What did you get up to during the COVID quarantine?
I was in school so when that was put on hold I essentially played video games like it was a job. I remember vividly playing Grand Theft Auto IV in one sitting for the Liberty City Minute achievement and I'm pretty sure I played through Master Chief Collection.
Do you look back on any aspects of it nostalgically?
I worked at the hospital, got burned out, and retired.
I don't mean to sound insensitive but do you mind me asking what the tipping point for you was?
The big thing that Ill never forget is when the child sized bodybags started going through frequently.
Children? During COVID?
What were they dying of?
They were dying of COVID.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-01-31-covid-19-leading-cause-death-children-and-young-people-us
How?
In the UK between the period of March 2020 and October 2022, there were only 88 deaths due to COVID for people under the age of 18.
I worked at walmart so people were angrier and I wore a mask. That's about it. The paid 2 weeks off when I got covid were nice tho.
Did the Walmart have mask rules you had to enforce?
Yep. Didn't bother after the first massive screaming fit I got. Even by walmart standards I worked at a bad one lol.
The week evening shut down:
Finished a vacation and was about to start a new job and then told not to come in for a while. They eventually mailed me a laptop but got like two weeks being paid to do nothing.
Matched with some lady on a dating app and were planning to meet but had to switch to a virtual date. We’re married now.
What did you do on your virtual date?
We just chatted initially but eventually we setup a virtual Friday movie night. At some point we had to meet but that was a few months later.
Went back to school. Graduated. Now, just like in 2008, I can't find a job.
Like, how many times is this economy gonna fuck me?
Just give us a heads up next time you go back to study.
I'm a doctor so I was at work, I was extremely butthurt at all my friends who got to chill at home playing video games during the lockdown.
Yeah, I’m EM. Ended up being more work for me.
I kept going to work at a so-called "essential" job until they laid me off, and spent the rest of it with my amazing spouse. It turns out we are one of those couples who genuinely enjoy being together 24/7 while the world outside goes to shit.
Same hat. Now on the rare occasion my husband has to go somewhere for his job, I'm like "Damn the apartment's so empty."
I mostly worked from home, and this allowed me to spend more time and bond more closely with my two young boys, and I also improved my cooking skills.
For me, the pandemic was a catalyst to improve my life.
What do you think is the most challenging thing you cooked during that time?
I didn't go with really difficult recipes, so I can't really say. I know I do enjoy it more than before so that's a win.
covid quarantine was not really different from my non covid day to day. I was already wfh and I do not go to crowded things. masking was the only thing that changed for me.
Same here. I don't really go outdoors a lot in my free time.
Alcoholism
I miss having a socially acceptable excuse to hang out at home and not have to spend all my spare time out & about.
I miss having a full workday where I could complete all my actual work in an hour and spend the remaining seven hours playing video games while being available through Teams & email should something arise.
I miss being able to wake up at 755, chug a diet dr pepper, and still get to work on time.
I miss being able to spend the workday in flipflops and boxers, and only putting on a shirt if I had a video call.
I don’t miss all the death & misery & related bullshit, but those are the things that I do miss.
I got up to Covid, and then Long Covid. I could do very little, except sleep, lie in bed listening to audio books, and doing jigsaws. It was basically that for about a year. Yay. I'm nostalgic for the time off work, and learning about how to recover, and manage my health. I eventually got to a place where I was eating super healthy, doing loads of yoga and light weight training, and my body was getting really strong and feeling good, even though I couldn't do much with it because of the fatigue. I wish I had the time now to be as healthy as I'd like to be, but I'm back full time working, as well as caring for my mum. I'd like to get that back, being able to focus on my health.
My wife and I had just moved and were living in my relative's field in a 5th wheel while we arranged to have a house built. The pandemic hit and construction immediately stopped, so we continued living in that 5th wheel for another six months. The two of us, a dog, and three cats. I shockingly didn't get laid off but didn't have any work to do, so I just slept and played video games.
We bought a house in June, at the very bottom of our market. We couldn't afford our house now, even if interest rates were still super low. We definitely couldn't afford to build the house we could have afforded to build in early 2020, despite making nearly twice as much as when we first moved here. Fuck this economy.
Anyhow... We moved in, then the whole west coast lit on fire. The skies were dark purple some days. It was wild. I still didn't have much to do at work, so video games and naps it was. I found a half face respirator and a cache of P100 filter cartridges while unpacking, so I got to go around feeling invincible for the rest of the pandemic. That was nice.
Damn, you guys got super lucky. Congratulations.
