COVID-19: who’s going full doomsday prep on this?

PINT of Stella. mate!

Many, many Scotches
Well bollocks to the lot of you pansies. I for one am glad I no longer have to spend any more time in quarantine.
Seriously. you try spending over 100 days in isolation when not working on what is essentially a giant floating bomb that's getting more and more dangerous by the day because the manpower required for the essential care and maintenance over the last year and a half has not been there due to closed borders.

Yeah, nurses and ICU staff are going to have a tough time of it but fuck it. We've had an absolute cunt of a time for the last 18 months and at least in a hospital when you finish shift you can go home, see your family and not worry about the fact that where you sleep is also where you work and where you know there's at least one or two areas of rusting steel precariously holding back tonnes of high-pressure hydrocarbons that have probably gone unchecked due to a lack of resources.
 

Haakon

Keeps on digging
Well bollocks to the lot of you pansies. I for one am glad I no longer have to spend any more time in quarantine.
Seriously. you try spending over 100 days in isolation when not working on what is essentially a giant floating bomb that's getting more and more dangerous by the day because the manpower required for the essential care and maintenance over the last year and a half has not been there due to closed borders.

Yeah, nurses and ICU staff are going to have a tough time of it but fuck it. We've had an absolute cunt of a time for the last 18 months and at least in a hospital when you finish shift you can go home, see your family and not worry about the fact that where you sleep is also where you work and where you know there's at least one or two areas of rusting steel precariously holding back tonnes of high-pressure hydrocarbons that have probably gone unchecked due to a lack of resources.
Prelude...?
 

downunderdallas

Likes Bikes and Dirt
I gotta say that it is going to suck in a lot of ways when WA (and I'll lump Qld, Tas and SA into it too) open up to NSW/Vic the world in a number of ways. I mean great that I'll be able to visit my family in Melbourne and a new niece in Seattle but sucks that something we have managed (who knows how) to avoid will be a day-to-day reality.
 

Squidfayce

Eats Squid
Alright, I work from home full time. I’ve had wife, kids driving me mad for the last few months with home schooling. So tomorrow was going to be my first day at home alone with all them going back to school. So I thought fuck it, I’m having the day off and going to ride all day. Electrician who was coming to do some work on the house 2 days ago, is now coming midday tomorrow. And just now daughters high school has been shut due to covid…..day off postponed :(
Erm....that's litterally perfect. Your daughter can let the electrician in while you're out....
 

cammas

Seamstress
I currently work a couple days in the office and a couple from home as we rotate shifts to keep interaction to a minimum, a woman who works next to me has been working from home for ages due to her young daughter and schools being shut etc.
She’s finally back at work this week come Tuesday she gets a call, her son’s work mate has Covid he thought it was hay fever. So she leaves to take her son to get tested and her boss, who was at my desk at the time suggests she should get tested as well considering they live together etc.
Well today I have a missed call from the site manager, call him back and informs me that woman’s son has tested positive and as precaution don’t come in as I have been deemed a close contact of her, yeah no worries I’ll get tested just to make sure.
Anyway her boss calls me as my job aligns with them as I am their planner, we are chatting as she’s in the same boat and already been to get tested, I ask what this woman’s test results were? She tells me she just spoke to her and she’s in the queue to get tested, I’m like WTF! She left early to take him to get tested but she didn’t get tested at the same time! Now I’m waiting on mine and her test results, if she’s positive we are going into iso.

Sorry for long story or rant but fuck if she got tested on Tuesday when she said she was, I wouldn’t be so pissed. My wife, daughter and I are all double vaxxed and we are masked up at work etc but still, now I’m waiting on a text message tomorrow plus thinking where I have been, I know I spent close to two hours in the optometrist finally getting some new glasses and I scan in everywhere.
 

PINT of Stella. mate!

Many, many Scotches
Christ, dude. Hope you don’t ever need the ICU or the pandered staff in there. I think you’re aiming your rage at the wrong people.
I get you’ve had a shit time. It sounds horrific. But, Christ.
See? straight away with the "Well, I hope you never need an ICU bed" self-righteousness. You sound like a parent who automatically decrees that one joint will lead to a smack addiction, riding a bike down to the shop without a helmet will end in a coma and holding hands on the bus will end in teen pregnancy.

I'm over it. I'm over the prevailing assumption that if you're in any way in favour of taking a dynamic approach to fighting this thing while ensuring that we aren't letting people fall by the wayside, you're some kind of reckless, self-centred arsehole who's ready to punch a police horse in the name of freedom.

We're now 18 months down the line. I know for a lot of people - particularly financially-comfortable old farts like the majority of Rotorburn's demographic these days (myself included), the first year of COVID was a bit scary at first but easy to settle into, so any change to that is going to feel scary again but let's be honest. We don't really have a choice.

