What Do You Think Today?

[Sorus]

It's frustrating because while I know that I was practicing social distancing during my interactions with him, the majority of my coworkers were not. They seem to think that we're all 'safe'. My boss flew to Vegas last week with her extended family - eating in restaurants, going to casinos, being on an airplane - and seemed to think these activities didn't carry any risk. This weekend she's in Tahoe, for a big family birthday celebration. Tahoe is the biggest headline of the local paper because people are going there to 'get away from the pandemic' and it's becoming a hotspot, because of course it is. And my boss is going to come in tomorrow and sit in the office with me with her mask down around her chin, and act like I'm overreacting. Am I overreacting?

[Savor Dam]

You are not overreacting to keep your distance from her, wear your mask, avoid touching it or your face, keep your hands clean, etc.

You may not be in a position to question her choices, given the boss / employee dynamic, but she is on no firmer ground questioning yours.

Stay safe and healthy!

[peter]

Absolutely. SD has it nailed. Also, I'd have no problems in (politely) requesting the wearing of masks in the meeting: you could not (in any reasonable world) be chastised or penalised for this..... I'm betting that even if your boss doesn't get it, someone not very much further up the hierarchy would. Just couch it in terms of your needing to be extra careful because of .......

[Sorus]

I've had that conversation with her so many times. She'll sigh and pull the mask up, but a couple of minutes later 'her face is hot' or 'her glasses are fogging up' and it comes right back down.

And the third member of our department is out due to exposure (not from work, but from some big church gathering he attended). He'll be out until at least the end of the week between getting tested and waiting for the results.

I get that people are tired of social distancing. I also get that I require less human contact than most people, and I'm not struggling with this whole situation much on that level. But things are getting bad here, and people need to take some responsibility and ask themselves if what they're doing is really worth the risk.

[peter]

The situation of prediction of the grades of school pupils unable to take their exams this year due to the coronavirus lockdown was always going to be problematic with bias and error inevitably corrupting the process. And so it has proven in Scotland, the first area of the UK to release the awarded grades. In their wisdom the verifiers have downgraded upwards of twenty five percent of the allocated grades from those awarded by the teachers within the schools to each pupil, meaning that many students have failed to achieve their expected grades and will not now qualify for the university places they had been offered.

The problem is that the downgrading has not been done on a student by student assessment of the accuracy of the allocated grade - but by assesment of the overall allocated grades as compared to the past performance of a given school as a whole. This inevitably means that individual students who would have shone despite being in the less well performing schools, see their hard work thwarted on the basis of being downgraded along with the rest of the school. This is rottenly unfair on the best of assesments, but of course it doesn't even stop there. The affluence of the area in which the school is situated seems to be part and parcel of the weighting as well, with over double the number of downgraded schools coming from poor areas compared to the more affluent.

This is a cock-up by any standards; under the terrible circumstances of the Covid crisis they should have been prepared to bite the bullet and show trust in the integrity of the teaching profession to allocate fair grades to all the pupils they taught. I think they would have risen to the challenge and not allowed self-interest and desire to be seen to be performing well to overly influence their decisions.

[Fist and Faith]

Sorus, although many people consider the whole thing unnecessary, there is no way you can be penalized for taking all the precautions. Don't let your boss within 6' of you without her mask. Don't let her touch you if she has her mask and is close. And I haven't heard of it happening, but I'll bet someone violating the protocols, or trying to pressure others into not taking it seriously, could get in trouble if a complaint was filed. We're talking about someone knowingly and intentionally not bothering with this, and putting your health at risk.

[Avatar]

There's a lot of stuff that Sorus should be complaining about at that place...going back years...

(Sorry Sorus, it's easy to say from such removes I know. )

--A

[peter]

It might be that the boss has problems with the wearing of a mask for extended periods (I certainly do) but common consideration should make him/her empathetic to any employee needing to be in a face to face situation and make the necessary adjustments to make it safe, such as holding the meeting in a bigger room or even better outside.

[Sorus]

Part of the problem here is that people seem to genuinely believe they're taking it seriously. My boss is included in that. The other part of the problem is people seem to believe they aren't going to get it. The guy who tested positive last week got it from his brother's friend. He was concerned enough to get tested, but he kept working without saying anything because he assumed the test would come back negative. He got hit with all the symptoms the same day the test came back positive. I don't know how he's doing now, but he was seriously ill last week. This is a 20-something guy with no obvious preexisting conditions.

We're required to sign off on a questionnaire before we can sign in for work. One of the questions is whether or not we've been in contact with anyone who tested positive in the last 14 days. If you answer yes, the computer blocks you from logging in. But that's just so the company can say they're not responsible if we get sick.

[peter]

This is what companies always do: cover their own backs under the guise of protecting their employees. The phoney lifting courses that instruct you to do jobs in ways that would make them impossible to carry out are the same thing. The signing of the form is a nonsense insofar as it is impossible for you to be sure that you have had no such contact (unless your track and trace system is operating at one hundred percent efficiency, and even then not so in reality). Despite what the company measures are in support of it's own interest, on the ground it's about you and me and how we conduct ourselves in face to face situations so as to best protect ourselves and eachother. In such situations it is the difference in risk perception - or the difference in preparedness to accept that risk - or the difference in the degree of care about the consequences of that risk coming to fruition - that effect the dynamic. This is what makes it so hard, but common courtesy should demand that it is the prerogative of the most careful/anxious/cautious of the two individuals who sets the parameters of the meeting.

[Sorus]

Oi, this week. The fallout from the guy lying to the computer about his exposure is that we all get our temperatures checked before we can sign in now. Which is fine. Plenty of places have been doing that all along. I don't know why we haven't. (Except that the company was probably too cheap to expense a digital thermometer for every location.)

