If you think it’s an accident that ICE is transporting migrant kids through a COVID-19 hub, here’s a reminder–Anne Frank didn’t die in a gas chamber. She died of a treatable disease, while incarcerated in a concentration camp and being denied adequate medical care.
Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. Some, as you operated the levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what traveled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now:
“There it goes again,” she said. “It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.”
On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction, because he was operating the up-line, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate.
His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: “What did it say?”
“There was a GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a-”
“You sent it on?” said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later.
“Yes, because it was a G code,” said Princess.
“Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.”
“Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times, Up-line and down-line. Just a name, no message or anything!”
She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: “I know a U at the end means it has to be turned around at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.” This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. “So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?”
Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression.
Then Grandad said: “Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.”
“Hah!” said Roger.
“I’m sorry if I did something wrong,” said the girl meekly. “I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?”
“He… fell off a tower,” said Grandad.
“Hah!” said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.
“He’s dead?” said Princess.
“Well, some people say–” Roger began.
“Roger!” snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning,
“I know about Sending Home,” said Princess. “And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.”
“Who told you that?” said Grandad.
Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific.
“Oh, I just heard it,” she said airily. “Somewhere.”
“Someone was trying to scare you,” said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears.
It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject.
It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind.
“We keep the name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. “He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?”
-on the meaning of GNU, and keeping someone’s memory alive.
I am not an expert in immunology - I follow doctors for that.
But I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place that paid better than average wages for food service.
And I am terrified of #COVID19.
Not because the virus is going to kill people, but because poverty might. / Y'all, all laws aside, nobody in the restaurant industry goes to the doctor when they’re sick.
There are health code rules about what symptoms exclude you from work - you have to go to the doctor and get cleared, or be symptom free for 24 hours.
And they are *never* followed. / The people making your food do not have health insurance. Restaurants almost never offer it.
They do not have paid time off. Benefits like that aren’t imaginable.
They do not have enough people in the schedule to cover an absence. “Lean Staffing.” It’s more profitable. / The average age of a fast-food worker is 29. The average income is $8.69 an hour. I was taxed around 21% on paychecks.
The average doctor’s visit w/o insurance, costs $300-600.
43.7 hours. At minimum, more than a week’s take-home pay.
Going to the doctor is an *insane luxury*. I have watched people PRIDE themselves on working through illness and injury. I had a driver break his foot by stepping on a tennis ball in someone’s driveway, and then work another four days on a broken foot on ibuprofen and spite.
Flu-like symptoms?
Fuck out of here. MOST fast food workers are already on some kind of public assistance.
Many of those are “means tested” and require them to keep jobs.
laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2013/fast_… This means that
1) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to go to the doctor. They will do what we’ve always done - dose up heavily on DayQuil, puke in the bathroom, explain things away as being “hung over” or “tired,” and their manager will pretend nothing is wrong. 2) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to miss work. The median age is 29 for christ’s sake. These are people with bills, families, responsibilities.
Median 2-bedroom rent is ~1,194/mo. That $8.69 wage is ~1,190/mo take-home pay.
Even w/ roommates, that’s HALF YOUR MONEY. You can’t afford to take off work to go to the doctor, much less take off work when the doctor says you need to be quarantined for three weeks. You need every hour.
Otherwise you lose your job, then your housing, and anything else that keeps the wolf away from the door. When this happened to me, the doctor said I needed to be off my feet and resting for two weeks, light duty for another two.
I took 4 days. It was one of two times in nine years I missed work, both of them involving a trip to the emergency room.
People who work food service are less likely to have reliable transportation - so they ride mass transit, exposing themselves to more people.
They live together in tight spaces, ensuring it spreads between folks.
They have poor diets, poor sleep, and weakened immune systems. ~14mil people work in food service in the US. They’re in every community. Everyone has to eat.
They live and work in conditions that make the spread of disease inevitable.
They won’t go to the doctor until it’s a crisis, long after they’ve passed things on to others. The Flu is bad enough, going around a kitchen.
#COVID19 is substantially more easily transmitted than the flu.
And we’ve created a situation where food service workers’ SURVIVAL depends on doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of anything that could fight a pandemic. And these are the people making your food. The average food service worker is a millenial. 62% of us live paycheck to paycheck.
And it doesn’t have to be like this. In our parents’ lifetimes, it wasn’t.
God Bless the Conservative movement and their deregulation, pro-business legislation, and “choice.” Poverty is a public health crisis, y'all. Wage Slavery kills.
And if you can’t be bothered to care about that out of your basic human dignity, maybe the fact that the servile class you’ve been supported by can’t afford to not make you sick will fucking help.
I’m a barista at a very large and famous coffee company (y’all know the one) and we are, technically speaking, supposed to have it lucky. Because we get paid time off and some of us do have health care.
Except paid time off doesn’t kick in until you’ve been with the company for a year. You are only eligible for health care if you work over twenty hours a week. And even with all this—at my store, the “work through the pain” mentality is SO STRONG, y’all.
I have gotten sick because supervisors have come to work sick; we pass it back and forth to each other, and try to blame it on the cold or the changing weather. I have had to call out maybe twice—once because I was new and sneezing and coughing and my friends were all telling me that it was irresponsible to go in, and once because a cold had ravaged my voice so badly I sounded like Kermit the frog’s evil twin. Both times I did exactly what I was supposed to do: called my manager with plenty of advance notice. The first time, she guilted me into coming in anyway, saying that she would try to find coverage for me but that it wasn’t likely she’d be able to. I struggled through four hours of that shift before my nicest coworker showed up early so that I could go home and get some rest. The second time, I got the day off, but had to cover 8- and 9-hour shifts the next two days to “make up for it.”
This is how we are staffed: we don’t have enough people to cover absences. If any of us is sick we will absolutely come into work—and I am stunningly, immensely privileged in that I was able to try to get out of working: most of my coworkers have kids and families that they need to provide for.
If Coronavirus spreads in the US, your friendly neighborhood baristas will be behind the counters. We will be smiling, stifling coughs, making drinks that we’ll be trying not to sneeze on, and running to the back to blow our noses, wash our hands, and get back out there, because you can’t run the floor with just two people during peak.