A lot of the long term effects of COVID on society at large are only now starting to bite with things like the global chip shortage, soaring energy prices, wear and tear on existing infrastructure, kids education standards dropping etc. becoming the norm.
Things need to get moving again and thanks to vaccinations and a better understanding of how the virus spreads and how to manage it, we can finally do this. Unfortunately there's still this head-stuck-in-the-sand mentality where any effort to discuss changing our focus is met with 'oh look how bad it is in the UK or America' or 'well, what about new variants?' and 'the vaccine doesn't stop infection, it only slows it'

Well, first of all, why are the fucking basket cases of Brexit Britain and Red-State USA used as our automatic examples of how things will go when we relax the borders? Why does noone ever use Canada or the Scandinavian countries as comparisons? Secondly, what about new vaccines? I doubt the folk at Pfizer and Moderna have hung up their lab coats and are now sitting around scratching their arse, playing beer pong. It's going to be a bit like whack a mole but we're going to get this thing sorted or a least manageable eventually. We did it with the Spanish Flu and we didn't even have Dolly Parton helping back then.

As for the very commonplace attitude I saw around Australia - here included- that anyone who was stuck overseas and trying to get home was somehow some sort of selfish gallivanting Typhoid Mary who should be exiled for all eternity in the name of keeping our borders secure. That was a pretty dark moment for the country. It really came across as quite cuntish and it's definitely shown me that the inner Pauline Hanson is quite strong in a lot more of us than we'd like to admit.
 

PINT of Stella. mate!

Many, many Scotches
Prelude...?
I think that White Elephant needs to actually have product flowing into it before it can be dangerous.

I won't say exactly where I work but it's not really important as it's an industry-wide issue at the moment. To use a common industry metaphor, there are a hell of a lot more holes in the swiss cheese at the moment.

Most are minor incidents, unworthy of reporting on their own but in a wider context, the chances of something major going down grow ever stronger. Most notably there was a flash fire on one of the Bass Strait rigs that supply Melbourne's gas earlier this year. That's the sort of thing that can end in a Piper Alpha incident (and as the 90's Longford explosion taught Melbournites, cold showers for a few weeks when the supply is halted)
 

moorey

call me Mia
See? straight away with the "Well, I hope you never need an ICU bed" self-righteousness. You sound like a parent who automatically decrees that one joint will lead to a smack addiction, riding a bike down to the shop without a helmet will end in a coma and holding hands on the bus will end in teen pregnancy.

I'm over it. I'm over the prevailing assumption that if you're in any way in favour of taking a dynamic approach to fighting this thing while ensuring that we aren't letting people fall by the wayside, you're some kind of reckless, self-centred arsehole who's ready to punch a police horse in the name of freedom.

We're now 18 months down the line. I know for a lot of people - particularly financially-comfortable old farts like the majority of Rotorburn's demographic these days (myself included), the first year of COVID was a bit scary at first but easy to settle into, so any change to that is going to feel scary again but let's be honest. We don't really have a choice.

A lot of the long term effects of COVID on society at large are only now starting to bite with things like the global chip shortage, soaring energy prices, wear and tear on existing infrastructure, kids education standards dropping etc. becoming the norm.
Things need to get moving again and thanks to vaccinations and a better understanding of how the virus spreads and how to manage it, we can finally do this. Unfortunately there's still this head-stuck-in-the-sand mentality where any effort to discuss changing our focus is met with 'oh look how bad it is in the UK or America' or 'well, what about new variants?' and 'the vaccine doesn't stop infection, it only slows it'

Well, first of all, why are the fucking basket cases of Brexit Britain and Red-State USA used as our automatic examples of how things will go when we relax the borders? Why does noone ever use Canada or the Scandinavian countries as comparisons? Secondly, what about new vaccines? I doubt the folk at Pfizer and Moderna have hung up their lab coats and are now sitting around scratching their arse, playing beer pong. It's going to be a bit like whack a mole but we're going to get this thing sorted or a least manageable eventually. We did it with the Spanish Flu and we didn't even have Dolly Parton helping back then.

As for the very commonplace attitude I saw around Australia - here included- that anyone who was stuck overseas and trying to get home was somehow some sort of selfish gallivanting Typhoid Mary who should be exiled for all eternity in the name of keeping our borders secure. That was a pretty dark moment for the country. It really came across as quite cuntish and it's definitely shown me that the inner Pauline Hanson is quite strong in a lot more of us than we'd like to admit.
I don’t even know where to start with that. So I won’t. I’m sorry you are suffering.
If you think ‘fuck the nurses’ is the solution, we are done though. The rest of what you said has essentially fuck all to do with anything I said.
 

Haakon

Keeps on digging
I think that White Elephant needs to actually have product flowing into it before it can be dangerous.

I won't say exactly where I work but it's not really important as it's an industry-wide issue at the moment. To use a common industry metaphor, there are a hell of a lot more holes in the swiss cheese at the moment.

Most are minor incidents, unworthy of reporting on their own but in a wider context, the chances of something major going down grow ever stronger. Most notably there was a flash fire on one of the Bass Strait rigs that supply Melbourne's gas earlier this year. That's the sort of thing that can end in a Piper Alpha incident (and as the 90's Longford explosion taught Melbournites, cold showers for a few weeks when the supply is halted)
Gas led recovery huh ;)
 
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