16 Things we are Adjusting to while we Live with Coronavirus Covid 19

While this list of 16 things is not all inclusive, it does highlight some of the realities of our business/working life and our personal lives.  It’s all more blended than ever if you are still working and if you are not working right now – I am empathetic if you want to be working, but many in the list remains true!

More Video!

Business people are holding way more video meetings than before Coronavirus!  Not only more video meetings but video conversations.  Facetime one on ones, or one on twos!  This weekend I learned how to have 3 people on a Facetime and see all 3 of us on the same screen – Swipe left y’all!  It’s that easy.  But if you hit “more” in the bottom left, you can pull up your photos and put a photo backdrop behind you in the camera.  How cool is that!  It’s helping us feel more connected when we can see and hear our friends and loved ones.  And of course our colleagues at work – sometimes it’s just easier to communicate.  But, there’s a fine line – I come from this space having worked for Premiere Global, now PGi back in the day before web collaboration tools even existed.  We sold audio lines for $0.34 per line!  Then came out the web collaboration tools and we sold those licenses and trained business users how to hold excellent web meetings.  Well, human nature is such that not everyone wanted to be on camera.  The product team of iMeet – a tool invented by PGi in 2008 – allowed for attendees to create a avatar where they could put up after entering the meeting instead of their live camera.  OR they could put up a photo of their choice from their computer.  Cool huh?  So many of us during quarantine, we are looking a bit shabby at times, yes?  Some people wake, shower and dress up – make up, every day because that’s what they do.  But even so we are past due on our hair dresser, nail manacures, and hair is long or turning colors we are not confident in.  I talked last week about doing TOO many video meetings.  We need to give our people some breathing room during the day. 

Deliveries not coming

I ordered two things off eBay last week and was promised to receive them  one on Friday and one on Sunday.  One item was a Spin bike I paid hundreds of dollars for – the seller cancelled the order = still has my money and I have no idea when my refund will show up.  I’ve heard some people’s grocery deliveries they are having to schedule 6-7 days out and 2 days prior to their delivery day, their order is cancelled.

Zoom Bombs

So Zoom is the new Webex – or web collaboration tool.  Why I say that is because like Kleenex is to Tissue Webex was the brand name of the solution category.  2019 it became more popular to use Zoom.  Well, if you haven’t heard….a “photo bomb” is when someone or something living gets in the back of your photo without you being aware.  Zoom meeting hosts and attendees have - unbeknownst to them – had un-invited attendees who at some point in the meeting disrupt it.  They draw on presentations…..as written by Fortune, April 2nd, the trolls attempt to disrupt the video chat and upset participants by shouting profanity or racial slurs, or put up disturbing or offensive images in their video feed.  It’s a modern form of trolls.  These guys are hackers.  Since the determination that there were deficiencies in the security protocols on behalf of Zoom, the CEO, Eric Yuan,    has taken responsibility and apologized in this blog posted on April 1st.  Zoom declairs that they designed the platform primarily for “large institutions with full IT support” and that since Quarantine, the user base has expanded way beyond what they could have ever anticipated for.  Regardless, they are under scrutiny of the FBI and NY Attorney general having to answer questions from security experts about the levels of encryption and they have also been served two (2) class action law suits that a feature on their platform (which has since been deactivated) shared privacy data with Facebook.

Zoom 101: Securing your Meetings & Virtual Classrooms

Some schools and other companies are moving their virtual meetings while Zoom says in the next 90 days they will focus solely on security and not add any new features outside of Security.

So, it’s a choice – move over onto something else or stick with Zoom.  I’m personally going to stick with Zoom.  I love the platform.  I’ll follow their guidelines as to how to keep my meetings secure.  One of the things is at this time encryption is not possible when you dial in from an external device like your mobile phone so I will be dialing in from my computer.  I’m happy that the CEO has taken accountability and so I’m going to stay on it and take the security measures that they advise.

Tech Talk

Boy there must be a ton of people out there who’s skillsets and talents exist not inside technology yet they are having to figure out their home band width, their virtual meeting equipment, kids school computer, website sources to access information….it goes on.  It must feel like another language at times.

In my promo video for this episode posted on LinkedIn and some shorter video format duration on other social media I joked, And so the DS 2407 is not available, By adding a block of code at the top of your script called a param block, you can add a parameter to pass into the script.  We will see if Schisizm co can get one delivered to one of their guys houses and we’ll test and engage dept 222 for advanced third tier support.

It’s a bunch of jargon but it was to laugh at the fact that sometimes those of us in segmented industries it’s almost impossible to understand sometimes! We need to be able to reach out to people who understand to help us.

