What To Expect When You’re Unsuspecting

First, I would like to mention that if you are looking for fresh, non-virus content from myself, or simply MORE new wonderposts, check out my article “Our Daily Ordinance” about a recent Akron council meeting I attended in Perraneu’s March Issue HELL, online now at https://dt194006.wixsite.com/perraneu/copy-of-march-hell-1 . There’s lots of other great content there too, so click around (squee!)

Second, in terms of this week’s entry, being a human in the world at this moment felt like something I needed to talk about, and frankly I couldn’t bring myself to focus on anything else until I wrote this. Writing is a way that I process my thoughts and as I’m sure you all know firsthand, there was a lot to process this week!

I make a point not to say too much online about my experiences at the library. Written down, over time, things can be taken out of context and I want to avoid that sort of situation if possible. And helping people every day puts me in the position to see perhaps a weirdly vulnerable side of them, and I didn’t want to betray that trust by writing about it.

I’m not interested in the specific to be salacious; I’m only interested in concrete examples insofar as they reveal something larger about a system. So I want to talk about what I experienced this past week working in, with, and for the public when society started to unravel a bit, reevaluate, and reform itself in the face of crisis. In one week, a distant concern became an immediate one, and I starting seeing patterns of behavior that resembled the stages of grief, which makes sense, really, because the entire world just received a scary diagnosis. That everyone-all-at-once-ness is the key, and I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be on the public-facing end of the healthcare system right now, or working at a grocery store, or as a first responder, etc.

And that is untimely why I’m choosing to post this: Every situation I encountered was similar to one I’ve encountered before, but never all on the same day, never in the same hour, never every patron interaction requiring every extra piece of attention and care that I had in me. In just one week, things went from business as usual to irrevocably unusual, and every day got progressively weirder, each step, each breath bending and mutating reality like the kaleidoscopic atmosphere in the movie Annihilation. And I can only imagine that constant crisis logic is going to spiral further, and I want to encourage myself and everyone who reads this to remember to take a step back and view each stressful situation in the next few months to see our interactions from the other side.

The first I heard of the Coronavirus was on Feb. 2nd, when my husband Dan mentioned that China was putting up a hospital in Wuhan in one week and I didn’t know what to make of the idea. It honestly did not register in my mind what he was talking about. The next day I looked it up and saw the timelapse video and was impressed by the sheer number of cranes and the fact that work didn’t stop at night. I still thought the point was that they do things differently in China. The idea of the government ordering an instant hospital and receiving it was intellectually stimulating, like the plot of a sci fi movie, but I don’t remember registering emotionally what it meant that multiple new hospitals were needed in one town.

Mar. 3rd I posted on my Instagram stories the phrase “Got my first patron in a face mask” over a bizarre filter that put my face onto a small animated person looking at their phone, and it zooms out and you see that I am also the rock the person is sitting on, and then the planet the rock is on. It was intended as a sort of joke about how people were endearingly cautious, up on the global news like trendy hypochondriacs, and also that nothing would stop them from coming to the library. I work in a community with an outsized retirement population, so it’s actually not the first time we had a lady in with a face mask. Over the years, various women (I’ve never had a male patron come in with a facemask. We had a gentleman come in wearing garden gloves this past week, the weave so loose you could see its ineffectiveness with your bare eyes. It’s a weird aside that masks are, in America, a gendered behavior.) on immuno-suppressant medication would still want to come in for Book Club, or to just say hi. I actually wasn’t even certain the mask was coronavirus-related, but that assertion made it topical.

As of Tuesday March 10, Dan and I were still discussing our local Sheriff elections, as well as the Democratic primaries, and which bar we should stop off at after for St. Patrick’s Day the following week. The last full day of normalcy. Wednesday at work my coworkers and I discussed the growing concerns around the virus casually while unpacking crates in the morning before we opened. At this point it was in America, but still a coastal thing. I think Wednesday was when I saw the picture of the man standing in front of an empty rack that typically held toilet paper at Costco. There was no real reason to think the virus would impact the paper product supply, so why were people hoarding it? Did they just want to avoid the unpleasant idea of trying to shop with the flu? I turned to my boss who was at the front desk with me and said, “look at this photo. People are nuts.”

Thursday March 12th, large events started to get cancelled. There was limited but building anxiety in the air. We started getting phone calls asking if we were still open, and my coworker slipped into her snow day banter protocol. “They’ll never shut us down!” she told patrons confidently. Shutting down isn’t our style. At noon this still seemed reasonable. By 5 pm, even the most unflappable among us wondered.

I was off work Friday and decided I had better stock up on food and other essentials. I mentally instructed myself to take extra care not to grab things we didn’t truly need and certainly not more than we could get through before it went bad. I hoped my haul said “I’m about to stage some photos for my How To Stock Your Pantry The Right Way post” than “I’m not being honest with myself that everything feels like it’s about to go off the rails and spending the entire day hunting down and acquiring items makes me feel more in control.” It was admittedly unnerving to see all the toilet paper in Target gone, as well as the Clorox and Bleach. I stopped at CVS and found some Clorox there, and they had water bottles right by the check out, so I grabbed a flat of those. A funny thing happens in your decision making cortex when you’re starting to panic, it was almost itchy, and I just didn’t want to be in that store any longer, standing around “deciding”. The problem with the future is that you don’t know really what the thing you wished you had known will be. I remember a flood of sympathy poured over me for doomsday preppers as I picked up that heavy case of future plastic waste. I felt really silly, I almost couldn’t look the cashier in the eye. I swear she was telegraphing, what do you think is going to happen to the water? but I didn’t want to hear it. She told me to take care.

