2 10 15 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working From Home Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19, Home Life, Professional Life Description An account of the resource Oral history accounts of the experiences of transitioning from a traditional work environment to working from home. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Fall Semester, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Donald Koger Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Paul Orlowicz Location The location of the interview East Rutherford, New Jersey Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound DK: Today is December 4, 2020 and this begins an oral history interview. My name is Donald Koger and I am located in Piscataway, New Jersey. Please introduce yourself. PO: My name is Paul Orlowicz, spelled O-R-L-O-W-I-C-Z and Donald you’re talking to me, I’m in my apartment in East Rutherford, New Jersey. DK: The purpose of this interview is for a public class project and then it will get saved at the Rutgers University libraries, with your permission, where it will also be made publicly available. I just want to make sure that you’re okay with our conversation being recorded, used in my public class project and then handed over to the university libraries where it will also be available. PO: Full permission, absolutely. I have no problem with participating and helping with the project. DK: I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. It’s 2020, it’s December, so future historians should be aware that at this point, the pandemic has been raging for quite some time now. PO: Mhmm. DK: Can you give an overview of who you are, what you do, and how the pandemic has changed that? PO: Well, I’ll go into it in a bit. In some ways the pandemic has changed very little for me, but not in every way. I’ll go into that a bit later. Again, my name is Paul. By profession, I am an ESL teacher, English as a Second Language. I have been an ESL teacher for eight or nine years now. Seven of those years, I actually lived in China. I moved there, I believe it was January of 2012. I moved back to the United States August, 2018, I want to say. So, I’ve now been back in the U.S. for a little over two years. I am currently a masters student at Rutgers University and I am studying history and education; basically, because I want to switch subjects. In a variety of ways, I’m actually a little tired of teaching ESL. It’s very repetitive. Every year, you teach the same thing. English doesn’t change. [laughter]. I really want to switch subjects and start teaching history, because I feel like it will be a bit more of an engaging career in terms of being able to do it for thirty or forty years without getting tired of it because there’s just, you can’t run out of history to teach. Right? Whereas in English, it’s like teaching algebra. Algebra doesn’t change, you teach the same thing every year. So, I’m an ESL teacher in the midst of a career change and getting my masters degree. I grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. I’m not living in East Rutherford. That, actually, is part of this pandemic story. I moved out of my parents’ house. I was living with my parents, most of the last two years, since I got back from China, because it was a good way to save money while I was getting my masters. When the pandemic hit, however, because my parents were older, and because they’re in a very strict quarantine bubble with my sister and nieces and nephew, I didn’t feel like it was sustainable for me to stay in that very tight bubble. I moved out with my friend Dan, because I felt like I couldn’t justify going on with my life and doing the things I need to do outside of the house, because it would be putting them at risk. I guess that’s about it. That’s a pretty decent introduction to who I am. [laughter]. Oh right, the pandemic, sorry! I said, I would say. The pandemic in many ways has not changed my life. I’m a masters student, mostly. Yes, the classes have shifted online, which is uh, a little annoying. It’s not the end of the world, right? I mean, I’m not a bio major who needs to go into labs or whatever. I’m a history major and most of my work is reading at the library, so yes it’s switched to online, but I hasn’t stopped or curtailed my education at all. Then, in terms, of the small revenue stream that I do have. Which, I teach online. I still teach Chinese children, even though I am now living back in the states. I teach online. Part of it is through a company where I work as an independent contractor and students sign up for my classes. I open up blocks of time and people sign up. The other part of my income stream is some private tutoring clients that I’ve maintained, in China. That’s another thing, right? Because China’s economy as not been as severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, that income stream has not been affected. Yes, my classes are online now, but my education has not really been interrupted by the pandemic and my income stream hasn’t been interrupted either because I’m not dependent on the local economy. I’m dependent on a foreign economy for my income. In many respects, with of course exceptions: my social life, going out places, sort of being me in the world; that has changed of course. I am much more isolated. I stay home most of the time. But in terms of my professional and education life, very little has changed for me. I’m very privileged in that way. DK: You’ve been working from home since you came back from China? PO: Mhmm. DK: That was, two years ago? PO: Two years ago. DK: What was that transition like? You’re changing where you live at the same time as changing the way you worked? I assume in China you were doing traditional classes? PO: Very challenging. I honestly did not anticipate just how different it is between in person teaching, in person classes and teaching one-on-one virtual classes with video. It took me, god, I feel like it took me three months to really fully adjust to teaching online, as opposed to teaching in person. I didn’t even have, at that time, two years ago, I didn’t even have the extra stress of the pandemic. It was my own choice to transition into that. Yes, I felt like it was just so different than teaching in person that it took me quite a while to adjust to that medium for teaching. DK: Did you have any issues finding space in the house to do your work? Did you have a space where you could say: this is my office? Or were you just clearing away dishes after dinner and taking over the kitchen table? PO: I was lucky. I am the last child of four. The house that my parents have has five bedrooms. They’re small, because it’s an old house, but numerous. Of course, I’m the baby. All my sisters are out of the house. I was the last one to maintain a space in my parents’ house. Even when I was living in China, actually. The three rooms on the top floor were kind of always mine. While I was living in China, they were just storage, but because I’m the baby, my parents had plenty of extra space. When I set up my virtual classroom upon moving home from China, I had my own bedroom, my own living room, and my own study. On the third floor. I was very lucky in that regard. I didn’t have to fight for space, I just turned my study into a virtual classroom. DK: Did you have any issues getting equipment? PO: Getting equipment was not the problem. Figuring out the best way to set it up was. I had never done anything like that before. Lighting was a big problem. The way my office was, the window is to my right, in the study. So I would get this side light that would kind of cast awkward shadows on my face. I ended up, honestly, looking up on the internet how to improve lighting. Especially with the job where I do independent contractor work, I’m basically fighting other teachers. I’m in competition with other teachers on the platform for the clients, for the students. The move professional I am, the better I do; the easier it is to get regular clients who will book you every week or so. I wanted to make sure that it was going to present professionally, there wouldn’t be any awkward shadows, and honestly the figuring out the lighting was the biggest challenge. I ended up having to buy these ring lights, on these bendy, flexible sort of things. I have one light above and two lights to the side to illuminate under my chin so it all looks bright. I wear glasses, which was a huge problem! Because I couldn’t have any light directly at me otherwise it just looks like giant white lights in my glasses. The lighting was the biggest challenge, honestly. Getting the equipment? It was just a matter of buying it on Amazon or going to Staples, or whatever. But figuring out the best way to set it up and how to make myself look okay- I also have, in my digital classroom, I have a white board behind me. I also had to figure out how to position the lights to not reflect badly off the white board also. The lighting was the biggest challenge because in that platform, the nature of it, having to fight for clients; having to compete for clients, essentially. You want to be as professional and have as good of a digital presentation as possible. DK: That’s all well beyond my abilities. PO: I had to Google how to do all of that. [laughter]. There was a learning curve! [laughter]. DK: In contrast, just to compare this to current experiences. Your classes are now virtual, and I assume they are using video technology. PO: Mhmm. DK: Are you using any of those same lighting