Notes From A Pandemic

I was chatting with the director last week. Even before COVID-19 changed everything, we would chat 3 or 4 times a week, and that seems to be a habit in which we continue to indulge. Often, the director describes some proposed change to lab activities, and asks me, on the spot and with no preparation or notes, to riff on what I see as all of the consequences of that change, good and bad. This is not to say that he asks me for advice, as the process is not that direct. He asks me for my perspective. Even so, I know that he has modified his arguments for and against proposed changes based on what I say. I'm just coming up on my tenth month at the lab, and as a supervisor, I'm a relative newbie. But I think that he appreciates that I've been around the block a time or two. And my newness can be beneficial since I look at things with a fresh eye.

While the central topics of these chats are nearly always some administrative or technical process at the lab, we usually spiral out into fairly wide-ranging discussions of politics and science. We tiptoe around religion and similar landmine topics.

We of course talk about how the pandemic has been affecting us personally. With some exceptions, mainly administrative employees who can work from home, all of the technical employees have been coming in to the lab every day. Back in early April, when the stay-at-home measures were being widely implemented, I mentioned to him that it made me anxious to be the only person on my street who was going to work--daily I was driving past all my neighbors who were out walking or gardening or playing with kids. He said, yes, I know, when I get up in the mornings, my house is the only one in my area with lights on inside.

So last week, he mentioned that he had been feeling... he hesitated, so I said, feeling an existential dread? And he said, yes, of course, that (crazy how we both just rolled right past such a huge elephant in the room), but that he'd also been having real trouble focusing on projects that required planning for the future. We decided that the best word to describe this was "viscosity."

I told him that I had been feeling the same thing. There are a bunch of quality management documents that need my attention and even though I have time set aside for that type of activity, I couldn't seem to get to those tasks. It seems easier to focus on small activities of the moment--spending more time examining the biopsy submissions, spending more time reading up on a specific disease I found in a necropsy. We were both feeling dragged down, unable to tackle projects that required us to envision where we wanted the lab to be in six months or six years.

We decided that we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. If we (we personally, and the royal "we" of the lab) got through this pandemic without making any big mistakes, that would be okay.