Hey! What’s up? It has occurred to me that I haven’t written anything about COVID life since we first started this thing. It seems that for the sake of posterity or whatever I should talk more about what it is like to live in exciting times. (1 out of 5 stars – Do Not Recommend)
Personal Life
Honestly, not much as changed for me. I think that is a combination of being a natural hermit/anti-social person and an essential worker. I still go to work every day. More on that later.
The major thing that changed for me is travel. We had a river cruise down the Danube scheduled for November. Surely, we’d be ok by then, right? Sob.
The cool thing is that it was scheduled with Viking Cruises and they didn’t just reimburse us. They gave us a credit for 125% of our payment. With that we upgraded to an ocean cruise to Greece, Turkey, and Italy for December 2021. Surely, we’ll be ok by then, right?
Since I already had time off work scheduled and I really need a vacation, we decided to make the best of it. Back when things were calming down a bit we decided to go to Florida. Yeah, it was still dumb then but hear me out. We’ve rented a house on AirBnB that has an indoor pool. We are going there and hanging out by our own pool by ourselves and reading books for a week. All we need to survive is the flight and the trip to the grocery store. It is post-election so we will either be celebrating or crying. Either way I wish I drank.
For my birthday last November I got a movie pass. It let me see unlimited movies in the theater for a year. All I had to do was see 2-3 movies a month for it to pay for itself. That was going well. I was enjoying it. And then…..
Yeah. But, cool thing. Regal Cinemas also did the right thing here and suspended it. It will restart whenever their cinemas reopen and they added four free additional months to it.
I must say I have been pleasantly surprised by big companies not taking the opportunity to say, “Sorry about your luck” on things like this.
Work Life
I have not regularly talked to humans since March!
Seriously, everyone is always like, “You become a vet because you like animals better than people but the animals come with people.” Not anymore! Evil laugh…..
My staff calls the owners when they check in and get the history. Then they bring the animal in and I do whatever is needed. The staff talks to the owner because I have moved on to the next room. IT IS A GLORIOUS SEASON FOR INTROVERTS!
Prior to COVID we were a super high volume walk in clinic. We immediately switched to appointments when we started doing curbside drop offs just to control the chaos. After a few weeks I realized that we were seeing about 50% of the volume and making about 75% of our previous revenue. Our previous volume was projected to be Unsustainable veering dangerously close to Why Is The Vet In A Fetal Position In The Corner? this summer. This forced us to realize that we can survive with a better quality of life and mental health. We won’t be going back to our previous walk in life. (I say CURBSIDE FOREVER but someday my joy will end.)
Most glorious side benefit – no anal jokes. Seriously, I always said this was the thing that was going to break me someday. I was looking forward to the day I retire when I was planning on absolutely turning into a raging lunatic on someone who just had to make a comment when I took a temperature. Let’s see – 90% of appointments make the same stupid comments times 50 appointments a day times 23 years in practice so far = probably the reason I have high blood pressure and acid reflux. My boss makes anal jokes every so often when he is holding a dog for me so I don’t get out of practice. He cares for me like that.
We have a few new employees since all this started. Yesterday one saw me without a mask on and commented that she had no idea what I looked like without the mask. We are all a mystery to each other.
People still get nasty about not being able to come in. COVID deniers are fun. Especially when they try to fight an office that has had three cases. One of my assistants (who had COVID herself at one point) uses a line that we only have one vet and if I get sick they’d have to close down so we need to keep me healthy. One person told her that if they were so worried about the health of that vet why don’t we get a new one. I’d like to think they’d still care about me even if we had the second vet that we need unlike that fine client.
How Ya’ll Hanging In There?