tricks now or is that mostly for the professional Paul? PO: Once the pandemic hit and I decided to move out of my parents’ house, my mother and I initially compromised and said that I could still use the attic and still use my virtual classroom, as long as I don’t live there. Don’t use their bathroom or kitchen, obviously, just go up and down the stairs to the third floor with my mask on. Just walk up and down quickly, I only used the side door, so I didn’t have to worry about door knobs on the front or the back door, which is what my parents use. In the short-term, that was a great compromise. I would wake up in the morning, go to my parents’ house, go upstairs, teach and then leave. Because it’s on China time, it’s early morning for us in Eastern Standard Time. As time went by, that became a little bit less sustainable. I did put a little bit more focus into setting up this. It’s just my kitchen, but I have a small apartment. There’s not any other space for me to do it. Actually, I don’t have it on right now, but now I just turned it on. It’s actually a therapy lamp. I don’t know if you’ve ever hard of a therapy lamp, but it’s for use in the winter to help keep your mood high because of the lack of sunlight. DK: Vitamin D or E or something, right? PO: It’s mostly because it enters in through your eyes, so it’ tricks your brain into thinking that it’s still summertime. I’m now using my light therapy and I ended up moving my television, or repurposing my television as a second monitor. There’s a second monitor here, so that I could work in two places. Honest to god, especially as a teacher, I can’t imagine people who are really doing work every day in this digital video format and not having two monitors. I just can’t imagine. I had a friend who does all their work on just one little laptop, and I’m like: “How do you get through the day with just one screen?” [laughter]. DK: Setting up this space where you’re living now, how much has that disrupted what normal life might have been like? Let’s say you made this move when there wasn’t a pandemic? PO: Initially, like I said, the initial compromise, I was going to my parents’ every morning and then just realized that was not sustainable. Setting this up in my house, though [sigh]. It is problematic. For one, my finances are strained because of the pandemic. Now I’m paying rent. I wasn’t paying rent before. I didn’t feel like I could justify another fifty-dollar camera and more little circle lights like I set up back at my parents’ house. I didn’t want to dismantle the office at my parents’ house either because I still use it sometimes. It became, like repurposing my therapy lamp, right? Repurposing my television so I wouldn’t have to spend more money. The financial strain of the pandemic that disturbed this whole process. I had to figure out how I could set this up to be professional, but still not have to spend any more money on it. Then the second thing, of course, I live in a small apartment now. The only way I could afford to move out was to move in my friend. I live in the living room, essentially. It’s a very East-Asian sort of living situation. Small space, two people. The only choice was to set up in my kitchen, which is not the end of the world. Sometimes I use my dishwasher as a backdrop. I actually have a white board I can magnet onto the front of my dishwasher and that can be a small board. One challenge of setting up the second post-pandemic setup here was finances. I didn’t want and I didn’t have the money to spend on new equipment like I did two years ago. Then, the other thing, like I said, of course, was just, where am I going to do it? Where it’s not going to get in the way of my roommate or get in the way, in general. The kitchen became the only place, which is complicated because it sucks away a third of the kitchen space. So, my kitchen, which is actually a pretty good size, is now kind of reduced in size, so to speak. [laughter]. DK: How has that changed cooking? PO: I just have less space to work. Or, if I do need the extra space for cooking, I need to shift my laptop over, put the wireless keyboard away, etc. It requires a little bit more daily shifting. It is a permanent setup, but no so permanent. It’s more flexible than the setup at my parent’s house, because it has to be, because it’s in my kitchen. It effects cooking sometimes. It just adds time. If I’m doing something complicated in the kitchen and I have to partially dismantle my setup here, that’s an extra ten minutes to dismantle it and when I finish cooking, an extra ten minutes to put it back together. So it just sucks up time, mostly. I don’t have that permanent office space that I had at my parents’ house. DK: Did you ever try and makeup as part of your presentation for your online teaching or just the lighting? PO: Just the lighting. Although, I know people who do things like that. I think, if the teaching I was doing was different, because the teaching that I’m doing was chosen because of the flexibility. Because I’m focusing more on getting my masters than I am on making money right now. This business that I’m doing, or this platform that I’m using to make money, it’s really only semi-professional. Yes, I have to compete with other teachers for clients, but on the other hand, it’s not as serious of work as working at a normal school like I used to. Perhaps if I was doing more serious work, I would spend even more time on my image. For, I think the level at which I’m teaching, or the quality of the program that I’m teaching, just getting the lighting right was enough for me. I didn’t feel like I really needed to go the extra mile in other aspects of my presentation. DK: It could be very easy to get lost in all those details. PO: Mhmm. Just look at YouTube stars. I remember, and this is just a small anectdote. Towards the beginning of the pandemic, Stephen Colbert, who I watch pretty religiously, or maybe it was Seth Myers. One of the two of them. During one of their monologues, went into this whole thing about how, because they were suddenly not in a big studio, they were doing their shows from their home. They gave props to all these YouTube stars and YouTube influences and they were like: “God! You know, I never realized how much work it is to get everything right in your home and your own spaces because it’s not a professional studio.” They were just like: “To all those YouTube stars out there, I give you credit because you’re doing this all on your own, with no help.” I agree, it’s much more work and much more thought that you need to put into it than most people realize, when you shift into this video based at-home situation. DK: What do you remember about the first days? When the pandemic first became real for you? For a lot of people, it became real the day the World Health Organization announced the pandemic. PO: Mach 11, yes. DK: When did become real for you, and what was that like? PO: Earlier. My clients are all in China. They were in lockdown in January, February, March. My business was BOOMING because I’m the side school. I’m not the main classes they take in their normal day classes. I’m like their night classes. My business was booming while they were in their lockdown in January, February, and March. I was already hyper-aware of the whole situation, starting in January. I also have maintained both a professional and social network in China because I lived there for seven years, which is pretty significant. Of course, I also knew through my friends and former colleagues, the seriousness of everything. I was fully expecting it to come to the United States. Most of my peers and my parents and everyone was shocked that it got into America. I was like: “No, of course it’s coming.” So, I was ready. DK: What changed? Did you stop doing anything or did you start doing anything differently? PO: Good question. What changed? One, I took advantage of that boom in business that I just mentioned. In February and March, I probably made more money and booked more classes than I ever have. There was another change, actually, in the, I want to say late summer, early fall. Business was gone, it disappeared almost. I suspect, although I don’t know this for sure. I suspect it was because the people in China had become, sot of fatigued from this whole situation and decided just, “You know what? We’re taking a break from life.” [laughter]. Including booking classes with me. [laughter]. In the late summer and early fall, there was that change. Taking advantage of the business opportunities during the Chinese lockdown; losing the business opportunities in the end of the summer and beginning of the fall, when I think most Chinese people were like “We’re taking a break,” those were really the only big changes. Because I had started teaching online prior to the pandemic, my own life didn’t change much, as I mentioned before. DK: When was it that you moved out of your parents house again? PO: That was the beginning of July. March, April, May, June, four months. I was at my parents’ house still. We were in extremely deep quarantine. NO supermarket. Everything delivered. The only thing left my house for, for four months, was to go on bike rides, too keep myself from going crazy. That was it. For four months, I never left the house for ANY reason except to exercise. Then I moved here in the beginning of July, because I knew that wasn’t going to be sustainable for me and I wanted to make sure that I had myself set up in my new place by the time the fall semester started and I was going to start