About this time last year, I was sitting in my office, drinking coffee and checking the news – wait, scratch that. I was drinking coffee and working hard when someone showed up at my cubicle entrance unannounced. Now, a man’s cubicle is his tiny, fabric-covered castle and when a stranger shows up there’s only one thing to do. After I popped him in the jaw for interrupting my very, very important work, I helped him up off the ground and he told me to go home. Not because I’d just punched him – he respected both the power and accuracy of my snake-like strike to his beak – but because of COVID.
Of course, I’m mostly joking. He didn’t feel the sting of my lightning fist, but he did send me, along with everyone else in the office, home. My son’s school had shut down the previous night and later that day my wife would also be sent home. The office, along with everything else in New Mexico, was for mission-critical folks only. At the time, we’d figured it would be a couple of weeks to a month and things would normalize. That time dragged on. And on. And on. Meanwhile, a rube in a bad suit kept telling us it was fine while actual disease experts said he was an idiot for saying that. Mania took hold and, in true American tradition, we diverged into two extremist camps and hurled insults at each other. Businesses were shuttered, some permanently, and everyone got to adapt to being home an awful lot more than we ever had before. And now we’re celebrating the first year anniversary of our two-week lockdown.
I’ve often said the one thing that would make humans work together would be an external threat. I always figured it would be aliens, but a brand new virus turned to work pretty well, too. Aside from the knuckleheads who still claim it was made up, most of the world put their heads together and figured out how to stop the damned thing. It turned out to be easier than saving us from ourselves. There are still people denying the virus exists even as they’re dying from it. Reports indicate our rube in the bad suit came perilously close to dying from it and only an entire team of top-notch people managed to save his dumb ass from something he told everyone wasn’t a big deal.
A little over a year in and we’ve got multiple vaccines getting distributed. We’ve also got fake vaccines and vaccination records being sold on Darknet, proving yet again that there’s no low some folks won’t stoop to. But the good news is there are legit vaccines being passed around, most people have decided wearing a mask in public wasn’t going to turn them into communists, and it looks like the worst might be abating. Slowly, but surely. Businesses are opening back up, kids will be going back to school, and I got to stand in line to let someone inject me with an edited virus. Twice. Yes, I’m fully vaccinated. And aside from a lust for human blood and constantly hearing Bill Gates’s voice telling me to buy more copies of Windows and Office, I didn’t have much in the way of side effects. For about 1/2 an hour, I couldn’t decide if I was hot or cold, but that was about it. Others have reported Covid-like symptoms that last for a few hours to a day and disappear. Pretty impressive considering this time last year, we didn’t even know what the damned thing looked like, let alone how to get microchips small enough that we could inject them through tiny needles in an effort to control the world’s population.
When Joe Biden took office, one of his promises was 100 million vaccines in 100 days. We managed to pull it off in 58 days. There’s still a long way to go and you still need to wear a mask, but there’s a light on the edge of the horizon and someday we’ll look back on this time in world history and, well, probably not laugh, but at least breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over and try to find ways to make sure the next global pandemic is handled better than this one.
Check out the original story here.
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