Dublin Core
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Oral History Item Type Metadata
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DK: Today is March--no, November 13, 2020. This begins an oral history interview with Kathryn Rizzi. My name is Donald Koger and I am located in Piscataway, New Jersey.
KR: My name is Kathryn Tracy Rizzi, and I’m currently in Branchburg, New Jersey.
DK: This is an oral history interview that I’m conducting for a class at Rutgers University in order to help document people’s experiences during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’d like to use this interview in the class and then it will then be passed along to the university library. It will be made public. For the class project, we have an omeka site where it will be accessible. I just want to make sure that I have your permission to conduct this interview and that you consent to it being made public and made available for future use by the university.
KR: Yes, I give my consent.
DK: Just to begin, you currently live in Branchburg, New Jersey?
KR: Correct.
DK: Have you lived there the whole time since the pandemic was declared?
KR: Yes.
DK: What do you remember, off hand, about the days surrounding the World Health Organization announcement that COVID-19 had become a pandemic?
KR: While I don’t remember the exact date that the WHO declared this a pandemic, my memories are shaped around Rutgers’ response and the subsequent shutdown of [the State of] New Jersey and the schools. What I remember is being completely shocked. In retrospect, I should not have been shocked and I’ll explain why later, but I was completely shocked. [During the] weekend of March 6, my husband and I went skiing. We were at Elk Mountain in the Poconos. We got there and there was nobody skiing. We said, “Is there no one here because of the pandemic? Are we, as a result, really silly to be here during a pandemic? Or is it because of climate change and Pennsylvania has gotten no snow this winter?”
That was on a Friday. We skied that weekend. The following Tuesday, March 10, Rutgers issued the email [in which they said] they were going to suspend brick-and-mortar teaching and shift to virtual and outlined the whole plan for following spring break. By Thursday, March 12, we were working from home, and by the next week, schools had shut down. My husband was working from home. I was completely shocked and taken off guard. I should not have been. My sister lives in Berlin, Germany. She had been sending us articles since January about the impending pandemic and what we should expect.
Then, from doing interviews of Rutgers administrators since that time, Rutgers also had a response going in January, maybe even before (in December), but do not quote me on that. The Rutgers response was going on, but people like me were not aware of it. So, I was taken totally by surprise, maybe because of media underreporting, maybe because of lack of attention from the Executive Office, the Chief Executive, President Trump. There’s probably a whole bunch of different reasons, but I was shocked and probably should not have been.
DK: Where did you first hear about COVID-19?
KR: In the news. It would have been, probably not in December, it would have been in January. I go running every morning, and I listen to news podcasts. I sometimes listen to NPR’s Morning Edition. I remember hearing about NPR reporting on it in China. I can’t tell you exactly when that was, but it was probably January; it could have been December.
DK: Do you remember how long passed between hearing about COVID-19 on the news and your sister sending you articles?
KR: It was [mentioned] a tiny bit in mainstream news, so like CBS, CNN a tiny bit. My sister was sending articles that were stressing the urgency, how Americans need to take this seriously. I can’t pinpoint the timeline of that. I do know that the concern that I placed on the pandemic from my news sources versus what my sister was telling me were different. That's what I was thinking.
DK: Once you started receiving news, did your buying habits change at all?
KR: Actually, no, besides having to buy more food because there are four people in our family and one dog, and we were home basically 24/7, so we had to buy more food. Our food-buying habits didn’t change. We did start buying stuff more online, consumer goods. Our food-buying habits did not change. We did not hoard food. We suffered from a toilet paper/paper towel shortage like everyone else did. We discovered that probably most of it was being stockpiled at my sister-in-law’s house. [laughter] Our food-buying habits didn’t change besides having to buy more food, and then our buying habits with buying online, mainly through Amazon, have really changed. Just to give an example, do you want a non-food example?
DK: Sure.
KR: For myself and for my children, I try not to buy books. We borrow from the library, and with the libraries closing, because they were completely closed for a while, we were buying books on Amazon.
DK: Did you and your husband both transition to working from home about the same time?
KR: Yes, I was the first to work from home, followed soon after by my husband working from home and my children schooling from home.
DK: Do you have an office space you can normally use in your home, or did you have to set something up for this?
