Day 4.
The Kids are home. Which is a good thing right?
Being kids they tap into the anxiety that is prevalent around them; in this case they have been absorbing both the teachers’ and our emotional instability. Being kids, they manifest this in the form of restless energy and parental harassment.
Despite this being my official day off, as Restaurant manager I still have to be involved in ongoing events. This means I am constantly trying to outwit and evade the chaos for the duration of my endless calls of platitudes to my staff and instructions from my area manager. The Webcasts are fine as the authors cannot hear the sound of my eldest deliberately pushing my youngest off the sofa and the protests that follow, or the rage when a son loses gadget privileges due to bad behaviour.
The morning theme is thus: messages, calls and emails mostly about whether the restaurant would and should open- the team worried about wasted efforts and infection vectors.
Essentially nothing has changed since yesterday, I reassure, just go on as normal!
Noon brings news from the upper management. No doubt the increasing sentiment on the company social pages has aligned with the financial outlook and their war room has decided.
They have weighed up their hearts, their responsibility to their employees, and the corporate responsibility to key workers and the access to takeaway for those shielding. Not to mention the financial pros and cons.
The long and short of it: all but a few dozen restaurants will close, chosen by their value of takeaway to the local community. My unit did not fall into this category, as expected. Finally my conversations reduced in number, a plan formed with the duty manager to finalise our preparations to put the store to sleep.
Messages and intranet posts turned to relief then fear that this was finally IT.
Interspersed between all of this was the continual parade of headlines pinging the phones or hitting the news channel that now was a permanent backdrop to our day. As my wife is a key worker at a school, every little nugget of news is analysed and extrapolated for clues to the consequences.
It takes the hungry lament of the boys to pull us back to homelife, a process we gratefully full back into, shunning this impossible world back to the fringe.
The routine finishes with the kids tucked up in bed, and usually is followed by us parents studiously avoiding work-talk until we follow suit. Tonight though, we discuss how weird it is to be talking our oldest son through the lockdown and comforting him as he realises that the ramifications of lockdown mean at least a month of no friends. Even then, we still can’t believe the events that are still unfolding, like we’ve somehow fallen into a poor quality film scenario, and no one, especially the director, has a clue what is going on.
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