Skip to main content

Judgement Time

Traveling for the quarterly team meeting used to be routine pre-covid but seeing that invite land in my inbox filled me with enough anxiety that I could not sleep most night. This is going to be a couple of dozen people with whatever vaccination status gathered together to team, bond and celebrate the end of the pandemic and return to normal - or so it seems. Everyone has the choice to attend remotely but its obviously not where the momentum lies. Being out and about is an act pregnant with meaning these days. It acts as a social signal of being a people person rather than a recluse, being a company culture adherent rather than someone who marches to the beat of their own drummer, being a bold risk-taker and not a wimp and the list goes on. This is an active and conscious choice imbued with reasons that never applied before to traveling for work. You just showed up to these things as needed and life went on. 

Now it seems you need to show up needed or not and be counted, every single time. Each incident of sitting it out will act as a strike - and there are only so many a person can afford. One guy I work with is widely advertising the days of the week he can be found in the office so anyone else who is around can come meet with him. Among the folks meeting him, there will be those like this man, people who would sooner die than get vaccinated, Maybe I am completely missing the mark here, but what truly is the point of such exuberant outreach in such a time. The guidance on masking while indoors has been a moving target and yet choosing to be safe and do that is met with looks of derision wherever I go. The optics will be that much worse in a workplace situation where people are mingling like the pandemic never happened. 

There is a good chance that some people in the midst of these needless interactions will get even the vaccinated among us pretty sick and depending on the person, some of those could end up becoming long haulers. As a society we went from "do everything you need to do to keep you and your loved ones safe" to "time to mingle because if you don't we will all judge you". I am not sure I understand why people can longer act from their own level of risk tolerance after all we have been through and for many among us, this is far from over.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more