KR: At that point, in March, we did have to set up work spaces. We don’t have a dedicated office. We didn’t before the pandemic, and we still don’t have an actual dedicated office. When my husband has meetings and when I do interviews, we use my daughter’s bedroom, which has a huge desk. We can shut the door and that’s our "office," where when the door is shut, our children know, “You may not enter. There’s business going on in here.” Then, we had to set up other spots around the house for private work spaces, you know, near plugs. So, right now, I’m in my basement. [Behind me] is a couple pictures and printer, and if I turn, you’ll see a whole bunch of toys over here. Then, I have little corner in my bedroom where there’s a rocking chair and there is a plug right there and that’s one of my work spaces also. Because our children are schooling from home, a lot of times we are sitting around the dining room table, with our kids next to us, so we can keep one ear on what they are doing, make sure they are on task, and make sure we are there to help. So, sometimes it’s just a big shared family work space.
DK: Did you have a hard time obtaining any office supplies? Did you already have a printer at home, for example?
KR: That’s a really good question. I have not had any trouble obtaining office supplies because our office established a procedure for ordering supplies that get shipped to me. The rest of the technological infrastructure of my "home office," I have had to erect, let’s say. The printer/scanner behind me, that was my mother’s. She gave it to me. That’s been absolutely invaluable. I’m on my PC, which is my own personal PC, and my husband and I pay for our Wi-Fi. Things like IT support, getting access to our network files through V-P-N [Virtual Private Network], Rutgers was unable to help me make that connection. There is one person, for the record, Donald Koger, who helped me map my network drive in a way that was sustainable because IT couldn’t help me do that, despite good intentions. The person hacked into my computer and couldn’t do it, basically. Those are the infrastructure issues that I’ve had to set up for myself.
DK: Did you have any trouble finding office furniture?
KR: Yes, actually. A lot. We still do. I need to order a desk; I’m working on a ping-pong table. I’m in my basement and this ping-pong table is doubling as my desk. I’m sitting on an antique chair that my mom gave me and there’s a pink swivel chair that’s next to me that has a scooped seat. If you sit on it, it causes sciatic back pain within fifteen minutes. [laughter] These home office essentials, we still don’t have everything we need.
DK: Have you had any conflicts as far as multiple people needing the same space at the same time?
KR: Yes and no. With my husband and I, no. We coordinate in the morning what time we each have meetings or obligations. So, for me, an obligation would be doing an oral history interview, which is a chunk of probably three hours that I need to be alone and in a space and then there’s the child care issues that he would have to take care of in that case. Vice versa, when he has meetings. Then, I make sure that he has the space and the time and support to have his meetings. Space conflicts with the kids are: one of my children is nine, so if Mommy is in the room, Mommy is automatically available to fulfill his wants and his needs, which becomes a conflict. My older child is twelve, and while she will ask for things and I’ll have to say, “Not now, I’m doing something,” she is certainly more understanding and less demanding.
DK: Have you had any experience trying to work from home pre-pandemic?
KR: Yes, I have. From 2010 until 2018, I was a part-time staff person for the Rutgers Oral History Archives, working from home. That was my original mode of operation in my capacity working for the Rutgers Oral History Archives. In that sense, this kind of adapting to this pandemic virtual workplace has been pretty natural because I enjoy working from home. It’s something I had done for a long time. I am task-oriented and organized, so I don’t have any problem getting anything done. I was working from home while raising very small children, so coming up with some sort of balance of work and family was also something that I had been doing for many years and I was used to it.
DK: Do you feel like you’ve found a good rhythm to balance the work and home life now that they are taking up a lot of the same physical space?
KR: Yes, we’ve definitely come up with a system and a balance in our family. For my husband being able to work, me being able to work, and our kids being able to be successful in school, we have come up with a balance, but that’s not to say it’s not challenging, because there are constantly new challenges presented. For example, there’s been two models of schooling for my children since March. There was March to June of 2020 and then there’s this school year, starting in September. Then, in January, my son’s elementary school is going to switch again to a different format, and there’s a chance that my son would have to switch teachers. That’s just incredibly disruptive in the middle of the year for a kid to have to do that. It would actually be the second year in a row that would happen. Challenges like that come up. That’s not a work challenge, but it does effect work because I’m working from home and my son is schooling from home. We are going to have to figure out a whole new, third system and then adapt everything around it.
