This week is dedicated to the one, the only, Coronavirus: show-stealer of 2020 and still playing sold-out houses until, likely, late into 2021.
Rather than trying to convince readers to consider the socio-political implications of this or that policy, its effect on the college-aged demographic, or any other such lofty goals, the premise of this week’s column is simple. I’ve gone about the Internet this week finding the best instances of things that could have only happened in this year of our discontent. In the trials and travails of these avatars of COVID-tide, reflect, dear reader, on the blessings you have retained despite quarantine, election, and now (apparently) blizzard.
The first story comes to us from Asia. Professor Dong Wang of the National University of Singapore was delivering a lecture over Zoom, the kind that many of us have sat through in various states of attention. What was different about Professor Dong’s lecture was that it went on for about two hours, all the while he was on mute. When he ended his lecture to ask for questions, he got nothing but crickets. It was only afterwards that the few students who stayed the entire time told him he had been muted. Apparently, students had tried everything to get his attention, even calling his personal phone, but they were unable to avert the inevitable train-wreck of a 2-hour lecture wasted.
Another Zoom mishap, this one a bit more light-hearted, involves a hearing in the 394th Judicial District Court of Texas. The meeting had been held over Zoom, like many court proceedings since the beginning of the pandemic. Attorney Rod Ponton was taken aback to discover that, as the judge and fellow attorneys instructed him, he was a cat. Specifically, he had a video filter turned on that made him appear as a kitten in the video chat. As he worked to fix his Zoom settings, he set the record straight, letting the court know definitively, “I am here, live, I am not a cat.”
Finally, we go to England. On March 1, 2020, British teenager Joseph Flavill suffered a traumatic brain injury after being hit by a car in the town of Burton-on-Trent. He has since been receiving care while comatose in a medical center in central England. Curiously, however, Joseph’s injury occurred a few weeks before the first national lockdown in the UK. Meaning that as he regains consciousness and begins his long road to recovery, he will be waking up in a world completely ravaged by COVID, a ravaging that he has slept the whole way through. Most tragically, his family hasn’t been able to visit him in person because of COVID restrictions, which means not only can he only communicate by blinking, but he can only communicate by blinking via video link. I think I would just go back to sleep and try to wake up in another ten months.
These COVID trials and travails, from the tragic to the farcical, helped me keep all of my blessings in perspective this week, as I hope it will for you too.
Image Credit / The New York Times