my new courses for my degree. DK: How did that change? It sounds like you went into hermit-mode early on? PO: Mhmm. DK: What was that like? To go from being able to leave the house and go to the grocery store to- PO: Right, right. On the one hand, like I said, there was no change. I had already been working online. Of course there was a huge change in my social life. One of my resolutions, New Years’ resolutions that is, in January was two things: One I was going to get myself in better shape again this year. I feel like it was really bad when I was having my reverse culture shock, when I moved back to the U.S. Culture shock is a serious thing and reverse culture shock is often worse than the initial culture shock when you move to a place. It took me a year and a half to truly get over my reverse culture shock, to be honest. My New Years’ resolution for 2020 was get back in shape, improve my diet and also visit friends, do some domestic travel. January and February, I was at the gym three or four times a week with my flat-mate; well who’s now my flat mate. We were really kind of going at it, and then March happened and that was it. That was it. All hope of being able to fulfill, I mean yes I was able to go for bike rides and whatever, but it’s just not the same. Being able to do things at home, it’s not the same as being able to go to a gym to a place where everyone around you is sort of doing the same kind of activity. My goals for 2020, my personal goals. Not so much professional, and not so much school, but my personal goals were completely detailed by this pandemic. Those first four months in that deep deep quarantine, with not even the supermarket or anything was very stressful mentally. My mother struggled more than I was expecting her to. She’s always been kind of a rock in our family and I actually found myself being a bit more of the stabilizing factor in the household, more than I was expecting to be. My parents still, even to this day, still do not do any supermarket or anything. I now do, because I live on my own with my flat mate. I’ll just, honestly, going to the supermarket, or the Seven-Eleven, or to get a coffee at whatever, is one of the things that’s been keeping me mentally stable since I moved out. Because my social life is still- yes I’ve opened up enough to go run my errands, but I’m not willing to do other things. Right? Like a large amount of social life or whatever. DK: Did you run into any issues when you were ordering your groceries online? PO: [Groans]. I mean, okay, so yes and no. It depends on your perspective. One of the things that actually as a problem between my Mother and I – you have to understand, and I know I’m generalizing here, and this is probably going to make me sound like a dick, but- My mother is a Baby Boomer. As such, she is spoiled rotten, whether she realizes it or not. [laughter]. From my perspective, especially, living for many years in a developing country, the access that we had to food delivery and everything was fine. Right? Yes, it as a bit of a challenge to get a delivery time or whatever, but we got enough. T’s not like we were starving, plus we had basics in the house anyway. Because I saw this coming, as early as January, I had already fully prepped the house with basics. My mother sometimes has these things where like for example, “I’m having this particular meat dish, so I only have that with broccoli.” Or, she has these things in her head where certain main dishes have to go with certain side dishes. So where I was at, my perspective, having lived abroad for so many years in a developing country: I was just like “Whatever, so we spend a few months not having the side dishes we want. Who caes?” But this really, this was hard for my mother. It was much harder for her. You know, not having, like “Oh my god, we don’t have sour cream! For this whatever.” And I’m like, “Okay, so we’ll make it different side dish.” “Oh but this side dish GOES with what we’re cooking!” So, yes it was a challenge getting food delivered. It didn’t bother me so much. Except for the time consumption, I guess, of having to spend so much time on your phone to get all this stuff done. It didn’t bother me so much, it bothered my mother a lot more, the sort of limited access, or oh maybe you’d get it this time but not next time. Trying to think ahead about everything I might need in the next week or two. It bothered her much more than it bothered me. DK: Some stores offered substitutions. Some were better at it than others. Did you have any items substituted for a different brand or even a different item? PO: [laughter]. At first, yes. They generally were substituted with things that we would not use or could not use and we just ended up giving them away, so then later, after a few times of that happening, we just set the app to “don’t replace.” If they don’t have it, then just take it off the order. After a few times where they would just give us something that we didn’t want, I just said, “Well, forget about it. If they don’t have it, they don’t have it. C’est la vie.” So, we changed the settings on the app. DK: The big question. Did you make bread? PO: NO! No. But, boy did it become popular, right? No, I did not. I did not increase my baking at all. It’s not really my thing to begin with. I’m more of a cook and less of a baker. My dad is more of a baker. But even him, they’re on a keto diet because of my mother’s very specific condition that my mother has. The keto diet is ideal for her condition to reduce inflammation. They don’t eat much bread, anyway. Or baked goods because a keto diet is a very low carb, I think maximum of fifteen grams of carbs a day, which is often covered by just vegetables. They don’t eat much bread to begin with, and I’m okay with sliced bead. During the pandemic, when we were getting things delivered, if they sent me the wrong bread, I was just like, “Whatever, I’m not starving. I’m not some starving farmer in Western China, I’m alright.” DK: How long passed between you going into hermit-mode, and I want that to be the term future historians use, and having a cup of coffee that you did not brew at home? PO: Ahh! It was like the first day, maybe the second day after I moved to this apartment that I’m in right now, in July. I went to my favorite coffee shop, Ara Coffee. I will totally say their name. For the record, it is the best coffee in the state! Those four months I was in hermit mode, I missed it! It is the best coffee you will find anywhere in New Jersey, I swear to god. It’s in Rutherford, New Jersey. Ara Coffee, A-R-A Ara Coffee. Run by a lovely South Korean family. DK: When did you start doing take-out food? PO: Take out food? My parents are, again they’re Baby Boomers, they’re relatively well-off. We went into that whole “Support local businesses” thing. It’s not something that I can really afford to do, now that I’m living on my own. But for my parents, it’s something that they’ve been really trying to do. They probably order-out maybe twice as much as they used to? Usually, it would be they would go out to eat maybe once a week. Now they’re probably ordering take-out twice a week. And they’ve been trying to go to different restaurants to kind of spread their money around locally. DK: Can you compare what your spring semester was like versus your fall semester now? PO: I’ll start with the fall semester. The fall semester has been pretty stable. I don’t really like going to class online, but I tolerate it. I don’t really like not being able to go to the library, but I tolerate it. The spring semester, though, because it was half in person and then right before spring break, Rutgers went on lockdown and everything shifted to online, it was chaos. It really was. It wasn’t just chaos because of the school. It was chaos because of my private life. Dealing with the emotional complications from my mother, or from myself as well. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t have my own emotional issues when this whole thing first happened. Still do. I think we all have a lot of emotions. The transition to digital mid-semester like that, in the spring semester, I ended up taking an incomplete in one of the two classes I was taking. I was able to get most of the work done except for one paper and I was just like, “Screw it. I have to focus on me right now. I have to focus on me, and I have to focus on my family. I have to focus on moving out. I have to focus on my mental health.” So I took an incomplete in one class and I managed to finish all the work in the other class. Being thrown into digital classrooms halfway through the semester, kind of all of the sudden, was not good for me. [laughter]. That’s one of the reasons I moved out, because I recognized it wasn’t going to be as sustainable living my parents. I wanted to make sure that I was set up in a way that would be better for mental health and better for doing classes online, because even as early as May and June, even though it was before Rutgers official said that fall classes were online, the department head that I was talking to said: “Paul, it likely will be online, so prepare for it.” And I did. Part of me moving out, setting up the second digital space that I have here in the new apartment. All of that was that to prepare for the fall. I don’t like it, but I was able to spend the summer. I had the luxury, and the privilege, and the money to set myself up for the fall semester very well. A lot of people just didn’t have the time or the energy or the money to prepare for whatever