere.

I rarely come on Mums net. I have been engaged with this topic - it is beginning to read like a novel. It has character building - novels have techniques for building character and this thread uses those techniques to some extent. It has dialogue, it has a theme. It doesn't have much depth so far and no plot development beyond the development of some animosities. but it is ripe for someone talented to build it into a novel.

totally agree. really really want people to catch a grip of themselves. The what if brigade are doing my nut in the least wee excuse and they all run back to working from home again and it takes dynamite to prise them out again. they seem to manage to go on holiday tho....

It's your intense focus on the US when this thread is about the insanity of life in the UK currently, and your burning hatred for a country you clearly know absolutely nothing about.

Oh the irony. You clearly know absolutely nothing about life in the UK to be describing it as "insanity".

Other than masks, virtually everything is normal. Case rates are dropping rapidly after peaking at a lower level than Ireland/France/Denmark/Portugal/Switzerland/Spain. Death rates for this wave have stayed at around the same level as Germany's.

Life's great here, even by January standards. I've been going to the theatre, meeting friends etc with no issues.

@DdraigGoch

It's your intense focus on the US when this thread is about the insanity of life in the UK currently, and your burning hatred for a country you clearly know absolutely nothing about.

Oh the irony. You clearly know absolutely nothing about life in the UK to be describing it as "insanity".

Other than masks, virtually everything is normal. Case rates are dropping rapidly after peaking at a lower level than Ireland/France/Denmark/Portugal/Switzerland/Spain. Death rates for this wave have stayed at around the same level as Germany's.

Life's great here, even by January standards. I've been going to the theatre, meeting friends etc with no issues.

The irony is high. The pp seems fixated on U.K. doing badly which is odd as the US has its own Covid issues currently.

And yes cases are dropping which is good.

The PP who talked about the meddling funsponges having had a great pandemic was absolutely right. There have always been a set of people who are obsessed with disapproving of and denouncing others; they think that a virtuous life is one that is as restricted as possible (we've had decades of drivel about how 'maturity' consists of hard work and domesticity rather than exploring, travelling, having as much fun as you can). Now these people have been energised to bully everyone else and compete with each other in martyrdom.

The WFH enthusiasts also tend to be the sort of people whose jobs are as comfortable as their home lives - not only have they enough room to designate a workspace, but they also don't have the sort of managers who install keyloggers on their computers and demand they register their pee breaks. Some people's WFH experiences have been horrible, too - sitting on your bed with a laptop on your knee because your flatmates have already commandeered the kitchen for their own laptop-bashing day, family members constantly disrupting your work (particularly if you live with an abusive man who thinks your little job doesn't matter and now you're not going out the housework has to be done perfectly).

What should have happened was a proper look at how we arrange 'work' and reward it. What we're going to get is further class division: low-paid service workers will have to keep on drudging and be scolded if they even think of participating in any leisure activity.

From my own experiences and those of my friends this manichean divide doesn't really exist when it comes to living in a pandemic! It is not a question of relishing the idea of pandemic spikes allowing us misanthropes to wfh and not engage with the outside world. It has opened up our eyes a bit to a more balanced way of living so my DH for example although does have to go away for work, he can now wfh on 1 or 2 days rather than those days being in a London office. This is great as my dc see him more. I can have a fulfilling job but still collect my youngest from school, go to the park, go to meet friends in the pub at night as I am not home late from work. At work, I don't really see anyone as my job is very isolated. I can literally go a whole week with only having seen someone in the loo so for me, seeing the parents of my DC's friends, being part of the local community has made me more sociable. Where I live is a totally different area to where I work so I find it has improved my mental health as I was lacking that human interaction. I did lose a family member to Covid so I would certainly say I'm not celebrating this new world as that is the wrong way of putting it but I have found some improvements.

But the 'more balanced way of living' for the cubicle mice is only made possible by low-paid service workers having to keep on drudging. Too many people seem to think that the only type of work that exists is office work of the sort that can be done remotely - as though your food, utilities, etc are provided by magic.

@FrippEnos

Kanaloa

confused

What machines are passing Covid?

I am talking about machines that aid ventilation prevented covid, not getting covid from machines.

Oh. As you said ‘better washing and sanitation for machines that have been used’ I took this to mean a cleaning system for machines. Perhaps not.

Regardless I don’t see how this would affect us not locking down again which is what I disagree with. I don’t think anyone on here is arguing against ventilation systems if businesses would like to install these.

Wreath 21 that's the oversimplification I'm referencing. I work for the council and my income is not very good at all below the UK average salary. I could be paid triple the amount in the private sector for the job I do but I'm sacrificing that to have a job that fits in around school times and holidays. I have colleagues on just above the minimum wage wfh some days. You are equating office with privilege and im not surebof your point anyway, so because some jobs aren't able to be done at home others should not embrace that flexibility. The wfh is more inclusive for many as if you can do your job anywhere you can apply for the jobs that were always the domain of those with geographical and monetary advantage.

@DdraigGoch

It's your intense focus on the US when this thread is about the insanity of life in the UK currently, and your burning hatred for a country you clearly know absolutely nothing about.

Oh the irony. You clearly know absolutely nothing about life in the UK to be describing it as "insanity".

Other than masks, virtually everything is normal. Case rates are dropping rapidly after peaking at a lower level than Ireland/France/Denmark/Portugal/Switzerland/Spain. Death rates for this wave have stayed at around the same level as Germany's.

Life's great here, even by January standards. I've been going to the theatre, meeting friends etc with no issues.

Precisely. There's a palpable sense that some individuals are rooting for a return to normality to fail. We saw the same thing when Sweden avoided economic and social carnage by adopting comparatively light measures. I posted extracts from a BBC article which cites scientists who believe that the UK is very close to "life as normal".

The scientists themselves were then attacked, and it was suggested that one wanted to see people die (!?).

The same people chanting "Trust The Science" when they cherry pick studies or data to support their beloved worst case scenarios, will turn on the scientists when they go against that desired narrative.

The characterisation of life in the UK at present as "insanity" is itself a deranged fantasy.