 

Essential & Non Essential Businesses

Things are changing so fast and depending on where you live, there are different categories of closures.  The State of Georgia, where I live, went from restricted to “stay at home order” or what I have been referring to as “lock down” last Friday April 2nd.  It’s a little bit confusing as to what is essential and what is not.  I saw a sign outside of new housing development and it said, “housing is an essential business but we are only taking scheduled appointments.  Call this number to schedule your appointment.”  My husband and I were talking about cleaning services. Are they essential we were pondering?  If you look up questions online it isn’t always in your face what is what.  Last night we decided to order food for either delivery or pick up….

Wine Text

6. Wine Text

Do you know Gary Vanderchuk AKA, Gary Vee?  He’s famous in the digital marketing entrepreneur space.  His story if you don’t know him is that he grew up as a young man working for his dad’s liquor store and he brought his dads liquor store online and nobody back then thought it was possible to sell wine online and that nobody would research it or gain info about wine online and he took his father’s biz which I believe was struggling to some extent anyway to a multi million biz  because he took it online back in the day when the internet first came out way before we are today. and so he helped his dads wine co who I believe owns Wine Text – open up this new service – it’s called Wine Text -  it was back before Corona Virus hit. Every day they send you a text if you guys don’t have it – some of you may be using it and enjoying it.  But if you don’t have it every day you get the text, open it up and it has a video of a guy or woman behind a table talking about the featured wine of the day and the features of it.  You get the wine per bottle at a discount and they quantify the number of bottles you can order for a discount and you just text back and tell them how many bottles of wine you want and they tell you how much the shipping will be and you you’re a min. you get free shipping depending on the number of minimum bottles, 6 or 12.

And so hello we are trying to stay home and we are trying to not go out and we are stay at home and the govt is telling us stock up - don’t hoard but stock up for a week or two and try not to go out at all until we get thru this apex – this tipping point in the no. of cases and stuff, where the peak is with all the number of cases there are – so having wine delivered to your house!  Some of you may have been doing this thru NAPA or whatever but most people haven’t so if you drink wine and you’ve never heard of Wine Text and haven’t been doing this and you are interested, I’ve really been enjoying it.  It’s cool.

Grocery Trips

This past weekend the Gov’t announced that the Center for Disease Control urges now people to wear home made masks when they go out particularly to the grocery store while remaining the 6 foot social distancing.  Well, we have seen many people doing more than that:  gloves, shoe coverings, neck coverings under the mask, plastic bag outfits, and even plastic Halloween costume face masks….it’s been nothing short of shocking.

Anti Virus-ing

This is yet another category where personal choice is coming into play.  Some of my friends are antibacteria and anti virus spraying all of their groceries either before they put them into their trunks or after they get home an unbag their groceries before they put them away.  There’s no right or wrong here. It is true that it can  be helpful because the virus can stay alive for days on the things that people touch in the stores then you put it in your cart and touch it with your hands and then you could touch your mouth, nose or eyes.  People are using bleach and sprays to clean surfaces in their homes….in their cars, on front door nobs – you name it.  This all is very time consuming and a lot to be thinking about every day!  And it is definitely contributing to our mental stress levels or wellness adding up with everything else that we are thinking about.

Frequent & Proper Hand Washing

So the CDC first recommended singing or humming Happy Birthday Twice as being the simple way to time the amount of seconds you are supposed to scrub the soap on your hands before you rinse and dry your hands.  The CDC has a guide available to de-bunk any miss information about how to kill the virus if it gets on your hands titled Show Me the Science – How to Wash your Hands  I feel like we have all heard it a million times, but honestly today when I pulled it up I did learn that the water doesn’t need to be warm or hot (I’ve been wondering this in the back of my mind lately). The guide, based on studies (of course it comes from the CDC) says, “he temperature of the water does not appear to affect microbe removal; however, warmer water may cause more skin irritation and is more environmentally costly.”

Kids Need to Eat & Eat Again

It’s hard enough to plan or make our own meals let alone every single one of our children’s meals every day.  Our oldest daughter has a 3 year old and we were on Facetime with her last night and her daughter asked her for food and she said, “I just gave you a plate of chicken nuggets and you only ate half so no wonder you are hungry already.  Not to mention, I ate the other half and I am trying to not eat things like chicken nuggets.  I’m trying to eat like salads and stuff that’s better for me.”  Three year olds can’t make their own meals, but they can watch you.  Leading by example and teaching them while they are young the art of food preparation is a gift.  Our youngest who is 17, I am always cooking for him because I love to cook but I am definitely holding him accountable for helping write the grocery list and learning how to cook new meals.  It isn’t easy because he wants me to do it – he does enjoy some of it at times - but it’s a great time for young people to learn. We had one of his friends stay with us over the holiday season and he was cooking all kinds of things! His mother did a great job forcing him to cook for himself sometimes before Corona Virus hit.  So I’m sure she is having an easier time then most of us in this department right now because her son was already “trained”.  So it does help when the older kids help and it’s safe for them to cook and it’s safe for them to cook – or even more complex meals they can cook the older they are. Some of you have kids who are college age and post college  it just depends but it’s just nice when the kids lend a hand with the food and meals. It’s just nice when the older kids help when the kids contribute.   It helps us working parents!