was coming next, but I really took a solid three months to just make sure everything in my life was as ideal as possible so that when the semester started it would go smoothly. Like I said, it’s so far been pretty smooth. Don’t like it, but smooth. Spring semester? Chaos. [laughter]. I’m not that happy that I have an incomplete. I have a year to finish it. Thankfully it’s just one paper, it’s one project, so it’s not the end of the world. It was chaotic enough in the Spring that I decided that taking the incomplete was the best route. DK: We’ve covered a lot. I really appreciate you taking the time. Before we go, is there anything else you’d like to add? PO: Not that I can think of. We really did cover a pretty broad range of things. I guess the only thing that I’d like to add is: for anyone out there who might be listening to this. Not in ten years, but maybe a bit sooner, if you don’t have a second monitor in whatever you’re at home set up is, invest in a second monitor. Repurpose an old TV or something, because having a second screen with whatever your home setup is, it makes such a difference. It really does. It makes it so much more user friendly, so much easier to deal with all of the situation if you have a second screen. That’s my advice for anyone who reads this. DK: Thank you very much for talking with me. PO: You’re very welcome. ----------------------------End of Transcript-------------------- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History Interview with Paul Orlowicz, a New Jersey Resident Subject The topic of the resource Working from Home Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Paul Orlowicz, a New Jersey resident and graduate student who had been working from home prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but needed to relocate both his living and working space while his studies had to adapt to a remote environment. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Oral History Interview Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource December 4, 2020 Adapting to live under lockdown anxiety Barchi college distance learning oal history Rutgers students Supply Distribution Failures Teachers Zoom Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working From Home Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19, Home Life, Professional Life Description An account of the resource Oral history accounts of the experiences of transitioning from a traditional work environment to working from home. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Fall Semester, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Donald Koger Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Miss Z Location The location of the interview Middlesex, New Jersey Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <p>DK:  Today is December 10, 2020 and this begins an oral history interview.  My name is Donald Koger and I am located in Piscataway, New Jersey.   Please introduce yourself and say where you are.</p> <p>Z:  Sure.  I am Miss Z. and I am located in Middlesex, New Jersey.</p> <p>DK:  The purpose of this interview is for an archive as part of a class project that will be made publicly available online.  With your consent, the contents of this interview will be made public as part of my project as well as passed along to the Rutgers University libraries where they may also be publicly accessed.  Do I have your consent?</p> <p>Z:  Yes, you have my consent.</p> <p>DK:  Thinking back, what are some of the first things that you remember from when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit?</p> <p>Z:  I will be honest, and Chris, my fiancé, will probably tell you the same thing.  I didn’t think it was as big as it was going to be.  I was still wanting to go out even though I was working from home, and still wanted to do all these things.  Even now, there’s bits and times where I’ll think, “Oh, let’s go out and eat breakfast,” and Chris is like, “No, we can’t do that.  We have to stay home.”  It was just a little bit of a shock, trying to wrap my own head around: “I can’t go out and do things.”  I couldn’t go and visit with my parents; I couldn’t go and visit with friends.  It was just very very lonely and boring, to say the least, being stuck in the same four walls all day.</p> <p>DK:  When did you first hear about COVID-19?</p> <p>Z:  I remember some people saying some things about it, but I don’t watch the news all that often.  Everything I got was hearsay from other people.  The first really big sign, that I knew something was going on, I was at work at one of my jobs and I received a text message from the school I work at, saying that all of our after-school activities, all concerts, all musical performances were going to be canceled and everybody is going to be having a half day, the following day, in order for teachers to change to possibly teaching fully virtually.  Then, when I got the call on Saturday night, saying you are now all fully virtual, no one’s allowed in the school building.  It was kind of like, “Holy shit, this is craziness.”</p> <p>Also, when I was working at my other job, at the food store, there was lines and lines of people getting hundreds and hundreds of dollars-worth of food and taking all the toilet paper, milk, all the snacks, and everything like that.</p> <p>DK:  In March, you were working multiple jobs?</p> <p>Z:  Yes.  My main job is a school-teacher at a school in Paterson, New Jersey.  I also teach private lessons in a music school near where I live.  At that point in time, I was also working as a cashier in a supermarket for a couple months.</p> <p>DK:  So you were busy?</p> <p>Z:  Yes!  Yes, trying to save money for that wedding that got postponed.</p> <p>DK:  You had a wedding postponed because of this?</p> <p>Z:  Mhmm.</p> <p>DK:  A lot of changes.</p> <p>Z:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  What has that been like?  Changing the date?  I’m not married, so I have no idea what goes into a wedding.  How was that?</p> <p>Z:  I ended up ordering my dress in a weird way.  I went into the store, I tried on a whole bunch of dresses.  This was also, the Sunday before everything was going on.  Went, tried on the dress, and a couple weeks later, I called the store and they said, “We are not letting anyone in, but we can do a phone order.”  So, I ordered an eleven-hundred -dollar dress on the phone.  That ended up coming in about three weeks after we decided to move the wedding date.  For the most part, we already had most of our stuff.  We had our centerpieces.  One of the things that we had to do but we couldn’t do because everything was closed was we couldn’t get the guys’ suits, we couldn’t get the girls’ dresses or anything like that.  All the little stuff we couldn’t do.</p> <p>DK:  What happened with work once everything hit?</p> <p>Z:  Once everything hit, we ended up going fully virtual.  My school thought that it was only going to be for about two weeks.  We put a plan in place for two weeks, and then two weeks turned into four weeks.  Four weeks turned into, “We’ll reevaluate after Spring Break.”  Then, they decided to close us for the rest of the year.  For the first two weeks, they wanted us to do reviews on stuff.  The homeroom teachers were doing reviews from the beginning of the school.  I was just doing, as a music teacher, fun things for them to do.  Then, they started wanting the homeroom teachers to actually teach some of the curriculum.  Being a special, they didn’t mandate us to have live-Zoom lessons, just activities because they understand that teaching a ‘special’ is not necessarily core stuff and it’s supposed to be fun.  We still had to do something because they had grades for it.  We weren’t allowed in the school building, if we needed to get something, we realistically needed to talk to our admin team.  After the first two weeks, they said, “If you need to get something, contact admin and then go in.”  I’ll be honest, I stayed home.  I left the building on March 13 and I did not return to the building until I had to pack up my stuff in June.  We weren’t allowed to teach in the building, no kids were allowed in the building, all the secretaries were working from home.  The nurse was working from home.  It was very interesting.</p> <p>DK:  Did you end up doing any live instruction?</p> <p>Z:  During that time, the specialist team decided what the kids needed was some interaction with people outside of their homes.  We did a fun Zoom with each of the grades.  For one day, we had all of kindergarten, one day we had all of first grade.  So that way they could interact with each other in a supervised setting and have some fun instead of just being bored at home.  I didn’t really start doing any teaching music from a computer until September.  I did have Zoom calls with some of the kids, if they needed extra help, or they didn’t understand something.  I said, “Okay, come join my Zoom, I’ll talk you through the assignment.”</p> <p>DK:  How was that?</p> <p>Z:  It was interesting.  The days we had all of the kids, it was very loud.  We couldn’t mute it because we had to hear and supervise them.  It was great seeing the kids.  I didn’t realize, as much as some of them drove me crazy as a teacher, and I’m sure you know this from you driving your own teachers crazy a little bit, I missed them.  Them coming on and saying, “Miss Z., we miss you.  We miss you.”  I still miss it now.  I have students I never go to say goodbye to when they graduated Third Grade because they went off to a new building.  