When I got home from the store, I put all my nervous energy into reorganizing our kitchen, chopping and portioning out the fresh produce so we could grab it on the way to work, making a big batch of hummus. I bought the full sized carrots with the tops still on them, and was munching on one while I worked and it was so funny to realize that the proportions of Bugs Bunny cartoons are correct. By Friday evening, I started seeing that other library systems were closing. It was the first time I thought maybe we would too.

***

I was utterly unprepared for Saturday. I actually thought people would be afraid to come out, but it was the opposite. People were afraid to be trapped inside. We were slammed. Everyone had involved reference questions, and then wanted to chat after the transaction would typically end. Kids were running around everywhere, and it felt like we were awarding points to people who could touch the most surfaces. Everything was picked up, handed around, put back down, over and over. I had two women ask me multi-part questions over each other, neither stopping to let the other go. We had people come from out of the county because their libraries were closed. Right about the time I thought, we can’t go on like this, we got word that we would close down Wednesday the 18th. Relief mixed with confusion and fused to my genuine growing fear about what Monday and Tuesday would look like. And then I got a call from one of our homebound regulars. I had to put her on hold three times to help in-person patrons around our conversation. She told me she didn’t know what she would do without us there to talk to her over the next few weeks. I told her we would be thinking about her and looking forward to talking to her again when we reopened. She paused. “Do you mean it?” she asked me. “Of course!” I told her. She started crying. So did I.

Sunday I was a wreck. I reread everything I could about preventative measures (maybe I missed something? maybe our collective knowledge had changed?), about flattening the curve. The fact that people had traveled into my sleepy daytime community had me sick over what role I played in the havoc that is coming. I was constantly doing math in my head, how many patrons did I see in a typical day? How many did I see yesterday? If I had it and didn’t realize it yet, was I killing people by going in to work? If we all refused to go in, we couldn’t open. Was that an overreaction? If I refused to go in, but my coworkers did not, would that put my older coworkers at greater risk of exposure? I decided I had to go in, but wasn’t totally certain my motivation wasn’t coming from being more worried about employment repercussions than any sort of moral reasoning.

Monday was as bad as Saturday, but instead of constant, it came in fits and starts. We also had double the staff we had over the weekend. The question on everyone’s mind was how could we possibly have an Election tomorrow? I got a lot of inquiries that, under any other circumstance, would be considered the ideal reference question: general, topical, answerable with materials we had on hand. Instead of wanting a specific book, people were looking for lighthearted fiction, movies about quarantines, books about stars and rocks and ghost stories. One of my all-time favorite library moments was years ago explaining the Dewey Decimal System to a 10 year old girl, and her whole face lit up as understanding dawned on her. That happened to me THREE TIMES on Monday alone. I couldn’t sleep Monday night, I had no idea what to expect, and it was compounded by the awareness that nobody anywhere knew what to expect.

Tuesday March 17th was our last open day. With the Election definitively postponed, we were going to close at 5 pm instead of 8 pm. Two separate individuals chose to take their anger over the postponed election out on my boss regardless of the fact that it was not her call to protect both the poll workers and the electorate. I was stunned by how many repeat patrons we had from the day before, wandering in circles, not quite processing that they’d already gotten everything they could want yesterday. I had more than a few people confide that they thought the whole thing was a hoax, leaning toward me over the desk, both hands roaming around on it. Somebody came in to tell us they hit a parked car in our lot. In the afternoon, a woman came through with a tight, low cough, wearing a bandana on her face like a bank robber in a stage play. She kept repeating, “I can’t believe I’m here, I can’t even believe I’m here.” And then, leaning toward me conspiratorially, “Don’t worry, I’m going straight to the doctor after this.” Two feet away, a bewildered elderly man looked up over at her, and then met my eyes briefly. I said nothing, handed her a receipt, and went straight for the Clorox wipes, wiping down everything with extra wishful thinking, more of an aura cleansing ritual than a sanitary practice.

At times it felt like a simulator training for working in a library, if there was such a thing. I walked a woman through signing up for an account to get magazines online, people looked up specific items in our catalog on their phones before coming in, and walked in the door holding their phone out and asking to be directed toward item codes for underutilized corners of our collections, exactly like you’d dream would happen when you design an app, but never has happened before Monday, back when people thought they had all the time in the world. I checked out so many movies, I couldn’t believe we still had more movies on the shelves. Under threat of removal, the library was in an induced state of thriving, everyone behaving like hostages in a bank heist if the robbers said, “Act like you’re at the library!” It was surreal.

By about 3 pm, things no longer felt at risk of boiling over. Many people were still in the building, and everyone was tense but focused, and oddly determined to work together. It was the nerdiest last call at a bar that served books if everyone was on adderall, like everyone sensed that, this was it, and if you wanted something, you’d have to work with people, not against them. Both copy machines were running silently. A man came in for the entire series set of Suits, and asked if he could have a Clorox wipe with which to wipe the cases down. “It’s not personal,” he assured me twice, as though I’d been out all last week and didn’t know the Apocalypse had arrived. I assured him I knew, and reminded him to wipe the discs themselves down too.

After we closed up, and battened hatches we didn’t even know we could batten, my coworkers and I stood in the back entry, in shock. It didn’t feel like we could possibly not all see each other again until who knows how long, until at least the first wave of this had passed. It felt like a scene in an airlock, a brief moment after suiting up, hoping you didn’t forget anything, hoping you’d all make it back alive. Now off into the unknown.