We didn’t dare eat take-out. We cooked every meal we ate for over two years. That got old after a couple months, so two years kinda sucked. We spent so much money on take-out after we got vaccinated!
Remember people washing groceries and leaving them outside?
I did this, lol. But I learned that produce tastes so much better after soaking in water with a dash of vinegar, and still do this with all of my produce.
My wife got upset with me for getting coffee at the drive thru.
I refused to stop though, told her if that thing was going to spread via someone passing a coffee cup thru a window we’re all fucked anyways and I may as well enjoy my coffee on occasion.
I used to make my husband text me pictures of him in a mask at the grocery store just slightly before masks became mandatory. I swiped some from work just before things got rolling and we began wearing them. Probably my best idea.
Plus the whole companies going into overdrive with enforcing hand washing and sanitizer
So the virus would need to also survive constant hand washing and sanitizer use, and if it did that, then nothing was able to be safely handled
Hmm. Individually washing the eggs in the carton before they went in the fridge, maybe.
Finding out it was definitely airborne was such a relief.
The first 6 months when we were too scared to go anywhere or do anything, we saved like $1000/month. I proceeded to learn nothing and we went back to max spending as soon as scientifically acceptable.
One of the biggest lessons I learned was just how much goddamn money most people spend eating out and stuff. My finances did not change because I budget to the bone.
I went to the expensive grocery store. I had to keep working the entire time. When I went to my usual store after work, I’d have to wait in line to enter the store just to find out the horders bought everything again. The horders didn’t go to the expensive store, so I didn’t have to wait in line and most of the time I could find everything I needed.
That’s how I got turned on to expensive Alfredo sauce. It was the only thing left, and now I can’t go back.
Same with us for Rao’s marinara.
I bought a house 6 months before lockdown.
I bought a super huge pack of charmin toilet paper at BJs. My ex bought a super huge pack of charmin toilet paper at BJs.
We had a laugh about all of our toilet paper.
As a joke I bought 2 more huge packs, because we had room and it was funny and had basically become an inside joke.
Then lockdown happened.
Toilet paper became a commodity.
I JUST (December 27th to be precise) ran out of the pre-covid toilet paper stocks we had.
That’s amazing!
I mock threatened my friends that if I couldn’t buy toilet paper when I needed it, I was going to come over to their house and scoot my ass across the rug like the dog does.
I had signed up for a tp delivery service the previous September, and got 48 rolls every eight weeks, which was the “light use estimate” for a single person household.
I don’t know what the rest of y’all are doing, but I had used six rolls when the second shipment came in November. I passed it around to all my friends and forgot to cancel it, so I received a third shipment January. Of 48 rolls.
I now had received 144 rolls of toilet paper in four months, and I use it at a rate of 3.5 rolls per month.
I set a phone reminder to cancel it, and donated 48 rolls to a shelter. Then, in march, when my cancellation alert came up, I realized another shipment might not be the worst thing.
Then in April I got a bidet. I did manage to cancel my subscription, and left rolls on all my neighbors front steps, and I still had enough to last until may of 2021, when I moved and donated the rest.
Ahhh so good to meet another pandemic poop baron
Bulk non-perishables is always the way to go. I think my family buys tp, garbage bags, light bulbs etc maybe once every two years.
How do you go though so many light bulbs?? I haven’t had a single one fail in the past 2 years
We use incandescent bulbs as heaters to keep water pipes from freezing in the winter. When put in a brooder lamp housing they’re safer than dedicated space heaters on a thermostat and useful for places where heating tape isn’t practical (eg around a pressure tank)
We usually go through 8-10 100w bulbs a year across the three pump houses and crawl spaces We have to maintain. Running continuously they only have a life span of a couple months.
Very unusual situation of course. Idk i think we last bought LED’s for the actual inside of the house maybe 5 years ago lol.
My folks were freaking out about no sanitizer anywhere. I have OCD. I just calmly went to my room and brought out my massive 1 L jug of sanitizer
For once, that pain in the ass disorder came in handy
Thankfully we just happened to have just bought our regular six months worth of toilet paper package at Costco just before the great TP shortage of 2020. We use a bidet anyways, so TP goes a long way in our house.
I hate that people will look back on this behavior with derision, rather than taking sensible precautions during a time of uncertainty.
Seriously, this is just peak hindsight and at the time things people did where the most appropriate application of better safe than sorry.
I got to work from home, I got to actually invest in my living space. I started tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive. I cooked more. I invested into learning new skills. I spent almost zero time communiting anywhere. I prioritized my health, getting enough sleep. I didn’t even get as much as a runny nose for like 2 years.
Honestly, one of the best times of my life.