There’s still some kids, who I never got to say goodbye, so it kind of breaks my heart a little bit that I’m never going to see them again.</p> <p>DK:  You were also doing private lessons before the pandemic?</p> <p>Z:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  Did you do any of that, virtually?</p> <p>Z:  Once March hit, they all switched over to Skype.  Teaching private instrumental lessons through Skype is very interesting because you can’t go and physically fix their fingering.  You can’t play with them, the sound’s not going to line up for duets.  You can’t get them used to performing with another person.  It’s getting better.  I do have some students who have excelled being at home because all they can do is practice.  I have some students who have gone on the downside with the private lessons because they are at home and not practicing.  They’re watching TV and playing video games instead.</p> <p>DK:  What happened with your job at the grocery job?</p> <p>Z:  The week after my school closed, that one first week, I actually took off from the supermarket because that was supposed to be my tech week for my students’ musical.  After my tech week, or the first week of quarantine, I called them and said, “I can’t come back in anymore.”  Chris didn’t want me to come in because he’s still going to work, he’s immunocompromised, and the food store is one of those places where I could catch something easier compared to if I just stay at home.  After that, I went on leave, and then when things didn’t change in June, I ended up giving them my resignation because I didn’t want them to hold a spot for me if I wasn’t going to come back in the summer.  I ended up, when summer hit, I went and worked for my parents’ company, managing and working in one of their stores.  At any point in time, there’s no more than four people in that store.  It’s not that crowded, so I wouldn’t have caught anything working there.</p> <p>DK:  It sounds like everybody would behave there more than we’ve seen at the grocery stores.</p> <p>Z:  And there is more distance.  It’s a larger store so I could distance myself easier, compared to being behind a checkout counter.</p> <p>DK:  Thinking about working remotely, did you have any issues creating a space in your home from which to work?</p> <p>Z:  You’re looking at it.  I take over a spot in my kitchen from 7:30 in the morning until about 3:00 or 3:45 when I can’t sit in this area anymore.  That’s it.  The only reason I picked this spot, even though I’m in my kitchen, I have knives in the background, I have my back door, it’s the only place where I have a light that’s right over my head.  So, the kids can see me and I’m angling it so I don’t have liquor in the background, or photos of me and Chris in the background that might be distracting to the students.</p> <p>DK:  Have you had any issues with getting physical equipment?</p> <p>Z:  My school actually gives all the teachers laptops.  So, I’ve had a laptop with my school since I started, five years ago with them.  We already had a table in place, because this is where Chris does his painting and sometimes cooking on it.  The only thing that I had to get that might have been a little bit of an issue getting was, some school supplies I needed at the beginning of the this year.  Like masks and stuff like that.  For working from home, not really, because I had all that stuff here.</p> <p>DK:  Did you already have a home internet connection?  How has your internet been?</p> <p>Z:  We already had a home internet connection.  When we moved in, about six years ago, we decided we would get the fastest speed internet that we could.  Knock on wood, I’ve only had one main issue with my internet.  That was two weeks ago, where it just, all of the sudden, crapped out and we had to call Optimum to come out to fix it.  I was lucky enough that my school was like, “Okay, that’s fine, you don’t have to do live lessons that morning, just keep us up to date.”  So, I put an assignment up and I taught in the afternoon.</p> <p>DK:  It sounds like you were pretty-well supported by the school.</p> <p>Z:  Yes.  In September, my school started a hybrid program where kids staying fully virtual and I had kids in person.  The kids in person, it was okay.  The kids virtual it was okay.  But then, combining the two together, I didn’t know who to focus more on.  Sometime after Halloween, we had an outbreak on the campus, we had to close and a whole bunch of people had to quarantine for two weeks.  After those two weeks, my school, higher up than my principal, wanted to have all the teachers come back and all the teachers would teach from the building but the kids would stay home.  My campus put up a fight about it, and we don’t know if it was because we put a fight up about it, about going back even though we got exposed, or because so many people still had to quarantine; they let the teachers stay home.  After Thanksgiving until January, I want to say January 11, all teachers and all students are fully remote.  They’re going to re-evaluate after the holidays.</p> <p>DK:  When it first hit, you mentioned that you were working at a grocery store and that there were people buying a lot of certain items.  Either working there, or in your personal buying, did you notice any things going out of stock?  Were any things harder to get than others?</p> <p>Z:  Yes.  I noticed, and this was the Thursday, after I worked in the supermarket.  I went to do my own food shopping, there was no toilet paper, no paper towels.  There were hardly any tissues, I don’t remember if there were any napkins, but that was the one main thing that I saw that was just crazy-insane, how there was none left.  Same thing with cleaning supplies.  I understand the cleaning supplies, I understand the paper towels, I STILL don’t get the toilet paper.  [laughter[.  Food-wise, not that I can think of.  I think a lot of people were getting soup, non perishable stuff, stuff for kids snacks.  There were people who were getting a lot of meat, but I think that there was a sale on meat so they were picking up the meat because there was a sale, not necessarily because there was a quarantine about to happen.</p> <p>DK:  Did your buying habits change at all?</p> <p>Z:  I will be the first one to admit, I never, I didn’t pick up two paper towels in one thing.  But I do have an entire, unopened thing of paper towels and an unopened thing of toilet paper, extra in my closet.  Now, I just make sure we always have an unopen thing of paper towels and unopened thing of toilet paper.  Once I see that I’m in that, I’ll get another one.  It’s one of those, just in case, I don’t want to run out of that but I don’t want to overstock it too.  Trying to get a lot of crackers and stuff, non-perishable stuff for snacks and everything or lunch.  I was trying to avoid getting a lot of frozen foods, although I jam-packed my freezer, not realizing it.  Then, I was going food shopping maybe every two weeks in March.  I’d go food shopping, I’d do a huge haul and then I’d have no room and no idea what do eat because I never plan out the food I want to eat for lunch or what we should have for dinner.</p> <p>DK:  Did your eating habits change?</p> <p>Z:  I have a bad habit sometimes, if I’m busy and just working and working, I won’t eat.  For example, yesterday, I had cereal for breakfast and I realized at 3:30 when I was leaving to go to teach my lessons, I didn’t eat lunch.  The only thing I can say is, that changed, where I’ll either not eat or I’ll just snack all day.  That’s just normal for me.  If I’m teaching, or if I was teaching in the school, it would be the same thing.  Okay, I’m hungry, I have twenty minutes, lets scarf down a yogurt.  But now I don’t want my lunch.</p> <p>DK:  Did you make bread?</p> <p>Z:  No.  [laughter].  I didn’t make bread.  I didn’t bake in March.  I think I started baking some brownies and some muffins in September, but like boxed stuff.  But yes, I didn’t make bread [laugher].</p> <p>DK:  We covered quite a bit.</p> <p>Z:  Mhmm.</p> <p>DK:  If you could tak to yourself back in March, or earlier, what would you tell yourself?</p> <p>Z:  Maybe try and spend more time with friends and family that I didn’t think to spend time with.  I normally go and see a friend of mine every summer, but with everything going on, I didn’t see them.  I also haven’t seen my cousins who are seven and ten, I think, I haven’t seen them since last Christmas.  Seeing my mom, like three times since March, it’s kind of hard.  But spending time with more family as much as I possibly can, and make sure not to stay up super late and try and get on a regular sleep schedule.  I know, right now, I’m having trouble making sure I’m on a consistent sleeping schedule staying home being home and trying to make sure to stay on a sleeping schedule.  Don’t freak out as much.</p> <p>DK:  That’s the tough one.</p> <p>Z:  Yes.  Don’t freak out as much and don’t get upset with the people around you when you start freaking and you can’t handle your own anxieties.  [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  That’s the tough one.</p> <p>Z:  Yes. [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  Thank you very much.</p> <p>Z:  Yes, no problem.</p> <p>DK:  Is there anything else you want to add, or anything else that should be included?</p> <p>Z:  Not that I can think of.</p> <p>DK:  Thank you.</p> <p>Z:  No worries.