Haven't posted in here for a while, mainly because the answer was drifting more and more towards "no" as the summer wore on. Sure, I wear a mask 6-11 hours five days a week and typically a "busy" service tops out around 40 people rather than 100 or 150, but the people who are coming out seem to be the people that genuinely enjoy the experience. Guest averages have been way up, wine bottle and cocktail sales (by percentage if not total volume) have been way up and I suppose most importantly, aside from larger buyout events the day-to-day income of the restaurant I work at hit a point where we could afford to be back to nearly full staff pre-pandemic (though mostly new faces front of house) and the tipped wages have been wild. I've maintained a steady bank account near five figures for the first time in my life for over six months now, and this previous pay period was the first time my paycheck had dipped below four figures since the first week of the pandemic.
In other words, I've came out of this experience with a life that honestly hasn't changed that much...except for this crippling self-hate, survivor's guilt sort of thing that's curdled on top of all that feel good momentum. I'm around the people I work with pretty much all day and night, as we fell back into the habit of going across the street to the industry bar for last call as soon as they re-opened, and life has pretty much gone on as it did before the pandemic except with this cloud of dread looming over all of it. Only one person I work with has contracted the virus, from an outside event, and no one in his family contracted it from him while he mostly enjoyed the opportunity to rewatch Deep Space Nine for the first time in years uninterrupted. We've hosted several weddings and not been contacted from a single one about a positive test afterward...but it's all just crossed fingers, right?
Anyway, I came back because despite all that, Nebraska is finally in the spotlight. I've checked the NY Times' trackers every morning and night since March 18th and we've almost never been more than steady aside from a mass outbreak at a meat packing plant in western Nebraska many months ago. We're back to our peak death rate and at nearly twice our daily case rate from the height of the pandemic in late spring. While my restaurant and part of town specifically experienced a bit of a slowdown the last two weeks, it seemed like generally the state and city in particular were getting back to business as usual.
So now we have our first health mandate in weeks (there's technically a mask mandate, but like a lot of red states the police departments have declined to enforce them, citing "freedoms") reducing capacity to 50% and some confusing language about weddings and private events being no more than 8 people (50% capacity at our venue, which measures a full city block, is about 70 people, though we only staff to seat about 25 at a time aside from said weddings) and being required to be seated at all times...unless playing parlor games? In other words, it feels a lot like March, when some really desperate, muddled maneuvers were made to make it feel like everything was OK for about a week and then the call was made abruptly on a Wednesday morning to shut everything down.
Back then, with Spring on the horizon, it was kind of exciting to be kept on staff and figure out how to survive as a takeout/delivery business when we'd formerly been casual fine dining, and it was really gratifying to have made it work and tough it out. But you know, we got to emerge into the summer and patio weather and Nebraska being relatively case-free aside from nursing homes, meat packing facilities and prisons (which is a whole other conversation, I'm aware) and that feels an entirely different universe from waking up to 37° and threats of sleet throughout the week.
On the one hand, I've been the voice of pessimism all summer, warning that we shouldn't be taking this summer for granted and crossing our fingers that most of our friends and loved ones aren't out of work come February, so in some ways I've always been prepared for this day, or at least this day before the day. As the dread starts to set in, though, I'm not sure I actually am mentally prepared for it. I'm not sure I could do the sit at a desk for 8 hours a day answering emails and organizing delivery routes thing while my boss is screaming internally every minute of the day over whether he's gonna have a college fund for his two kids at the end of the season. Part of me was even envious of the friends who were on unemployment this summer to begin with, it kind of sounded like a dream scenario, avoiding all the stress of trying to keep a business alive while making significantly more money than they were used to.
But then I'm also one of those people who would make for a great Aaron Sorkin character, who finds a lot of my personal identity and worth in my work...AUGH!!!!
Anyway, there's your update from the Breadbasket of the Heartland, I guess.
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