I was feeling challengey and became the world record older for the most sites having signed up for. A self-experiment that turned into a victory. Not quite the same as my grandfather's "I'm going to walk from Ushuaia to Cape Agulhas and back", but still.
How did you manage to do that? Did you just register for a site every time you came across one or did you actively search them out? Did you use a disposable email address?
All of the above. I have one email address per email site, so technically all are co-disposable.
That is really neat. Did you automate the one email address for per site thing some how? Did you use one of those disposable email services?
I use each one depending on if the site sends newsletters, if they keep the data, if the site is popular, etc. so that I could keep any sites' emails organized that I could.
Worked mainly. Me and my partner both worked alternative shifts at a supermarket. We also parented a toddler who turned two just as COVID hit.
So yeah. Great fun. Constant risk of bringing home COVID, no time to see each other and a toddler who was suddenly told she wasn't even allowed to go to a park or spend time with people outside our own bubble.
I never got extra time off or pay because I was already working from home.
But I'm also well suited to long periods of time alone and got my gaming friends into Dungeons and Dragons online. We have kept up with it, two of them run their own games, and I'm playing tonight.
I still haven't caught covid.
And I got to spend all of 4/2020 home getting high with my wife.
So all in all I am not complaining.
I was living at or below the poverty line for years before COVID. As a senior developer, I wasn't finding any work. Then when COVID hit, I wasn't able to keep up with the work. I was finally earning 6 figures. I was able to travel (like in a jet, legitimate travel) for the first time--just because. It was amazing. I was able to network with people and provide value for people. I felt like my career was suddenly moving!
Then around 2021-2022 all my clients abandoned me, my network ghosted me, and I was back to square one. That's where I am today.
I'm working on having a breakthrough because someone college-educated with a GitHub profile should not be standing at food bank lines every month.
Worked from home for 2-3 years. It was nice. Now they forced us back to the office, but once you’ve had a taste of freedom it’s hard to want to go back to that grind.
Overall, Covid was good for me, aside from the 1-2 times I caught it. But, the government was handing out free money, the job market was hot as hell and I got a high paying new job. Interest rates were low and I managed to scoop up a home and lock in with a low rate. It was the first time in my life that I feel like I got ahead after years of low wages and digging myself out of student loan debt.
Not too much different.
I didn't experience any quarantines. I only read about them happening in other countries in the news. I kept going to work normally like all the other people I work with. Wearing a mask and washing my hands a bit more freguently was pretty much the only thing covid changed in my life at the time.
Do you mind me asking what country that is? God the lockdowns were brutal but our health service was put under tremendous strain each time there was a spike so everyone just ate it.
I think the collective mental health of the country took a serious hit as a result though.
Finland
Animal crossing, gardening, zoom happy hours, ukulele. I work from home anyway so it was life as usual in my career, I just picked up way more hobbies.
One thing I miss is the flood of people producing games. A lot of them were lewd Ren'py games but I feel like itch.io had a lot of gems around that time.
I'm trying to think of developers that started during COVID and really took after that but I'm drawing a blank.
I finished my degree online. College was an easy way to keep busy.
I went to work in a nearly empty office. The other people, sales, administration, other developers, they all had home office. I need a shitload of hardware for my job that I can't keep at home, so I had to come into the company every day.
I was able to repair a bit of my mental issues due to not having to interact with god-damn people every day.
I get you. I feel like the lack of expectations of me for several months helped me in that front
I was considered an essential worker, along with a few colleagues.
There were three phases: going into it, being in it and coming out of it. During the first and and third of those there was new legislation and instructions coming in pretty much every day that needed to be interpreted and implemented and we had to do all of that. It was exhausting. And then everyone else came back from furlough and told us all about the DIY they had done and the books they had read and so on.
In the middle though: well, I work across a cluster of heritage and wildlife sites. There was a bare minimum of checks and maintenance that we were expected to do - pretty much alone - one at each site. Once that was done we went out and did patrols. They are some beautiful places and there were a few days when I completed the entire circuit of the site and saw absolutely no-one. Just me and the wildlife. That was excellent.
By DIY do you mean things like the plexiglass shields they put up for cashiers?
Re-decorated their living rooms, fitted new kitchens, built patios and bbqs and so on.
We were the ones fitting the plexiglass etc.
I was already not going to the office a lot before the pandemic, so the switch to full WFH wasn't really much of a change. It did prompt me to take my home workspace more seriously, so I got a proper desk with a keyboard tray. My work also allowed us to "borrow" our office chairs, so I didn't need to buy an expensive ergonomic chair. Wife and I are not outdoorsy people to begin with, so staying at home for days on end and only going out for groceries wasn't really an issue.
