Which would be me.
For the first time since March 17th, I went into the office today. Theoretically I was the only one there, though a few others showed up or passed through, along with one cleaner and a couple of the guys delivering stuff.
Work itself was a bit odd, just because of the way the campus is set up to allow for safe movement in these kooky pandemic times. Buildings felt more like security checkpoints, with only one point of entrance in most cases, and said entrance staffed by, well, security. The vending machines, currently the only source of edibles, were poorly stocked or broken and I gave up on them. My coworker took mercy on me and bought me a steeped tea from the Tim Hortons a few blocks over.
Speaking of Tims, this lets me segue to my main topic of this post: My first long commute since the virus hit. This is something I had been quietly dreading for months and I was bracing for the SkyTrain to be packed and awful.
To my surprise (but not as far as delight), the trains were substantially less busy than normal. I often don’t get a seat when leaving Sapperton station, but today it was not an issue. The Canada Line was a little worse, only because it runs those runty two-car trains (great planning there), but even if wasn’t anywhere close to capacity.
So in terms of crowding, it was actually okay. I never had anyone sit beside me across five trains and on the three that have single seats, I was able to nab one.
Translink has a mandatory mask policy, but enforcement is soft, as in, there is basically no enforcement as far as I can see. They just kind of hope everyone will wear masks. And nearly everyone did. In all, I saw five people not wearing masks, two on the way in and three on the way back:
- Three (all young men) were drinking coffee from Tim Hortons, so I now view them as unintentional contributors to the pandemic.
- A fourth was a young woman who ate a pizza slice from Broadway to Joyce stations. Once she was done, she did not put on a mask. I stared at her the entire time she was eating. She never noticed.
- The fifth person was another young man, a hulking Aryan type with close-cropped blond hair and tattoos all over everything. When he boarded the train, he threw his pack onto a seat, then plopped down beside it, staring intently into his phone. He had a demeanor of someone just begging to be asked why he wasn’t wearing a mask, so he could explain in a loud voice and through the use of colorful metaphors. No one asked.
I wore a mask and because it isn’t designed for glasses, it fogged up regularly, which was not great. Riding in the newer air-conditioned cars helped, riding in one of the ancient 300 year old cars did not.
I can’t decide how the combo of cap, mask and giant headphones makes me look. Like I’m taking part in some kind of bad cosplay, perhaps. Also, I find a certain irony in the GNC slogan “Live well” being on a mask I’m wearing because we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Even better (worse), GNC is permanently shutting down because of the pandemic.
In all, the commute was not as bad as I had expected, but seeing so many people wearing masks provided another tangible piece of evidence that we have slipped past whatever we considered normal times into where we are now.
Also, though I didn’t need a pandemic to remind me, that twice-a-day hour plus commute? It still really sucks. I like having those two hours back. I sleep more, I exercise more and feel better. And even not counting the commute, I was struck by how awful the office was. The air quality is terrible–my eyes felt itchy and it was cool to the point of nearly being cold, my chair is not comfortable, I have a mushy keyboard, the lighting is harsh, the monitors are kind of lousy. Really, my home setup is superior in every way. I honestly would be happy to never step foot into another office ever again.
I’ll see what can be done to make that impossible dream happen.
In the meantime, I’ll look for better masks and hope that future commutes don’t turn into COVID nightmare sardine cans.
