This will be the final Wednesday installment of the weekly Coronavirus stories series. If there’s a strong desire to keep them going, you can still email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com and perhaps we’ll have a regular section in the weekly Saturday newsletter. I’d be up for that. But as for the weekly stories, I sense that the novelty, as difficult as that novelty may be, has worn off for many people. Every one of these emails is a reminder that this shit is still going, and far from over. And I understand if one does not particularly want that reminder every Wednesday.
But I am up for a weekly Coronavirus story in the Saturday newsletter, if people send them to me. Up to you.
Please stay safe, and any time you want to send me your stories, or, shoot, just want to talk about this, it’s williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Either way: It has been my honor to have you share these stories with me. We have two good ones this week.
The first story comes from Jared:
I am a 42-year-old man with a family. (Wife, three girls 9,9 and 10, and a golden named Willie.) I own a home-building and development business and have 10 full-time employees, as well as indirectly employing a large number of others.
I left for spring break with my family in early March confidently thinking this was going to be a great year business-wise and feeling pretty good and excited for a vacation. The vacation turned into a worryfest as negative news on the virus started to pour in, and I returned home to a different reality. I did what I always do when faced with a challenge: I dove into it as hard as I could. Since then I have been working like a madman to try and figure this thing out, how to survive, how to even come out the other side better. Many of the other small business owners I know have been doing the same. I think it is ingrained into who we are to work harder and fight back when challenged. The bigger the challenge, the more we work.
Home has been its own challenge, of course. Home schooling on laptops, cooking three meals a day at home, cleaning, laundry, walks with the dog, and trying to maintain sanity … it’s the routine for my family. A new family budget has also been implemented in case my income is reduced or goes away.
But I have missed most of that. I came back to my business and for the first few weeks did not even take a day off. I went into the office on Saturdays and Sundays. I triaged at first, developed a recovery plan and went to work executing it. We instructed office workers to work from home, put guidelines in place to make our job sites safer, cancelled all non-essential interactions with other humans and held the essential interactions over Zoom. Luckily our industry was deemed essential, and we were able to keep working, albeit at a reduced capacity and with new challenges. Since this is Recession No. 2 for my business, we were able to use some plays out of our playbook from the last one.
We prepared for and then applied for the PPP loan and got it. I know this did not fit well for some businesses, but it fit mine like a glove because we are deemed “essential” and have still been working. This allowed me to keep all of my employees fully paid and even hire another. We are currently two weeks into our eight-week program.
I read about “The Stockdale Paradox” and am trying to follow it. I even told the story to my employees. Long story short: James Stockdale was captured during the Vietnam war and endured years of torture and captivity. Neither he nor the men he was imprisoned with had any control over when they might be rescued or released. So they came up with a plan: They had to accept their situation, develop a deep and ingrained optimism that they would survive and be rescued one day, and then concentrate only on what they could control. I cannot control the coronavirus. I cannot control how many cases and deaths there, and I cannot control how our government will fight it or open our economy back up. I cannot control what restrictions will be placed on my family, society, and my business. I can only control my reactions to them and how we decide to work and move forward.
Because we have had to slow production of homes, we are doing other things that are productive. A software upgrade, fixing some accounting issues, documenting processes, and making sure the production we can do is done well. The PPP money will run out in six weeks. We will be a different company then. Because we will have to keep production slow for three-to-nine months or more, we will end up having a reduced staff. There are still more gut-wrenching decisions to come in my business. We have been able to maintain most of our contracts. We have even had a few new contracts during the shutdown. We will get through it, be a better company, and I look forward to those challenges ahead.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions for my family too. When will I be able to see my 91-year-old grandmother? When we will be able to see my parents and in-laws? My daughter’s 11th birthday is coming up next week; how do we give her a party and make it a good day for her? How do we help others in need? When can we go to church? Summer camps? Our vacations? When are play dates with friends OK again? Will the girls get to go back to school in the fall? Will my Dawgs play in the fall?
The questions are not all answered yet. That is OK. If those are the questions we still have to answer, then we should consider ourselves blessed.
We’ll figure them out and get through this.
The second and final story comes from David:
My wife of 20 years has been sick for over a week. She filled out an online form with Kaiser Health three days ago describing her symptoms, and in less than an hour they called her back requesting her to come in immediately for a virus test. We were told it would be 24-48 hours to get the results. We spent the entire weekend terrified. It was the worst anxiety I have ever experienced.
They called her today: Negative result. So tonight, we celebrated. This is where you come in.
We are longtime Nationals fans, and we have long-remembered sad feelings from 2012, particularly a series of insulting post0game comments coming from some Cardinal players directed at the Nats. So at my wife’s request: We are watching our recording of Game Four of last year’s National League Championship Series.
Joy abounds tonight in our home.