The day before the first day of work from home I got fired from my engineering job at an oil company. Soon after I smoked weed occasionally for the first time in years after having received random drug tests. Unemployment extensions were nice too!
I bought a big laser cutter and started making art. Spent more time helping out at the local artist collective sprucing things up.
Eventually I got hooked up with a cool LED art installation company helping them install their projects as a freelancer. Now I'm full time with them!
It's lower pay than the oil company but it is so much more rewarding, interesting, cooler people, better work/life balance. Overall the pandemic was fun times for me personally.
Nice! Got any photos of art you made with the laser cutter?
I was work from home before the pandemic and luckily was able to continue working. But it was just a few hours per day.
So I had a lot of time playing video games.
In a way I do look back on it nostalgically. It was a weird experience. My family didn’t actually get Covid until much later so the lockdown time was kind of restful.
I got married, then got fat, then got sick of being fat and got unfat, then got married again. Two anniversaries wooooooo!
I kept working from home like I did before and after and kept wishing I had more time to do all the cool shit some other folks got to do.
Dude I'm visibly disabled. My support system (except for my wife) vanished the day covid started. I'm not going to go from organization to organization begging to see if they need a token cripple, especially when it's hard enough to get adults here to wash their hands after using the bathroom, let alone wear a mask when they're sick and you're live-in-care for someone with cancer.
What do you imagine my covid lockdown was like?
I worked through that whole thing. Municipal transportation (thankfully skilled trade, not public-facing). Didn't get sick until 2023.
We did make a trip to France in 2021, when international flights opened in the lul before Delta. That was rad. First time in Paris and it was super quiet. It was a bit nerve wracking, as they still had testing requirements for returning travelers. We had to be extra cautious with masks while all the Parisians were running around with their masks on their arms. We also had to jump through a multitude of hoops to get our CDC cards entered into the French database, otherwise we had to get tested every three days.
Learned to cook. I'm fortunate enough that my field remained busy enough for me to have job security throughout, and used the extra time to pick up a creative hobby
The creative hobby being cooking or did you get into something else?
Cooking, yeah
Work. I worked. It was awesome.
Oh. STILL working remotely. Still awesome.
Work, and watch some clients die (especially old, rude and stubborn ones).
iT iS noThinG, THe GoVernMent mAdE tHis uP.
I built a computer and a wood shop.
Worked from home, luckily I have a large terrace and live in a very green and walkable neighborhood. There's a botanical garden across the street that shut down for the public, but since I go there for a jog nearly every morning, the guards let me in regardless. Had the whole thing to myself.
Watched a ton of Netflix, perfected my bread baking skills, and grew a big beard.
That's cool of the guards to do that. What was your favorite show to watch during the quarantine?
Taskmaster! Not on Netflix though, but definitely my favorite show. UK show where local comedians have to perform a series of tasks over a couple weeks and are then rated on stage based on their performance. Exceptionally silly and entertaining. There are a bunch of international adaptions as well now, I've binged all through UK, Norway, Sweden, Croatia, Portugal, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately the US version is crap and got cancelled after one season. Some others I didn't really get into, like Denmark or Finland, but I might give it another try later.
I wasn’t allowed to work whilst I was applying for my green card, so not much changed for me at all.
I started playing League of Legends
Now I'm level 450
Oops
That's weird, I can barely remember how things went down. My cell and laptop went kapult at the start at the pandemic and I didn't have a streaming stick or smart tv yet.
I ended up borrowing a relative's phone to keep track of the news, do online courses, watch videos and chat.
It suuuucked. Trying to drag my kids through their schoolwork. Anxiety about income. Anxiety about precautions. Cancelling plans, not seeing family. No fucking third spaces, not even second spaces.
Essential worker but not in the way you think, still had a lot of free time. We have a three year old now. Child of the Quarn born in December 2020.
Everything was pretty much the same for me, I still had to go into work every day, I just ate a lot of takeout and my husband made me wear gloves everywhere even in the dead of summer which was pretty funny looking back. I had no pandemic downtime at all.
Worked in the ER.
I just worked from home. The main difference was when I was in pointless meetings that I didn't need to be in, I just played Animal Crossing.
I don't really feel nostalgic about it because it was so recent, but maybe I will once more time passes. It still kind of feels like yesterday right now.
Hell, it still feels like yesterday that I was in college, and that was 10 years ago. 😬
Nostalgic? It was awful.
That's how the question was worded.