It was a Tuesday of March 17 2020, and the schedule for my library had me covering Tuesday evening shifts as a supervisory staffer until 8 PM with a number of part-timers (I was also the interim library manager at that time). I'd been busy before that getting an early dinner before 5 PM, so the interoffice emails I need to check from time to time hadn't been read until 20 minutes past that, after having helped a patron with printing jobs.
It turned out the city manager's office sent out an order closing all public areas at 5 PM for the city around 4:00 PM just as I started dinner. /headdesk
If there was any good news to this faux pas, it was that the library was barely in use that night, and had been for a lot of nights ever since the reports of COVID-19 hitting the cruise liners in December. Our main patrons are mostly the retirees of the community, and many of them had either not traveled down to Florida as snow birds from their northern residencies or they made the personal choice to stay home and avoid getting infected. Our daily visit numbers since January 2020 had dropped significantly.
Our city residents had proven more foresighted than our own state and federal leaders - you might recall trump himself was dismissing concerns right up until March 11 when the World Health Organization declared an official global pandemic - to where you saw places around town practically empty of shoppers or visitors. The local movie theater was mostly (more than half) empty the last time I went to see a film (Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey for you trivia buffs) that Saturday January 26.
The only place where it wasn't empty of shoppers were the grocery stores: Publix had been wiped out of toilet paper by the first week of February. But I digress.
What happened once I saw that email from city hall, I had summoned the part-timers together to have them tell the few remaining library users we had to close due to the emergency pandemic order. We didn't get any complaints and they vacated rather quickly. We did our standard floor check to make sure everything was shut down, corners cleared, bathrooms cleared, stairwell and elevator cleared, all that. Then I sent the part-timers home while I finished up making CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs for the front doors and changed the phone message for the library with the same emergency information.
I then made sure to email and call staff where I could to inform them the library was closed to the public but that we still had to work, such as handling hold requests to other libraries in the county and to the Books-By-Mail service. Once I took care of that, I sent myself home locking up for the night. I remember glancing at the library while standing in the parking lot, the sun was just beginning to set with the sky turning purple twilight, and I wondered what was going to happen next if we were ever going to open again that year.
I need to go back and check my personal notes, but I think we didn't get to that re-opening until September...? I think we had curbside service in August...
There were a lot of hazy days between then and now. We had to change our summer reading programs for the kids into virtual viewing events on Facebook and YouTube. We had to close our meeting rooms and cancel all library programs (I personally miss the computer training classes I hosted most months). Our library volunteers - many of them the elderly residents from the nearby retirement communities - still can't come back because as a public facility we're still a high-risk vector.
I can't tell you the number of times I have to go around on the computer floor to ask our users to keep the bloody masks over their faces. If I sound rude to anyone, it's because it's been months of being open and with signs everywhere asking our patrons to respect the mask rule, and they're STILL draping them over their necks instead of their mouths and noses. I'm sorry, but I'm not the problem here, people! PLEASE keep the masks on! Argh.
So here we are in March 2021, with the last three-four months of vaccine implementation and a gradual sense that we are seeing better days ahead. Even here in Florida where our self-serving idiot governor DeSantis is messing around with the vaccine deployments to richer likely Republican neighborhoods instead of more-deserving poor communities and essential workers, we're seeing a good number of daily treatments that are outpacing the number of new cases. Most observers are hopeful we'll see effective vaccine coverage by late May. Biden himself is aiming for a July 4 full vaccination deadline.
It's just a question now of when myself and my fellow library staffers get our chance at vaccination. Some of the older staffers have (anyone 65 or older qualified, last week I think they dropped it to 60) but the rest of us are still waiting. You'd think that city employees - who are in the public work areas meeting people all the time - would be a priority group, but sadly no...
Still. Hopeful days ahead.
1 comment:
Hang in there, the Biden administration will come through in spite of DeSantis.
Ohio prioritized teachers in Group 1B which meant that I received my first poke on February 5 and second dose on March 5, according to the CDC I became fully vaccinated today. I was emotional when I learned that I would soon be getting the jab. My MIL is 82 and lives next door so we had been very guideline compliant. When the day came I expected to be emotional, but wound up simply feeling overwhelming relief.
One neighbor across the street caught it and went from 185 lbs to 155lbs, another neighbor went to Florida, caught it there and passed from the virus last week. One fellow teacher who is a trumper disregarded the guidelines and is now a pulmonary long-hauler. My wife's aunt and her husband played with fire and were down as in bedridden for ten full weeks, did I mention that they were hospitalized twice during that time?
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