Yeah I’m pretty nostalgic for it too, sans the whole potential death part haha. I cooked constantly, worked from home, and played classic wow with my homies. It was awesome.
tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive
Generally I don’t shill online but my town just gots its first microbrewery when COViD hit so when I found out they were doing takeout, you better believe I spread the word far and wide. It worked: that business survived.
Of course I accidentally spread negative word about a great Pakistani kebab place, so I shut the hell up and went there every week for the summer. It became a thing with my family, when you couldn’t go places with people and restaurants were closed. We’d walk down to the center of town, order through their app, send one person in to pick up, and have dinner outside on the town common
Maybe because they are not sensible precautions?
Meet less people, wear a mask, wash your hands - please yes
Wash your keys, buy delivery but then put it in the oven (including packaging) - I won’t stop you from having fun, but it was not exactly required to stay safe.We know that now, but at the time there was less information about how the virus spread and, I believe more importantly than the short term dangers, the long term effects of infection.
Of course one could think that it is silly to go to the extra effort of sanitizing your take-out when cooking at home was an option, but I don’t know their situation enough to make that judgment.
Yeah, you didn’t know this back then. Maybe you did if you were a healthcare professional or a specialist in virology. In the US, all we had to go off of was the CDC, who are supposed to be the apex specialists, fighting with Trump who just had gut feelings about drinking bleach to kill the virus, and a literal ocean of misinformation and horrifying lockdown/mass casualty stories coming out of China.
It was clear that nobody actually knew what was up, and that public safety advice was biased through this filter intended to get people back to work to save the economy. Someone at some point decided that X number of people might die to save X percent of the economy and apparently we were supposed to be okay with that?
Hmmm.
If you were paying attention at all, you knew this by June or July. People were doing silly shit like this a year later.
Unless you were only paying attention to Instagram or Tiktok
I think a lot of that depends on your viewpoint and attitude. I will admit that I got grocery delivery for a few months and would actually sanitize the packaging before bringing it inside. I chuckle about it now and think I was maybe going a bit overboard - but like you said, the times were so uncertain for many - especially during the beginning.
It’s funny to look back on is my point in posting this, but at the time we were just trying everything we could.
For a few months basically no one knew how it spread. I look back and think about how it could be seen as overboard, but being cautious and careful is more important in a time when something like Covid was quickly spreading and had these wildly different experiences for people. Especially the first alpha variant which seemed to either kill people, or cause them to not smell/taste and have memory issues. I wasn’t going to fuck with that, and still don’t want to.
Also, some forget, but there was a lot of videos coming out of China where it started with people running around seemingly trying to infect others and felt very zombie-esque.
Same… we’d wipe down our groceries, and anything delivered by mail or UPS would sit on our back porch for a few days before we’d bring it in the house. Was it necessary? Probably not, but our house never got sick - at least not until 2023. So for the next pandemic I won’t mind being overly cautious again.
Yeah I remember it was months in before studies started coming out that it didn’t spread via surfaces. I distinctly remember thinking “shit what am I supposed to do with all these Clorox wipes??”
I wish that message had gotten around a little faster. By summer or fall of 2020, we had a pretty good idea that covid didn’t live well on surfaces, but we still had people gobbling up isopropyl alcohol and causing a shortage. Worse, a few companies made hand sanitizer with methanol as a cheap way to keep up with demand.
Yep. There were reports that it could live on plastic surfaces for over a week.
Is it silly in hindsight knowing everything we do today? Sure. But if a new epidemic spreads rapidly again before we have any reliable info on it, I’m going back to wiping things down and washing my hands after touching anything.
Basically the 2nd week of the pandemic they announced that fomites were not a vector of infection.
The early weeks of the pandemic, before it was out of China and declared a pandemic, I was assured by health and safety officers that we could only get it if we touched a surface someone with COVID had coughed or sneezed on.
The only thing that really changed for me was that I wore a mask when going to a store or something. I didn’t need one at work since I worked alone and outside at the time.
The one time I thought I had caught COVID, it turned out to be just a gnarly case of strep throat. Never once lost my sense of smell or taste from strep throat before, but 2 home tests and 1 actual doctor test all showed negative for COVID so… 🤷🏻♂️
I then had an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin given to me for the strep throat so that was fun.
I didn’t do none of that shit. I worked outside, so I never even stopped working.
I worked at walmart and was therefore ‘essential.’ The only way my life changed was I had to wear a mask, got screamed at a tiny bit more and people would look absolutely HORRIFIED when I sneezed.
I too never stopped working. Went in every day like “we ride at dawn bitches”
I work in commercial buildings, electrical maintenance. They all shut down…except hospitals. I worked nothing but hospitals all of 2020. Covid wards and all. I had scar tissue from the nose clip on the n95 masks.