<br /><br />----------------------------End of Transcript--------------------</p> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History Interview with Miss Z, a New Jersey Resident and Teacher Subject The topic of the resource Working From Home Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Miss Z, a New Jersey resident and teacher. Miss Z recounts her experiences while working multiple jobs, including as an educator, during the first days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource December 10, 2020 Language A language of the resource English Adapting to live under lockdown anxiety Barchi college distance learning oal history Rutgers Supply Distribution Failures Zoom Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working From Home Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19, Home Life, Professional Life Description An account of the resource Oral history accounts of the experiences of transitioning from a traditional work environment to working from home. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Fall Semester, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Donald Koger Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Kathryn Tracy Rizzi Location The location of the interview Branchburg, New Jersey Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <p>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.</p> <p>KR:  My name is Kathryn Tracy Rizzi, and I’m currently in Branchburg, New Jersey.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>KR:  Yes, I give my consent.</p> <p>DK:  Just to begin, you currently live in Branchburg, New Jersey?</p> <p>KR:  Correct.</p> <p>DK:  Have you lived there the whole time since the pandemic was declared?</p> <p>KR:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  What do you remember, off hand, about the days surrounding the World Health Organization announcement that COVID-19 had become a pandemic?</p> <p>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?”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Where did you first hear about COVID-19?</p> <p>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 <em>Morning Edition</em>.  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.</p> <p>DK:  Do you remember how long passed between hearing about COVID-19 on the news and your sister sending you articles?</p> <p>KR:  It was [mentioned] a tiny bit in mainstream news, so like <em>CBS, CNN</em> 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.</p> <p>DK:  Once you started receiving news, did your buying habits change at all?</p> <p>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?</p> <p>DK:  Sure.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Did you and your husband both transition to working from home about the same time?</p> <p>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. </p> <p>DK:  Do you have an office space you can normally use in your home, or did you have to set something up for this?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have a hard time obtaining any office supplies?  Did you already have a printer at home, for example?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have any trouble finding office furniture?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Have you had any conflicts as far as multiple people needing the same space at the same time?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Have you had any experience trying to work from home pre-pandemic?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have any issues getting your internet set up?  Four people draw a lot of bandwidth.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>DK:  Is there anything that you miss about working in the office?</p> <p>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. </p> <p>DK:  How have your eating habits changed?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>DK:  Did you make bread?</p> <p>KR:  I am one of the few who has not made bread.  [laughter] </p> <p>DK:  Any plans to try the sourdough bandwagon?</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>DK:  Is there anything else that you feel we may have missed or anything you want to add?</p> <p>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 <em>Chromebooks</em> 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.</p> <p>DK:  Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.</p> <p>KR:  You are very welcome.  It’s been my pleasure.  Thank you.</p> <p> </p> <p>----------------------------End of Transcript--------------------</p> <p> </p> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History Interview with Kathryn Tracy Rizzi, a New Jersey Resident Subject The topic of the resource Working from Home Description An account of the resource An oral history interview where Ms. Tracy Rizzi recounts her experiences during the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 13, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Adapting to live under lockdown anxiety Barchi college distance learning oal history Rutgers Supply Distribution Failures work from home Zoom Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working From Home Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19, Home Life, Professional Life Description An account of the resource Oral history accounts of the experiences of transitioning from a traditional work environment to working from home. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Fall Semester, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Donald Koger Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Andrea Shipman Location The location of the interview Raleigh, North Carolina Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <p>DK:  Today is November 25, 2020.  This begins an oral history interview Andrea Shipman.  My name is Donald Koger and I am located in Piscataway, New Jersey.  Mrs. Shipman, if you wouldn’t mind, please introduce yourself.</p> <p>AS:  My name is Andrea Shipman and I am in Raleigh, North Carolina.</p> <p>DK:  The purpose of this interview is to discuss your experience, mostly in the early days, of the COVID-19 pandemic.  With your permission, I would like to record our conversation and use it in a class project.  It will be made public as part of the project and it will also be publicly available from the Rutgers University libraries. </p> <p>AS:  Yes, I am okay with that.</p> <p>DK:  What do you remember about the first days when the pandemic hit the U.S.?</p> <p>AS:  I was traveling, actually.  I was in Los Angeles kind of when it started to be like we’re going to have to wrap some stuff up and shut some stuff down.  I had a flight from L.A. back to Raleigh, which is not a short flight.  I remember thinking:  “This really isn’t that big of a deal, why is everyone freaking out?  I don’t really get it.”  I did sanitize my whole seat and my whole area.  I always would think of that, in general, anyway just because I think planes are kind of gross.  I came home, I worked one day in the office.  Then, that was it.  I think, starting March fourteenth or fifteenth, I work for a really large company, and they shut down their entire campus, and I have not back since.  It is currently November 25.  It was crazy, it still is.</p> <p>DK:  What was that last day of work like?</p> <p>AS:  I think everybody thought, “This seems like a little much, but maybe we’ll be back in by the summer, or after Easter.”  I think it was just a little bit surreal.  I have a locker at work that just holds stuff like a keyboard, or if you wanted to have snacks, because we have an open floorplan.  I remember thinking, “I’m not going to need anything from here, right?”  I think I brough home exactly what I needed and I was really stunned by the fact that I still haven’t been back.  I think it was jut a little surreal.  A lot of people where I work would come into the office and work three days a week, then work from home two days a week.  I’m a fairly social person so I really like being in an office, I like seeing people.  So it look a long time to realize that I’m not going to work with other people in the same space for a long time.  I still don’t see how we can possibly do that.</p> <p>DK:  What do you think the breakroom fridge looks like, now?</p> <p>AS:  [laughter].  They are really, I will say, they are really good about cleaning all that stuff out.  Every Friday, they’re like “it’s getting thrown away.”  Everything, you could have the nicest Tupperware, or the greatest glass case, they don’t care, they throw that stuff in the garbage.  So that probably looks okay, but I’m willing to bet some people’s lockers are kind of funky.  That’s my guess.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have a space to work in your house before having to make this transition?</p> <p>AS:  I did not.  I set up a desk in our bedroom because we had space for it.  I would work in a very cute but uncomfortable chair once or twice a week.  Fridays I would work from home and my Fridays were pretty easy so I could do a couple of meetings in the morning and then get up and do laundry, start dinner, you know, kind of do house stuff.  Then it very obviously became clear that I would be working in this space for an indeterminate amount of time for full days, and we had to do some shifting and rearranging so I currently sit in my new office.  Which, thank god I have.</p> <p>DK:  What was that room before it became an office?</p> <p>AS:  It was my daughter’s room before she took over a bigger room down the hall, so it was kid of a kid’s guest room.  So it was kind of random, unused space, which was dumb on our part.  