Topic: Covid-19 mental health check-in

[ober]

I think travel right now is still sketchy.  If you were just going to another place and taking all your food with you and not eating out and staying to yourself in a cabin/beach it would be one thing, but most families will go out to eat, pick up food, go get souvenirs, etc. etc.  Plus stopping along the way at various places.  So now your point of contact is through the roof and you might pick up a strain god knows where.  It just seems too risky to me.

[ober]

Well... now my mental health is down a bit.  Not that I can say it was unexpected.  My company just laid off 33 people (mostly in customer support and sales).  None of the engineering staff were impacted by the layoffs.  But then they chose to do pay cuts too.  Sliding scale from the top getting 10% cuts down to 2.5%.  Not sure what mine is yet but probably somewhere in the middle.  This sucks.

[Perspective]

Ugh, man that sucks. Hopefully it doesn't last long.

[Mike]

Oh man, really sorry to hear that.

[ober]

7.5% pay cut for me.  Ugh.  They claim the pay cut ensures we keep 15 more people for the duration of this.  We'll see.  And the pay cuts get reinstated once our sales pick back up.  Still a downer.

[Jake]

sorry Ben. that sucks balls

[KnuckleBuckett]

Agreed.  It is 10% here for salary folk.  4 Day work week tho. 

[micah]

As a provider of compounded pharmaceuticals for hospital systems, we've had a few record breaking months of sales and simultaneous efficiency growth resulting in surplus product available for immediate sale on top of the uptick in orders.  Apparently, its a great time to be in a medical-related industry.

[ober]

That's the thing... I am in the medical industry.  We make scheduling and related software for long term care facilities and now even some hospitals and government agencies.  I thought our company would be safe in all of this.  Our problem is that our clients and future clients are so busy dealing with all of this that they don't have time to talk so our sales are waaaay down.

[jkim]

meanwhile at my hospital, people asked not to work were still receiving 80% of their pay, had their benefits covered, could apply to the Employee Assistance Fund (up to 5k/employee), and some people STILLLLL had the gall to ask if they could apply for unemployment because of their cut pay.

[jkim]

Agreed.  It is 10% here for salary folk.  4 Day work week tho. 

I would 100% take a 10% cut for a 4 day work week if it was a true 4 day work week.

[Mike]

Hmmm, I wonder how a 4-10s proposal would go right now.  Eh, the voting part might be hard (workers have to vote to approve alternate work schedules like 4-10s)

[charlie]

We decided to keep our vacation date for the first full week of June - we're going to Florida. Can't wait.

Are you flying?

nope, driving. Pan Handle - town is called seaside.

We are renting a house and we're going with my best friend's family...there was a significant down payment which we committed before the covid outbreak. They are giving us an option to reschedule for next year, but they will not give us our money back. After weighing it all out, we think risk is not any higher than staying in Chicago. All we'll be doing is lounging on the beach anyway.

I'd tend to agree with this... unless there's an outbreak near where you're going, I think a trip by car is fine. Just don't eat in restaurants, always get take out. This doesn't seem any riskier than all the stuff you were already doing at the cabin.

[jkim]

I was woken up at 1 AM this morning because a primary analyzer went down basically because a field engineer messed up a setting after upgrading the computer the afternoon before. I had to travel into work and couldn't figure it out until 4:30 AM. Got a swift 1-1.5 hrs of sleep and then started work (from home) because we were supposed to go live with another analyzer "first thing" in the morning, something that I worked on 7-7 yesterday for as the owning manager. I finally signed off around 11 AM so I could work on a video. Stopped to take a "nap" but I don't think I actually fell asleep for longer than 5 minutes. Now I'm here at 9:30 PM somehow running on less than 3 hours of sleep. What happens next?

By the way, as far as I'm concerned the go-live was a success. It was another 4 day turnaround. And the next feedback that I got was "Well what about this other test?" Yes, that test that was would have been ready to go live Wednesday had this instrument not been promised to the CEO with this insane turnaround time is now going to be extended by almost a week. Even more fun, both of these projects are actually duplicates of existing instrumentation. It's not like we couldn't run these before, they just want to be able to run more of it.

[Mike]

That sounds really rough Jen.