By Manny Roman, CRES
I am writing this in early April. If you are reading this in June, then a couple of good things have transpired. TechNation continues to be the voice of the industry and you are still with us. I hope that by the time of this publication the country is mostly back to work and the loss of life has been minimized.
I decided to share some observations regarding my quarantine experience. No, I do not have the virus. The quarantine was self-imposed.
Ruth and I returned from the 2020 AMSP Winter Meeting on March 15. This year’s annual meeting was held on the beautiful island of Aruba. The meeting brings together the AMSP members, both active and associate, and industry suppliers of products and services for a three-day event. The meeting was quite successful and informative.
Aruba is an island a few miles north of Venezuela in the southern Caribbean Sea. The island is gorgeous, and the people are absolutely wonderful wherever you go. As we were leaving the island the news of the virus was becoming progressively alarming. We loved the island, but we wanted to get back to the safety of our home. At the Aruba airport we met a lady whose son was a high-ranking military officer. She said, “My son got a call from the admiral to get your parents’ home. Travel will be banned within two weeks.” This is when we truly realized the gravity of the situation. We became very aware of our environment and were part of the “crazies” who sanitized the seats and everything else we would touch on the plane.
We decided to protect our neighbors through a self-quarantine. Surprisingly, it has been relatively easy to be in physical isolation. Being semiretired we are there most of the time already. With text, email, Facebook, etc. contact is still possible. The only issue is all the quality time together. Our neighbors are, of course, grateful since all of us are old. We do miss the wine tasting events; mostly wine drinking events.
I don’t want to provide the wrong impression here. Ruth and I get along famously, most of the time. She has her old TV programs and books and I have my online poker. However, as the time progresses for nearly a month now, there are instances of annoying meet irritable. Mostly I play the annoying part and she attempts to avoid the irritable part. She is mostly unsuccessful because I have perfected the annoying part.
A surprising aspect of this isolation is that when it is self-imposed it is palatable because you know your timeline. When it is mandated it takes on a different tone, a progressively darker nature. When the governor made it mandatory, it was a “for the good of the club” issue at the beginning. We are all in this together and everyone must do their part to mitigate the damage. As time moves along, we begin to feel caged, held hostage, violated in some way.
We know that this isolation is for our safety and the safety of everyone we contact. We know that isolation will not last forever. Yet, I feel the need to defy the order. I just want to drive somewhere, step out of my car and be free to move about with impunity. That deadly enemy is elsewhere in large metropolitan areas to the east and west of us. We are relatively safe.
Then it happens. We receive the news that a friend and his daughter suffered the assault. Both are young and healthy, yet that silent, invisible, relentless enemy attacked. He said, “I’ve never been this sick in my life … health care professionals need to take extreme caution when visiting medical facilities, I believed I was invincible and could never catch it and now I’m a statistic.” They are still under the care of those wonderful and courageous health care workers who are tasked with running to the danger instead of isolating away.
Ruth and I are committed to maintaining the isolation as long as needed to get through this difficult and historic time. We hope that lessons are learned from all this and that we recuperate as a nation and a world. We hope that as you read this you are in the position to reflect on what is, at your timeframe, a memory because mostly everything is back to whatever the new normal is.
Now, in this time frame, I will either play some poker or annoy Ruth for a while. First, I will determine her irritability level.