I had always kind of wanted to make it into an office, but I didn’t really have time, and I’m terrible at painting, all that nonsense.  Then, look at all the time!  We suddenly had all this time to not leave the house and do things.  So, we still have a little guest bed because my husband thinks we need two guest rooms.  I’m like, “Who’s coming?  We’re in a pandemic.  We don’t really need two guestrooms.”  But I don’t really feel like taking apart the Ikea bed.</p> <p>[Internet Connection Interrupted]</p> <p>DK:  Sorry about that.  My internet dropped out for a bit.  So, you were talking about converting the guest kid bedroom into an office.  You did not want to dismantle the Ikea bed was the last thing that I head.</p> <p>AS:  Correct.  I did not want to dismantle the Ikea bed so it still exists, just off-camera to my right.  [laughter].  It’s covered with a bunch of stuff.  I realized I need to put something behind me, too.  Because now it just looks like I’m sitting in a really empty room, but I’m not!  All my stuff is on one wall.</p> <p>DK:  Was that intentional, to put everything on one wall, so it wouldn’t be in the background when you have meetings?</p> <p>AS:  No, actually, it’s just because of the way my desk is.  I spread out, I’m a little messy.  So I needed shelves and stuff above my desk, so I have post-it notes and stuff right here.  I have a few shelves so when I’m standing or sitting, it’s easy for me to get to.  But no, I just don’t know what I’m going to put back there.  I also just considered, maybe I might get a treadmill because I run.  I had surgery recently, so I can’t really run on the road just yet, and I was like maybe I’ll go buy a treadmill.  And then I realized, that would be the background.  So maybe I won’t.  [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  A lot of folks buy treadmills just to end up folding laundry on them.</p> <p>AS:  I have a lot of those spaces, too.  So, yeah there’s a reason why I haven’t.  You can’t go a, well I mean you can go to a gym right now, I just don’t want to go to a gym right now.  I’m just trying to justify ridiculous money that I want to spend, is really what I’m saying.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have any issues finding equipment for setting the office up?</p> <p>AS:  I work for <strong>[a large computer company],</strong> which makes things a little bit easier.  I already had a secondary monitor and I have my laptop, which I’m really lucky to have.  I was also the resident printer of things in our home because <strong>[my husband]</strong> Craig has always worked from home.  So there was a lot of emails with “Print this, print this.”  So, now we actually had to purchase a printer.  I would say, what’s hard, the printer we got, printer ink was very difficult to find.  The specific ink that we need for our printer, was on backorder for a really long time and we didn’t have it, which I thought was very strange.  But now he has a printer, so now I get to send him things and say “Please print this.  Please copy this.”  It’s very soothing to my soul.</p> <p>DK:  Did you already have the desk in that room?</p> <p>AS:  I bought one from Wayfair.  I like to do a sit/stand, like I said, I had surgery on my hip so I can’t sit all day all the time.  I need to have moments where I can kind of stand and do work.  So, I have a two-level desk but from before, I still have that desk in the bedroom that I probably need to sell because it just doesn’t work in a sit/stand way, even if I had gotten one of the little shelf things that like pop-up.  Just the way it’s set up, it would not have worked.  No, but I will say the Facebook marketplace has gotten quite a few of our things in trying to rearrange things and get things out of the way.</p> <p>DK:  Did you have any issues with any supply shortages?  Did you have a hard time finding anything such as paper as well or just the ink?</p> <p>AS:  Just the ink.  I think it was specific to our printer.  We don’t really print a ton, we don’t have a ton of stuff on paper.  I think what changed really early in the beginning was when our kids’ school, which is now virtual, we had to do a lot of printing and copying.  A lot of taking pictures of stuff and printing it out, which was just strange, but there we things we had to do because there was no other choice.  From a supply perspective, I don’t think it was too bad.  I know, obviously, for work, our supply chain is still struggling a little bit.  But personal, thankfully, with the exception of that printer ink, it wasn’t too bad.  But that’s just for work stuff.  We won’t talk about paper towels, and toilet paper, and wipes. [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  Up here in New Jersey, we had toilet paper shortages at the stores.  Did your stores have the same kinds of issues?</p> <p>AS:  YES.  I remember, shortly after I think I had gotten back from L.A., I had done a Target run.  It was really full, there was a lot of people there, and I remember thinking:  “This is a lot of people for a Wednesday or Thursday night.”  EVERYONE, and I mean every single person had the extra large thing of Charmin paper towels.  I was like, “You know, it doesn’t go bad.  So, I should grab some.”  When I grabbed those, there was probably only four or five left on the shelves.  Even now, they don’t allow you to buy more than one, you can only buy one at a time.  Even if they’re fully stocked.  So yes, we had that.  I went to Costco the other day, there were no paper towels to be seen, at all.  I don’t know if it’s starting again, but I have seen, in my mom groups pop up:  “Hey, if anybody finds or sees the big thing of paper towels or toilet paper, let me know.”  I had gone to Home Depot the other day and I was like:  “Home Depot has toilet paper!  People forget!  Run to your closest Home Depot, or Lowes.”</p> <p>DK:  Did you see any shortages on grocery items?</p> <p>AS:  [inaudible].  Sorry, my headphones try to connect to other things while I’m mid-sentence.  Which is always really fun.  I feel like the paper products were the most; bleach, cleaning supplies were obviously and ironically at a loss, which made me think:  “Did you guys not clean before?  We were not washing our hands before?”  I just want to know, that part.  You saw a shortage of canned goods, canned fruit.  For whatever reason, I think I bought a couple canned things too, which we never eat canned fruit.  I also noticed too, which we did as well, because of the concern for local businesses, we signed up for a produce box from local farmers.  Which is a great option, in fact, we just got one today.  I think, of the heartier vegetables like the things that don’t go bad so quickly.  Like squashes and gourds and all that stuff.  I do remember seeing flour was very difficult to come by during the bread making phase of quarantine.  Yeast was very difficult to come by, also during the breadmaking phase of quarantine.  [laughter].  A lot of random baking items.  I don’t know if everyone was just, at the same time, “I guess I’m going to bake more stuff.”  I feel like those were the biggest ones that you would see missing.  I’m sure there are others.  Flour, yeast, canned goods, and the paper products.  And cleaning products, I’d say were the ones that we missed the most.</p> <p>DK:  Did you join in on the breadmaking?</p> <p>AS:  Fun story.  Before we had a kid, Craig used to make a lot of bread, like a lot.  By hand.  It was delicious.  I can’t eat a lot of bread anymore because I’m old and my stomach doesn’t like it, but I did make, and I can still make, a very mean banana bread.  Banana bread was my jam.  I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies.  And then I made my pants.  Smaller.  [laughter].  Too small, from the making of the banana bread and the cookies.  So no, we didn’t make any of the new bread; I guess sourdough was the thing and people would make a starter and stuff.  We still, thankfully [knocks on table twice], very luckily, had jobs and we still needed to work all day.  So we weren’t in the middle of the day like, “let’s just make some bread.”  But, have Craig Shipman make you bread, because he is a very good bread maker.</p> <p>DK:  Looking back, what would you say was the biggest shock, or the biggest surprise?</p> <p>AS:  I think the biggest shock and the biggest surprise, myself included, was our arrogance in thinking: “This is just going to go away.”  Which, now, eight months?  Are we eight months into this?  Does that sound about right?</p> <p>DK:  Almost nine now.</p> <p>AS:  Right, almost nine.  IT’S BEEN TWENTY YEARS! [laughter].  That’s what it feels like.  I think, that for me, it was the arrogance.  We all did, it, we all thought:  “It will just go away.  This isn’t a big deal.”  Then, the subsequent refusal to believe in just science.  Which, I don’t think has ever been a thing?  Then, I think the hardest thing, really was not even for me so much – or no it probably is for me more than it is for my kid, is the school’s closing.  I think that’s when I was like, “Oh we’re serious.  We’re closing schools.”  Now we’re really starting to realize how important having schools open is.  How important childcare, you know, the stuff that we’ve always kind of done and just assumed would always be there and that change.  I think that really has been the most eye opening, for a lot of people, not just me.  I don’t even know if I answered your question because I feel like I went off on a tangent.  [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  You’re doing great!  