One view from an 'essential worker'

Fridays are the worst for me in this pandemic. It has been a long, frustrating week. There are good things each week, but I know the score by Friday. Irritable, angry, and my hopes and dreams are crushed. My wife and I are trying to give each other half the day to do work, run errands, take care of ourselves. When not working we both do our best to give in fully to the whims of our daughter within a gentle structure of education and activities.

Around 4:45 each night I get in the truck and head to my essential job. As the coronavirus came bearing down it became clear to me our Nation was not going to make a series of decisions that say, like South Korea, would have kept the majority of the economy humming along while also minimizing preventable deaths.

Worried we’d have extreme closure of non-essential businesses, I figured getting a job in an essential business would allow me out into the world. I also wanted to help out where I could and needed some form of income—even if it was not what I was used to in a successful freelancing business.

Saturday morning, I awake, we have relatively normal weekends. Clean the house, have fun, goof around, read a book, work on dreams. I have the weekend evenings off right now and it is magical. Monday morning, I hop back out of the eye of the storm and into another hurricane of a week--hopeful I’ll manage better than last week, excited about some tasks and the company we’re trying to build, even looking forward to my colleagues I see each night.

A friend of a friend also asked me to come on to a team of highly energetic, dedicated individuals to try and figure out how to design, build, and distribute ventilators to hospitals in extremis. If the venture was successful there’d be a monetary pay out. Both with the essential job and with the push to ventilators, I felt like I was running towards the problem. I was excited to be part of the solution.

The ventilator project fizzled, or I fizzled on the ventilator project. No shame in trying hard, recognizing you’re not moving towards a solution, and heading in another direction (fancy phrase for quitting). Acknowledge when you were wrong and correct course. Why is that so hard for people?

I pulled the plug on my involvement. Despite good intentions and smart people, the relationships between key sectors needed did not exist and could not be created in time to meet the need.

As that fell apart, I figured I’d go back to doing what I do best—and what I had planned on doing before the pandemic crisis hit—find ways to connect people with the transformational power of adventure and the outdoors and help them integrate that into their daily lives. My partner in all of this and I launched an At Home Adventure series April 6th. Even we’ve been surprised at how well it has gone. You can still sign up for a couple of beta adventures here: https://www.adventureunited.co/bookadventure The results have been incredible so far.

Meanwhile, working my essential job, moving packages that consist of a mix of American commerce, medical supplies, and a surprising amount of animal semen to ensure the success of breeding in horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep, I’ve learned a lot about myself and the American economic system.

Outside of certain jobs in the medical field and energy production, many essential jobs are low paid, high labor, repetitive work. The people who work those jobs, in my case, we’re almost all doing a second job after 9-5, are a mix of folks who have a variety of educational, social, and economic backgrounds. Teachers, day laborers, construction workers, college administrators, students in high school and college, freelancers who aren’t freelancing as much, entrepreneurs etc.

Outside of the military it is the most diverse group of people I have ever worked with—all focused on a single mission, get the box from one box to a conveyor belt and back into the right box so that shoes, blood, medical test kits, sweaters, camp stoves, tents, cheese, butter, essential oils, tires, car parts, etc. get to the right location on time.

Effective social distancing is impossible at work. At least half of the folks I work with I bet work in other essential jobs. I like my colleagues. They’re funny, smart, kind, empathetic, and insightful.

I’m routinely pleasantly surprised by factoids I learn, dreams that are harbored or were once chased. It reminds me how awesome the people of America can be.

It also gives me a better insight into why people want the lock down to end. I believe our public health and medical professionals. At the same time, I believe my fellow workers who do the work, show up on time, don’t complain, work well outside of CDC recommendations for staying healthy to get the job done. I understand, and feel the anger that when we’re done, we don’t get go to the bar, to a meeting, to our houses of worship, to the store that closes before you get off work and doesn’t open when you leave the house in the morning. Those things that bring joy and offer a respite from the tedium, sporting events, concerts, your kid’s activities, national parks, a trip to Disneyland, are closed to you—but you keep working.

Many of my new colleagues and friends would be better off under current unemployment payouts than continuing to ensure America’s supply chain keeps working.

Many, like me, who run small businesses during the day, are too far back in the queue to see their applications for EIDL or PPP get approved—if their bank can get an application to them at all.

Credit card companies aren’t suspending interest. Mortgage payments and rent checks are not going anywhere.

It is tough to remember that it did not have to be this way. Remember in November please. Other options existed and still do exist. Testing, targeted interventions, better policies targeted at small, or micro businesses even.

Business as usual is not working. New systems, new ways of thinking, new ways of getting energy, growing food, and accessing recreation are needed. If you have ideas, share them. If you can begin implementing them in some way big or small and have the time and head space, please get to work. We need everyone. EVERYONE.

Good luck out there. Stay healthy. Give yourself and your neighbors some grace.