Hair-ness

Well I get my hair colored and cut and my husband he gets his hair cut like every 2 weeks!  My hair is turning colors I do not care for and my husbands hair – I like it long haha but he doesn’t.

I’ve got some grocery store grade root touchup dies and also some purchased from the beauty supply outlet – called SALLY.  I’m not sure how it will turn out.  I’m quite unsure haha  - I think I need to order a “toner” online.  A toner to kindof tone down some of these brassy shades showing thru.  Who knows whether it’ll show up or not!  But wth us getting onto video cams we want to feel our best. Whether it is Facebook, video meetings or whatever.  So this is taking time and thought also.

The NEWS

I was guilty of watching too much news at first.  Were you?  I know a lot of people were.  We were like, what is going on? What is going to happen next? What is the deal with the schools? What are they going to ask of us next? What can we do? Am I gonna get it? Are the older people I know going to be ok??  We felt like if we watched the news constantly that it would help us feel real time informed and somehow more in control of our lives.  But then it starts to wear on people psychologically.  It can be too much, even confusing.  So we started to hear advice to “limit it”.  Stay informed but direct activities, work and personal without the news on.  And also everyone has their own ways they like to dedicate and decide on timing as to dedicating it and living with someone or many others, we should work together to try so everyone is mentally doing okay with the consumption of news.  Know what I mean?  What’s worked for your family?  One thing we try to do is watch several sources at times and try to decide for ourselves what is truly important and action oriented.

We still have our Ailments

Geeze the pollen has been bad here.  Last week, I got the worst head ache in the middle of the day. I didn’t know why I had this head ache.  I finally put 2 and 2 together and figured out it was allergies from all the green stuff outside!  I wasn’t even thinking previously about taking any medicine. I actually have year round allergies but it’s worse in the Spring.  During Coronavirus it’s easy to forget about our other ailments that we used to totally weigh importance on.  The news too – they used to exclaim every morning – OMG the pollen is SO bad today! Don’t go outside! Like it was the worst thing ever and not once this spring have I heard the news talking about it  yes it is WAY WAY WAY less important than Covid 19.  But I must say I think that pollen and allergies can really hurt people who have asthma or other lunch vulnerabilities. So I’m not down playing it.  I’m not saying one is more important than the other but all we hear on the news now is Covid 19 and Corona Virus.  What I’m saying is part of taking care of ourselves is to eat right, exercise, get outdoors, try to sleep enough and take your vitamins and consider your bodies needs, like allergic reactions to pollen so you can feel your best.  We’re under enough stress.  We still have our ailments.  I just wanted to acknowledge that.

The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*CK – Now it’s spelled differently from the way it’s spelled on the book but I am a clean podcast so….The subline to the book is

A Counterintuitive approach to living a good life

Well, I’m not all the way through this book but this NYTimes Best Seller is helping a lot of people. The inside flap of the book Mark Manson says, “Let’s be honest; sometimes things are fucked up and we have to live with it.” For the past few years, Manson – via his wildly popular blog – has been working on correcting our delusional expectation for ourselves and for the world.” “……Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties – once we stop running from and avoiding and start confronting painful truths- we can begin to find the courage and confidence we desperately seek.”  Interested? 

Animals & Coronavirus

The NY Times news confirmed, “Tiger Tests positive for Coronavirus at Bronx Zoo” and online there are articles that veterinarians are advising us to keep our pets using social distancing which is no less than 6 ft from anyone they are living with.  Some people are going to the extent of covering their pets in protective gear while outdoors walking them.

Alexa

So where we are with technology currently is audio is going to revolutionize the way we do many many things.  Our children today will be grocery shopping via these audio devices is just one example.  It isn’t just Alexa - Amazon owns (Alexa), Google (Google Assistant), Apple (Siri) and Microsoft (Cortana).  Virtual assistant robots are being developed.  It will soon have the capability to access all information on the internet and at lightening speeds.  AI (artificial intelligence) and data will allow for it to develop conclusions and scenarios to consider.  For those of you who have Alexa or one or many of these devices if you are like me, we way under utilize it today, just because most of us still do many of the tings we do every day out of habit.  Did you know that you can tell your audio device, “Play Carey Sperry – All Social Y’all Podcast?”

For links to references I made here today please visit www.allsocialyall.com for the shownotes.  Please review and subscribe.  Stay well and I am thinking of all of you who are struggling either with a job loss or reduction of income or of someone you know with Corona virus or you yourself having it.  I am praying for all of our medical personnel and the scientists behind finding medications and a vaccination.  This is a very scary and important time for us to get through.  Thank you for listening and I wish you a peaceful rest of your day.