Coronavirus, work from home, and baby #2
After returning from my trip to Florida we had Gavin's first birthday party. About a week later i was sick with a bad stomach flu. This is around the end of November 2019. 6 months down the road i would look back and think this was COVID-19, but it, I would eventually find out is a completely different monster. But we'll get into that later.
My first build partner on the build team decided to leave in December. The holiday season 2019 was otherwise great. There were rumblings about the coronavirus outbreak in China, I never thought things would go the way they would in 2020. A month or two into the year my new build partner was hired and things went well for awhile.
In March as the result if the COVID-19 outbreak, the government started to shut businesses down and as a result, DealerSocket decided all workers would work remotely until conditions with the pandemic improved. Sara and I found out we were pregnant and due to mandates put in place by the Governor of Wisconsin Sara's hair business had to be temporarily shut down.
Some of my coworkers initially didnt like the idea of working from home and had a generally bad attitude towards others on video calls. Ive always loved the idea of working from home Car dealerships were temporarily closing and our business's future seemed bleak. Despite this, our work didnt decrease all due to a baglog of new website projects.
I am not sure when it happened, sometime in May 2020, but DealerSocket decided it needed to lay some employees off from every team across the entire company. The coworkers i previously mentioned with bad attitudes were the ones they layed off. They did some shuffling of the team and began outsourcing. Each builder/project manager pair now would have a builder helping from India. They continued to announce through the summer and into the fall that we may go back to the office X month and then the decision would be pushed back to Y month. Finally the decision was made to stay working remotely. It costs less for the company, and they found we are all more productive at home.
In July, we had our second son, Elijah William Hileski. He had some complications during birth and had to be put in the neonatal intensive care unit. He was out and at home within a couple of days. The whole experience at the hospital was ruined by COVID-19 safety protocols. Nobody could visit and our baby was in the NICU so Sara and I had to sit in her hospital room alone. Gavin started misbehaving with Sara's mom at home and I had to go help.
When we started toying with the notion of having kids, we agreed that 2 was the limit. There's nothing like seeing parents with a zoo of kids struggle taking them anywhere and we don't want to be outnumbered. We soon learned that even taking 2 kids places is a struggle. Moving into the holiday season, we scheduled my vasectomy and booked a flight a couple of weeks later to visit my parents in Florida. We'll get into that soon.