Hey everyone. I hope you’re doing well. TL;DR, if you’re *not* doing well as a result of COVID-19, and if I (or The Prepared) could help, please be in touch.
I’ve been working from home for the past week and a half, and it has been a real emotional rollercoaster. I’ve spent a decent amount of my time trying to help out with medical supply sourcing for NYC - Tyvek suits, respirators, ventilators. The shitty thing to say about it is that it’s totally fun. I genuinely enjoy figuring out how you’d set up a new manufacturing line for a weird product, and right now pretty much everyone I’ve called (side note: using a telephone is great) has been more than willing to help me learn.
The other important factor, of course, is that I’m just *so* lucky that I can seamlessly move the large majority of my work to a makeshift home office, which then gives me time to bake bread every morning and also the freedom to take half hour breaks to hunt through the kitchen with Nora to figure out what dissolves in water and what doesn’t, or to step into the backyard with Tess to let her poke around in the dirt. Note also that by any measure, Ada has taken on a much larger burden than I have, providing us all much needed stability and joy.
But the rollercoaster part mostly has to do with the place I’m at in my career, and the degree to which I’m both in an ideal position to help the response effort and also feel woefully unqualified to take it on. I am presumably not alone on this - at least the latter part.
I think there’s another weird factor here, and it’s the combination of the feeling that this is a generation-defining event and also the sense that it’s all being hashed out on Twitter and Slack and Reddit. All of my reference points (wartime production during WWII, The New Deal, the Apollo program) for existential collective struggles involve a lot of top-down coordination, and it’s hard for me to imagine a path forward on this disaster that is fundamentally reliant on individual people 3D printing plastic bits and hand delivering them to intensive care units. It’s possible that my impression of wartime and wartime-adjacent efforts is naive, and that under the surface they’ve all been chaotic and ad hoc. It’s also distinctly possible that the hierarchical structures present in 20th century industrial America are actually counterproductive. But the current crisis still feels confusing.
Anyway. If you’re in need of help related to COVID-19 and I or The Prepared can provide it, please let me know. And wash your hands.