Pandemic fear...
It’s been 96 hours since I last ventured off the property. The days run into one another; is it really only 4 days? It puts me a bit in awe yo think if the amount of time Anne Frank & her family hid in an Amsterdam attic
I awoke Monday to find my new phone dead and plugged in. I tried another lightning cord. Nothing. Changed the cube. Still nothing.
Crap. Not even 2 1/2 weeks since buying it and it had bricked. My alternatives appeared to do without my phone during this pandemic or venturing out to the place I’d gotten it, to get something done about it. I chose the latter. That decision took about 30 seconds. At the moment I’m questioning that wisdom, but more about that later.
I’ve gotten the phone at AT&T & I returned there, arriving 10 minutes before they opened. Immediately, I was struck by some of the social changes in just the five days since I’ve last been out. The line for Trader Joe’s stretched a full block, passing in front of the AT&T store; people were standing off for 6 feet apart, thanks to Blue masking tape lines on the sidewalk. The line parted 12 feet, allowing me to stand in line in front of the AT&T store, two people behind me extending out into the parking lot. Once in the store I found they had little to offer me. It seems any service on an iPhone after it’s been purchased has to be done by Apple & Apple has closed all of its brick and mortar stores, opting to go noncontact over the net. I looked at the clerk helping me & said how am I supposed to call them if I now have no phone to use? He sent me down at a back kiosk with a phone that he cleaned copiously in front of me and allowed me to dial through to Apple. After working my way through the phone tree, I waited for 45 minutes for a live person, only to be cut off after 34 seconds. Crap.
I decided not to sit there, but to run my other errands in town & try my luck via the computer once I got home. From there it was stop to get gas (gloves and facemask back on), go to the market to get fresh veggies and bread for my husband, & then head for home. Five minutes after I left the market, it dawned on me, my new iPhone has the ability to charge wirelessly, if I could get a wireless charger, so I doubled back to the same shopping center where AT&T was, in hopes that Best Buy was open.
Entering the shopping center I drove past Costco, with a line that snaked all the way around to the back end of the store, again people 6 feet apart thanks to blue masking tape on the sidewalk. There was no line at Best Buy, but the store was not allowing customers in. Strictly sidewalk pick up for phones in orders, or a queue to request at arms length, for a worker to get what you wanted from inside the store. It bothers me right now to realize that I was too close to that worker, who was not wearing a face mask, although I was. Roughly 10 minutes after I got there, I was on my way with a wireless charger as well as two new lightening charge cords just in case, both cords I’d tried that morning were the problem & not my phone.
In retrospect the two new chords were a very good idea, because both the cords I tried that morning had failed. There was nothing wrong with the phone itself. It works just fine. If only I had tried the brand new cord & cube that came with the phone, The whole trip might have been unnecessary.
It’s Good Friday as well as the second day of Passover. Smart religious people are taking their faith online rather than in person. I was just reading a piece in of all things, The wall street journal, about people with the coronavirus dying and ICUs alone, families when lucky getting to make their goodbyes by cell phones encased in plastic bags, or by Skype or Zoom.
I found myself in tears. I found myself mentally standing next to my father’s deathbed at Cornell hospital in the fall of 1995, there with my mother, my sisters & my aunt and uncle, weeping as pop left this world for the next. He had lost consciousness by that point, but being there with him, as awful as it was, was still the only place I felt I could be, and it was a valuable piece of my grieving process. After he was gone, I sat there alone with his body, waiting for the mortuary to come get him. Pop had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family; it is an obligation no Jewish body is left alone after death before burial, lest it be defiled. Would that have happened there at a major NYC hospital? Unlikely. Did I need to do that for my father? No choice. Absolutely. So there I sat. In silence. With my grief. There are 613 mitzvot to observant Jews. It’s said that the mitzvah of preparing the dead for burial is the greatest of the 613, as it’s the only one where the person on the receiving end of the act cannot thank you. Whether that’s true or not, it was something I needed to do for my father. It was as much my need as the kosher casket was for one of my sisters.
The tragedy of this pandemic has been compounded; families facing the loss of a loved one are unable to be there with that person as they pass, they cannot gather to mourn together to physically comfort one another. It is all from a distance. For that my heart aches. As a child who’s lost a parent I dearly loved, someone I still grieve for a quarter of a century after the fact, I found myself weeping today for so many people I do not personally know. A boy from a good Jewish family who hopes that the words from Matthew 5
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall find comfort,”
I awoke Monday to find my new phone dead and plugged in. I tried another lightning cord. Nothing. Changed the cube. Still nothing.
