Something Good Will Come of All Things Yet
By: Ascher J. Robbins
Tags: 2020, Covid 19, Resilience, 2021, New Year

The Wonder Years cancelled the remainder of their tour the next day. I reluctantly went in to my office job that morning, and my coworkers were frightened that I had attended a sporting event and a concert in the past four days. I wiped down every square inch of my desk with Clorox. I didn’t touch door handles. On Slack, we panicked and made vows of solidarity to work remotely the next week, no matter what our department leaders said. That Friday, I addressed the director of my department directly, telling him that I would be remote the next week. He understood, but he still planned to come in. It became a moot point. That was my last day in an office. The following Monday, the office closed indefinitely and we were all working remotely.

The next part will sound familiar to anyone who was fortunate enough to be employed at any point during this year. Zoom calls and remote meetings and busywork replaced any actual productivity. Leadership expressed tone-deaf optimism that things would return to normal soon, even as the news perpetually blasted ever-more-dire figures of infections and deaths across the screen. In many cities, we were placed under lockdown, urged not to leave our residences for anything short of an emergency. Days turned into weeks. Our facial hair grew long and our legs grew stiff. We ached for human contact, for the lives we knew just a few weeks ago.

After about a month of busywork and bullshit, we were furloughed. At first, it wasn’t so bad. I slept in late and spent the days getting extremely tan on my rooftop. I decided to buy an Xbox — I hadn’t had a gaming console in six years — to help alleviate some of the boredom. My live-in girlfriend and I spent the days watching Netflix, improving our culinary prowess, and bickering like two people being forced to spend every minute together. It was like an extended vacation from work, albeit a boring one. The money wasn’t so bad either; while on furlough I could collect unemployment, and with the extra $600 a month at the time, I was netting out pretty well for sitting on my ass all day.

Eventually, following a month and a half on furlough, we were called back to work — remotely of course. The executive team at my company was certain that things would be returning to normal by July, or August at the latest.(This is where I disclose that I was working for a movie company, and we laugh together at what a hilariously naive and willfully ignorant prediction that was). So, back to Zoom meetings and calendars for the future and busywork galore. To be honest, I preferred furlough. And after another six weeks or so, I was granted my wish and furloughed again, after it became abundantly clear that movie theaters would not be returning to business as usual by August. They probably never will. Of course, this furlough was longer than the first, and as the weeks turned into months, my coworkers and I began to consider the increasingly-likely proposition that our jobs were never coming back. In September, approximately 90% of the company was laid off, myself included.

The timing of my layoff coincided nicely with the dissolution of my relationship. While the loss of my job can be chalked up fully to Covid, the impact the pandemic had on my relationship is less clear. I guess I’ll never really know if things would have gone differently in a plague-free world. Nonetheless, within a few weeks of losing my job, my girlfriend of two and a half years and I decided to part ways. The life that I had led prior to March 11 was a distant relic of the past.

The summer of COVID-19 had been bearable. The weather was nice and I’d decided to use my newfound excess of free time to get my lazy ass back in shape. I’d started running and biking several days a week and I’d actually managed to lose 35 pounds. But now, as the October chill portended a long, cold winter, I was finally starting to feel the full weight of 2020. I was single, unemployed, and alone. As the calendar moved to November and December, coronavirus cases began to soar again, this time much higher than the previous peaks that ravaged the country in the spring. Bars and restaurants and gyms and salons closed down once more.

I slept in too late and drank too much. Sometimes I got fucked up just because I was bored. It was hard to find a reason to get up in the morning. And I don’t mean that in a suicidal way. I mean that, quite literally, I could not find a reason to get out of bed — every day was exactly the same, my time spent doing absolutely nothing but lamenting the fact that I was bored of doing absolutely nothing. I applied to jobs and got summarily rejected within a day — hiring was slowing down again as more businesses failed. For the first time in years, I truly felt like I was going under. And that made me feel even worse, because in the grand scheme of things, I’m pretty fucking blessed. I have a roof over my head, a solid support system of family and friends, and enough financial security to assure I’ll never go hungry or homeless. But that’s kind of the point; if someone in my position has struggled this hard with the trials of 2020, just imagine what it’s been like for those less fortunate.