It was really fucking frustrating with the conspiracy theorists claiming there were no viral cases when I just got back from Stanford Children’s Hospital where half the building had been converted into a covid ward, new patients were arriving every few minutes flown in from regional ICUs, and nurses and doctors were sleeping on the floor from exhaustion.
Same. I’m from the UK so people used to come out at whatever time to clap for the NHS workers. The fun bit was there were no NHS workers near us but I would get home just in time to be applauded by my entire street for working like normal.
Thursday nights at 8pm in my neck of the woods. There used to be one excited happy clapper who banged pans or pot lids together in half an hour sessions
I push carts
I have OCD and even over a year prior to the pandemic would wear gloves and use sanitizer constantly
It was hilarious when the only change I needed to make was wearing a mask, meanwhile everybody else had to adjust
Constant hand sanitizer - I still haven’t dropped this habit. I see hand sanitizer, I use hand sanitizer.
This is a habit you should keep!
My church bestie and I always sit together and when we pass the peace and hug and shake hands, she always immediately puts sanitizer on my hands and hers after without even asking. She’s the best.
It’s not great for your skin though. Especially in winter time my hands get dry AF and hand sanitizer undoes at least 3 lotion applications.
Also some bacteria is good.
Ironically because of Joe Rogan I was among the first people in my friend group and family to take the threat seriously
I live in San Francisco, where we shut down IMMEDIATELY. It was actually in Feb, not March. Everyone was like, well, that’s probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.
A month later NYC had mobile crematoriums.
Not much, I’m already kinda germophobic so it was easy to treat every surface as dirty. And now that people stopped cleaning everything, it’s easy to see that everything IS dirty. Still haven’t caught it lol
I still use my sleeve or elbow to open every door to this day. It doesn’t hurt anything to do.
I manage a produce department at a grocery store and was always front and center with the hordes of people coming in. At the start of the pandemic my wife and newborn were stuck at home, so even if I wasn’t worried about myself, there was always this background anxiety that I was going to bring it home and potentially cause the death of my wife or daughter. Any illness we did get was especially weird or aggressive, and always thought “Ah, shit, this is it.”, but somehow never was. To this day we’ve somehow never tested positive for COVID, though I know statistically we’ve probably had it.
Those early days were bizarre, though. I remember ominously gathering in the stockroom at work shortly before things started getting weird. The owner explained what was going on, how it would change things and what we would be doing differently going forward. He predicted all of the shortages, especially toilet paper. Funny enough, we always had a huge supply of that shit downstairs, but idiots would buy it up so fast it always looked like there was a shortage. You can only fit like 3-6 packages in a large shelf space at any given time. People would show up before the stock guy could get more out and wind up depleting all of the napkins and paper towels instead. Bet their assholes felt great. The best were people who bought up a bunch of Lysol, thinking that shit was like a convenient and instant disinfectant. Yeah, if you want to spray down every inch of your home and leave it sit for thirty minutes…
Strange days…
Yes we were just doing whatever we could think of doing in the hopes something would help. I’m glad you’ve stayed a NOVID though!
At my grocery store people would put everything they bought into one of those thin plastic produce bags and then just pour in hand sanitizer and shake it all over everything in the bag.
Weird time, but I’m glad they took it seriously… some customers angrily did not
Masking outdoors with no one around. I heard on a podcast that it was still good practice so you’d remember not to touch your face, but it was mostly just hot and miserable.
This is the reason I will now always fly with masks. Just to keep myself from touching my face and getting sick at the start of a vacation.
I always fly with masks now because I’ve realized how many people are harbingers of disease in the airport.
That’s where I got COVID is on a plane where my husband and I wore an N95 the whole time. He was immune suppressed I think for another reason, which is a whole other story, and I think that’s why. He ended up hospitalized about two weeks later and while we had five vaccines apiece at that time and our COVID was mild, it sure didn’t help later.
I know a few people who still wear surgical masks outside when the pollen levels are high because it helps with allergies. Not perfect, but the masks reduce enough of the pollen breathed in to be helpful without the sweating problems from n95 masks.
Yeah, I moved from the US to Europe in 2021 and wore a mask daily everywhere outside of my bedroom (I had eight housemates, including a very nutso Q person, who was trying to get covid to hasten his natural immunity and who did not shower for the ten months we lived together- he was the second worst roommate) until probably June of 2022. It wasn’t until then that I realized I have allergies to things that grow on this continent that I never encountered at home.
Me too! I also had special touch screen gloves my husband insisted I wear everywhere in the dead of summer so I wouldn’t touch anything with bare hands. I looked ridiculous in summer short sleeves wearing gloves. I also had safety glasses.
I didn’t change much. On the other hand I was already pretty socially distanced before. I honestly loved how society came down to my level. It’s much more stressful again now.