So I come in, and my boss tells me I don't need to bother with the temp check because 'she knows I don't have a fever'. Okay, I know I don't have a fever, but I expect to be checked. We've had three people out in the last two weeks - two who tested positive, and one who just tested negative, but HR is making him quarantine for 14 days past when the person who exposed him tested positive. Which means he'll be out for another week. Which my boss is upset about, even though the extra workload falls on me, not her.

So she's venting about how irresponsible he was for going to all his church gatherings. And I'm agreeing, because she's not wrong, but she also just hopped on a plane to Vegas and spent a weekend doing tourist crap. How is that different? She says she wore a mask the whole time, but I know her, and I know that means her nose was poking out like a hungry baby bird the entire time.

I like her. I like her better than most of my last bosses, and I really want to keep a good working relationship. But ye gods, I want to scream right now.


Vent, vent, vent.

[Skyweir]

No wonder. Poor you.

Id be pissed at her too.

It IS ridiculous and incredibly reckless of her ... particularly given she's a boss, she should be showing some leadership and responsibility.

I mean really :facepalm: Why have COVID protocols if you are not applying them.

Maybe she thinks she is doing you some kind of a favour by somehow acknowledging your more diligent adherence to social distancing and mask wearing ... I dunno.

Sending love and strength ... in solidarity

[Sorus]

Maybe she thinks she is doing you some kind of a favour by somehow acknowledging your more diligent adherence to social distancing and mask wearing ... I dunno.

She totally is, but she also thinks she's in the same category, and expects me to trust her in return.

My social circle is non-existent. I wear my mask properly 100% of the time. But I also work with the public. I ride public transportation. Two of our freaking coworkers just tested positive. It's quite possible that I could get it.

It's just baffling to me because she's a smart person, but she just doesn't seem to get why the things she's doing are high-risk.

[peter]

We as UK citizens should be ashamed of the role of our offshore banking system in facilitating the activities of kleptocracies and despots the world over in harvesting the wealth of their countries into untraceable secret accounts registered in the British overseas dependencies. This is of course not to mention the organised crime, the drug-dealers and mega-corpoation tax-avoiders, all of whose money is welcome, no questions asked, as long as it is understood that the City of London elite who operate these offshore accounts will take their slice and our Government will have access to the cash in need as long as it keeps it's eyes down and maintains denial.

Ahhh, "Good, evil and banking" you might say, but the effects of this system, which now holds nearly half of the worlds offshore banking and is the reason why London is the destination of choice for the kleptocrat oligarchs of the post communist Russia, is pernicious and debilitating in respect of the lives of millions of ordinary people the world over. Sub-Saharan Africa is held in a state of backward dependency, crippled by borrowing it cannot hope to service, while the criminally corrupt regimes at the heads of countries cream off the wealth into these untraceable accounts with impunity. The Russian people themselves have been denied the chance to develop their own representative democracy because of the very system that allows the sharks that scrambled to the top in the post Soviet times, to salt away the riches previous held in trust for the people by the state.

And head of the list of beneficiaries of this system, the British offshore banking system sits as the conduit that makes all this possible. A 'fence' through which the truly bad guys of the world channel their ill-gotten gains. It would be nice to assume that ones country is a force for good in the world - but it appears that it might be an assumption too far. Would it not be too much to ask that our politicians, our movers and shakers, turn their attention to this deplorable situation and introduce some transparency into the system to at least bring an element of control, of visibility, into it that might slow down the skimming activities of its users. Or could it be, that as the recent ISC report on Russian influence in our country implied, the interests of our ruling elite are so tied into the operation of this system, that they themselves have no motivation to see its activities in any way curtailed?

It is rumoured that Vladimir Putin may be the richest man in the world with a fortune that eclipses that of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but we'll never know. And it isn't really any good us complaining about it - we made him.

[deer of the dawn]

peter, you might as well remove the word "British" from your post as it's superfluous. all the rich dudes of the world have it figured out. The rest of us are just their drudges, a giant sponge to squeeze and get more and more. It's the way of the world. And that has never changed, but the LEVEL has become obscene.

As for the "people being stupid during a pandemic", the magical thinking is ridiculous. And sadly, it's the most restrictive countries who are kicking COVID to the curb, whilst we 'Mericuns are probably going to be the last and hardest hit because no one can tell us what to do.

[peter]

Just an interesting little footnote to my post above; is it a coincidence that the new EU anti-tax avoidance laws come into play on Jan 1st next year that, were we to have a Brexit extension, we would be subject to? Wonder why the Government are so adamant that there will be no extension to the transition period, even in the face of the perfectly plausible reason for having one (and which no one could begin to criticize them for) in the face of the Covid crisis and the absolutely devastating effect that no-deal will have on our economy already crippled by the lockdown? Look no further - the interests of the elite must be protected at all costs, irrespective of the damage done to the small people for whom no-deal will be an unmitigated (and completely avoidable) disaster.

[Avatar]

Of course...the small people only count when there is a vote going to happen.

--A

[peter]

Well they won't be counting my vote, that's for sure (and in fairness, they never would have been).

[sgt.null]

Doesn't stop Sky from opining.

[Savor Dam]

Nor yourself.

As a beleaguered moderate, I am so delighted to be tarred by the generalities of both sides. Leftists and rightists both are rather fond of spouting broad condemnations of those not in perfect agreement with their views.

I can only take refuge in the wisdom I once received from a former member of the Silent Service, "When you are getting equal amounts of noise from each direction, you are probably exactly on course."