Crap. Not even 2 1/2 weeks since buying it and it had bricked. My alternatives appeared to do without my phone during this pandemic or venturing out to the place I’d gotten it, to get something done about it. I chose the latter. That decision took about 30 seconds. At the moment I’m questioning that wisdom, but more about that later.
I’ve gotten the phone at AT&T & I returned there, arriving 10 minutes before they opened. Immediately, I was struck by some of the social changes in just the five days since I’ve last been out. The line for Trader Joe’s stretched a full block, passing in front of the AT&T store; people were standing off for 6 feet apart, thanks to Blue masking tape lines on the sidewalk. The line parted 12 feet, allowing me to stand in line in front of the AT&T store, two people behind me extending out into the parking lot. Once in the store I found they had little to offer me. It seems any service on an iPhone after it’s been purchased has to be done by Apple & Apple has closed all of its brick and mortar stores, opting to go noncontact over the net. I looked at the clerk helping me & said how am I supposed to call them if I now have no phone to use? He sent me down at a back kiosk with a phone that he cleaned copiously in front of me and allowed me to dial through to Apple. After working my way through the phone tree, I waited for 45 minutes for a live person, only to be cut off after 34 seconds. Crap.
I decided not to sit there, but to run my other errands in town & try my luck via the computer once I got home. From there it was stop to get gas (gloves and facemask back on), go to the market to get fresh veggies and bread for my husband, & then head for home. Five minutes after I left the market, it dawned on me, my new iPhone has the ability to charge wirelessly, if I could get a wireless charger, so I doubled back to the same shopping center where AT&T was, in hopes that Best Buy was open.
Entering the shopping center I drove past Costco, with a line that snaked all the way around to the back end of the store, again people 6 feet apart thanks to blue masking tape on the sidewalk. There was no line at Best Buy, but the store was not allowing customers in. Strictly sidewalk pick up for phones in orders, or a queue to request at arms length, for a worker to get what you wanted from inside the store. It bothers me right now to realize that I was too close to that worker, who was not wearing a face mask, although I was. Roughly 10 minutes after I got there, I was on my way with a wireless charger as well as two new lightening charge cords just in case, both cords I’d tried that morning were the problem & not my phone.
In retrospect the two new chords were a very good idea, because both the cords I tried that morning had failed. There was nothing wrong with the phone itself. It works just fine. If only I had tried the brand new cord & cube that came with the phone, The whole trip might have been unnecessary.
It’s Good Friday as well as the second day of Passover. Smart religious people are taking their faith online rather than in person. I was just reading a piece in of all things, The wall street journal, about people with the coronavirus dying and ICUs alone, families when lucky getting to make their goodbyes by cell phones encased in plastic bags, or by Skype or Zoom.
I found myself in tears. I found myself mentally standing next to my father’s deathbed at Cornell hospital in the fall of 1995, there with my mother, my sisters & my aunt and uncle, weeping as pop left this world for the next. He had lost consciousness by that point, but being there with him, as awful as it was, was still the only place I felt I could be, and it was a valuable piece of my grieving process. After he was gone, I sat there alone with his body, waiting for the mortuary to come get him. Pop had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family; it is an obligation no Jewish body is left alone after death before burial, lest it be defiled. Would that have happened there at a major NYC hospital? Unlikely. Did I need to do that for my father? No choice. Absolutely. So there I sat. In silence. With my grief. There are 613 mitzvot to observant Jews. It’s said that the mitzvah of preparing the dead for burial is the greatest of the 613, as it’s the only one where the person on the receiving end of the act cannot thank you. Whether that’s true or not, it was something I needed to do for my father. It was as much my need as the kosher casket was for one of my sisters.
The tragedy of this pandemic has been compounded; families facing the loss of a loved one are unable to be there with that person as they pass, they cannot gather to mourn together to physically comfort one another. It is all from a distance. For that my heart aches. As a child who’s lost a parent I dearly loved, someone I still grieve for a quarter of a century after the fact, I found myself weeping today for so many people I do not personally know. A boy from a good Jewish family who hopes that the words from Matthew 5
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall find comfort,”