DK: Did you have any issues getting your internet set up? Four people draw a lot of bandwidth.
KR: Luckily, no. We have really good internet speed. We have like two hundred megabytes per second. That’s really good internet speed, so I haven’t had any problems. That is, it’s expensive and we are paying for that. We are supporting two professional jobs and two educations on that; it’s expensive. We go that extra expense because we need it and I think it certainly makes me appreciate that we are lucky that we do have that. So many people do not have that, and the digital divide is just becoming even more pronounced. I see that in my job. You hear about it from other kids that are in our world. I see it in my job, doing interviews with people who either don’t have internet, don’t know how to use something like a video conference, or have really slow internet speed, and that impacts things. I’m definitely aware of that digital divide. It’s just something that we already had set up, luckily. We were just fortunate to have that already.
DK: Is there anything that you miss about working in the office?
KR: I’m an introvert, so I’m okay being at home in my little bubble with my family because that’s who I draw my energy from. That’s who I want to be around, so I’m okay in that type of situation for a sustained amount of time, whereas a lot of people aren’t. I am an extroverted introvert, if that makes any sense; I do like other people. I miss being in the office and being around other people face to face. I miss face-to-face interviews with people; it’s different doing virtual interviews. It’s going well, it’s working, but it’s different. So, yes, I’m missing that collegiality on a day-to-day basis, missing that teamwork on a day-to-day basis, that collaboration, that brainstorming that happens in an office. That’s something that I miss. Seeing other people in the building who I don’t work with but just talk to, that’s something I miss. Being on campus is something I miss. I love being in New Brunswick, working in New Brunswick, it’s super fun. However, I don’t have to commute, so I’m more productive and I don’t have to waste all that time every day going to and from work. It’s a huge waste of time. In terms of just comfort, I’d rather work at home, I’m more comfortable. I don’t have to dress up. I don’t have to do my hair every day. I don’t have to wear shoes when I’m at home. My home is comfortable. My office at work was always 120 degrees. [laughter] I just want to say, for the record, I do miss my two monitors in my office, which I was so spoiled by.
DK: How have your eating habits changed?
KR: Not really much. I think we have always really focused on buying really good quality food that’s healthy and eating really well, in a healthy way. That’s always just been something that we’ve done. We probably spend a pretty penny on food. In terms of our eating habits changing, not really, except that meal time has become more special. Because we don’t go anywhere, having a meal and sitting down with my husband and kids has probably become more special, more of an occasion. I’ll say, for example, to my husband, “I’m going to make bacon, egg and cheese melts for breakfast. 9:00 AM, meet me at the counter.” We put our laptops down and just eat and talk a little bit and just have this great breakfast. We do that almost with every meal. Sometimes during lunch, we will work while we eat, but we really do try to eat together. Then, we have family dinner every night. So, I’d say not much has changed. A positive, on a lighter note, my kids now eat lasagna. They did not eat lasagna before March. [laughter] So, that’s awesome.
DK: Did you make bread?
KR: I am one of the few who has not made bread. [laughter]
DK: Any plans to try the sourdough bandwagon?
KR: No, absolutely not. I see everybody’s pictures, well, in March and April/May, I was seeing everybody’s pictures of their really stale hard-looking bread that they were posting online and I said, “I am never making bread.” My sister and her now-fiancé were making bread and sending out pictures and I just said, “Nope, we are not making bread.”
DK: Is there anything else that you feel we may have missed or anything you want to add?
KR: I want to add that this has been a really challenging time for everybody. It’s been a challenging time for working parents, it’s been a challenging time for students, for graduate students; it’s just a challenging time for everybody. I’m so thankful that I still have a job. I’m thankful that my husband has a job. And I‘m thankful that my kids are able to go to school like they’ve been doing and have had the infrastructure in terms of Chromebooks and internet to be able to do that. I feel lucky because a lot of other people are undergoing circumstances that are more challenging, [situations] that are really severe, that are showing economic disparities in the country. In my immediate family, we have all had our health as well. That’s been a huge factor and something I’m really thankful for.
DK: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.
KR: You are very welcome. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
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