Six months into the pandemic, and things are starting to go downhill in terms of how people behave or do their jobs. I'm not sure why, but a good indication is that most (young) people seem to have forgotten how to social distance. There are very few of them that remember to do so, and it is always me who has to move away from them if I meet them on the sidewalk or in a store. It's incredibly annoying. Add to that the ones who hold parties with many people, and you get the picture. For them, the pandemic is over, if it ever even occurred. They are hopeless cases. Case in point: the recent bunker party that nearly ended in the deaths of many of the attendees. In my opinion, not only is there a coronavirus pandemic, but there's an epidemic of stupidity and idiocy. You can read about this incredibly stupid rave party here: https://www.newsinenglish.no/2020/08/31/two-charged-after-illegal-bunker-party/
There are other things that have happened during the past two weeks that are an indication that people's attention spans are getting less focused and that work output is getting sloppier. The first situation concerns online shopping; I know that a lot of people are shopping on the web now, so there is probably a backlog of orders most places. I ordered four items two weeks ago from an online pharmacy here in Norway. I have ordered from before (three times) without any problems. This time, my order was not confirmed and I had to contact them to get a confirmation. Then today, I got my shipment, but it was someone else's order, so now I am in the process of trying to contact the company via telephone to find out how to return the items at no cost to me. Of course I was put on hold, because as always, there is always a long queue of people waiting to be served, which I never believe is the reality. It's rather that they only have one or two persons dealing with telephone customer service. They would prefer that you contacted them by email or used their chatbot function (which is a piece of garbage). Finally I got through, and of course the onus is on me to prove that I got the wrong shipment. I had to take photos of what I received and photos of the box the items were sent in, and send an email with the photos to customer service. I did all that, so now I wait to see what happens. I cancelled my original order and asked for a refund. I have no patience for this crap.
Today, out of the blue, I got tossed off my hospital's email server--no warning, no explanation, no nothing. So now I have no functioning email account and cannot receive emails from people. I have two work email accounts, none of which can be accessed from home. It's pathetic. The IT service people are trying to help but they have no idea what's wrong. It won't be solved; just an intuition, but the explanations that have been advanced so far don't hold water. I could connect early this morning, and then suddenly around mid-morning, I couldn't. Go figure. It's a good thing I am retiring sooner than later, because I no longer have any patience for this. And hopefully this isn't an omen for how the rest of the week is going to be. But you never know.
