In my last post, I spoke of my own entry into an unwanted “new world” of illness and coping. Since then, it seems we all have found ourselves with an unthinkable menace: a pandemic. This has caused uncertainty in how to proceed among nearly everyone, all the way up to the world’s great governments. We all live on edge, trying to figure out how far this Covid-19 will go and how long it will last. (I read somewhere, I wish I remembered which site, that the Novel Coronavirus is to Covid-19 as HIV is to Aids, in that one causes the other. So they’re not necessarily interchangeable as terms, though common usage has tilted in this way.)

Anyhow, like the rest of you I find myself trying to adapt to restaurant closures, fewer supplies being available at grocery stores, and the most difficult of all being mostly stuck at home. One of the great challenges I face is whether to continue going to work. The place has not yet closed, so I sort of hesitate to leave needed dough on the table. And unfortunately, my position definitely cannot be done from home. They are starting to practice social distancing measures though, making sure that the fewer and fewer of us who arrive each day do not sit directly across from each other and are spaced as far apart as the equipment allows. I do believe that at some point soon some sort of total lockdown will be issued, but until then I will just wash my hands a lot, try not to touch my face, and hope that I have not been passively exposed.

When things are normal, I am still mostly doing the same job I have for the majority of my seven years at good ol’ LCI: packaging light sticks. I feel like I might finally be getting up to everyone else’s speed, which means that I can be left in bliss and to proceed through my thoughts as I desire. I’m a natural introvert, but do try to interact occasionally.

The only tough thing these days is that work has become a lot less reliable than it had been. Well on looking at my previous Job Days post, some of that changeability had already crept in. The difference now is that by Wednesday each week, we will have usually run out of light sticks to package. This is because each truckload is relatively small, and they only come in on Fridays. So if no work is available in flatware, we must spend the rest of the week sorting folders or doing some other sort of busywork. The worst is when we have stretches where nothing is available at all, but fortunately these are few and far between.

Moving Forward

Before all this Covid stuff started, I was launching myself onto the path to become a CPACC, Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. This followed the SourceAmerica Training I had been doing for much of the latter part of last year, and is being completed through Deque University, a series of online courses offered by Deque Systems. The material is challenging, but no doubt my prior knowledge gained through an HTML course I had taken with the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired has helped me tremendously. To this point, I have completed four courses: Accessibility Fundamentals, Designing An Accessible User Experience, Semantic Structure and Navigation, and Images. Now working on one that deals with colors. The visual stuff is the hardest, but I am learning.

And finally, I have just acquired another Rehab Counselor with the North Carolina Division of Services for the Blind. She reached out to me, and we are going to try one more time to see what we can make happen on the job front. I am feeling hopeful though, and might especially see if I can find something that allows me to work from home so that I can nix the work commute. We’ll see how this story continues to unfold.