What’s been the biggest change between working in your office and now working from home?</p> <p>AS:  I’m probably more efficient, I think.  Working from home, just because it’s much easier for me to get stuff done, because I don’t get as distracted by talking to people or someone walking by.  I also think that I do miss out on opportunities either elevator conversations, or walking by conversations, that kind of stuff.  You can’t recreate that.  You can’t just pop into somebody’s Zoom call, like “Hey!  Just popping in!”  Which would be strange and probably illegal.  I think that was one of the harder parts, I think, of changing.  My job is world wide, so I talk to people in Europe, and Japan, and Asia-Pacific, all the time.  So we are always on calls, and thank the sweet lord that nobody expects us to be on camera.  So it’s very rare for us all to have cameras on, I think that for a lot of people, you can hear like “man, I have to do Zoom meetings.”  And now, what used to be regular phone calls for a lot of people, everybody now wants to do it on Zoom or on Teams with cameras on and whatnot.  So I’ve had a lot of friends say, “God, this was always a phone call, why can’t it just be a phone call?  Can’t we just?  We’re not used to looking in each other’s faces.  Do we have look in each other’s faces now, really?”  So, I think, that for myself, that was probably the thing that changed the least.</p> <p>I did have an outdoor, socially distanced lunch with my old colleagues.  I also went to a new business unit with my company in May, so I’m also working with a whole team that I’ve never met in person, ever.  That is really strange.  I think I’ve met one of my colleagues outside of work, just if they live close by, and we are able to grab an outdoor lunch or something, that’s been really nice.  But otherwise, I only know people by their photos.  I don’t know what anybody actually looks like in person.  Nor do they know what I look like in person.  So that’s, I think been the strangest.  I don’t know what you look like in person and that’s weird.  You always look at somebody’s photo, and everyone’s going to use their best photo.  I look great because it’s a professional family photo that we did.  I don’t normally look like that.  That’s also like four dozen cookies and like three loaves of banana bread, pre all that, so it’s different.  I don’t look that way now.</p> <p>DK:  If you could reach back, what advice would give yourself back in March?</p> <p>AS:  Buy stock in Zoom, and Microsoft.  Immediately.  Right now.  Repurpose all your storage area for paper products.  Do your physical therapy because you are stuck in the house and you can’t really do anything.  When you can’t move, which I haven’t.  I had surgery in June.  You will need that later, that is very important.  I think the biggest thing, though, is:  One of my favorite influencers, a science influencer on Instagram says:  “Be good to each other.  Wash your hands.  Cover your face.”  Because that’s the only thing that’s going to get us through.  Be good to each other, wash your hands, cover your face.  And I think it’s amazing how much kids can get used to.  I think that’s kind of one of the big things.  Kids just kind of roll with it much better than we do.  That stock part is really important too.  [laughter].</p> <p>DK:  Is there anything else that you want to add, or we might have missed that you’d like to have included?</p> <p>AS:  I would just say that my experience overall is probably one of the easiest ones.  I think there are so many people that have either lost jobs or really saw a decline in whatever business they were doing and needed to pivot and needed to figure out how to make stuff work.  I do think that coming out of this, and now history may prove me wrong, but I do think that coming out of this we will see a kind of renaissance of new businesses, new small businesses, and new ideas.  Things to, I don’t want to say alleviate, maybe the word I’m looking for is, how to kind of work within these parameters, making it a little bit easier to either work from home.  I really hope we see a change in how childcare is done.  I feel like this time we will result in a lot of different policy changes, just because of the nature of the things that you don’t realize, the systems that in place that are either not working or are barely held together. </p> <p>DK:  Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.</p> <p>AS:  Any time.  You picked a good day.</p> <p> </p> <p>----------------------------End of Transcript--------------------</p> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral history interview with Andrea Shipman, a North Carolina resident. Subject The topic of the resource Working from Home Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Andrea Shipman, a North Carolina resident. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Oral History Interview Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 25, 2020 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Adapting to live under lockdown anxiety Barchi college distance learning oal history Rutgers Supply Distribution Failures Zoom https://archivingcovid19.libraries.rutgers.edu/files/original/244c79729f0940ae769358c305302a52.m4a 428ed22e0f64dbecb29d145c72095585 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working From Home Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19, Home Life, Professional Life Description An account of the resource Oral history accounts of the experiences of transitioning from a traditional work environment to working from home. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rutgers University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Fall Semester, 2020 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Donald Koger Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Wanda Koger Location The location of the interview Piscataway, New Jersey Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <p>An Oral History Interview</p> <p>With Wanda Koger</p> <p>Interviewed by Donald Koger</p> <p>3 October, 2020</p> <p>Piscataway, New Jersey</p> <p> </p> <p><em>Wanda Koger is a 62 year old resident of Piscataway, New Jersey.  She lives with her husband, her younger son, and two of her nephews.  On October 3^rd, 2020, she was interviewed by her younger son, Donald Koger to document her memories of the days surrounding the March 11, 2020 declaration by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 had become a pandemic.</em></p> <p> </p> <p>Donald Koger:  Today is October 3^rd, 2020 and my name is Donald Koger.  This begins an Oral History Interview with.</p> <p>Wanda Koger:  Wanda Koger.</p> <p>DK:  Do we have your permission, first of all, to record this conversation?</p> <p>WK:  Yes, you do.</p> <p>DK:  I am going to use the contents of this interview for a class on documenting the [COVID-19] epidemic.  Beyond that, I would like it to be your donation to the library for their safekeeping and maybe future scholars might use it.  I would like to make sure you’re okay with making this donation of the information from your oral history.</p> <p>WK:  Yes, yes I agree to that.</p> <p>DK:  Okay.  So we are going to record our conversation today and then I’m going to type up a transcript and then that will be put in the library going forward.</p> <p>WK:  Okay.</p> <p>DK:  I’d like to talk to you about the COVID-19 Pandemic which has been going for some time now.  The World Health Organization officially [declared] the pandemic on March 11^th, [2020].  Living in New Jersey, I’d like to hear about what your experiences were.  What do you remember first about the pandemic?</p> <p>WK:  I guess just hearing about how it was affecting everything.  In the beginning, some places were starting to close down.  You heard that it came from China.  I think as far as letting the public know what was going on, they misled us or whatever.  My feeling in the beginning was that this was going to get worse.  It wasn’t going to just stay here for a little bit and go away.  That it was just going to spread and get worse and worse.  As far as my thinking, that it was going to last possibly up to a year.  The way that it was spreading, and things were up in the air whether or not, at that point, rumors that things were [going to be] closing down, companies [would be] having people work from home.  So, it was just like the beginning of things starting [to get ready] to shut down.</p> <p>DK:  Did you feel, at the time, that you were being intentionally mis-led or do you think that people just weren’t sure what was going on?</p> <p>WK:  Well, I don’t know.  Maybe they weren’t just saying certain things so that people wouldn’t panic.  They really had the brains to know that China was lying to them and things were way worse than what they said they were.  You’re hoping maybe they were more on trying to keep people calmer than actually not knowing, or blindly believing some of these other countries were saying about things that were going on;  that there’s no way to verify exactly what was going on in their country and now it was spreading all over.</p> <p>DK:  What are some of the things that you felt changed right away?</p> <p>WK:  I guess maybe I’m a little bit luckier than some other people.  I happen to be retired.  So, as far as things starting to close down: stores, bars, and people working from home and all that, it didn’t have that much of an impact on me in the beginning.  The main thing was grocery shopping, food shopping.  That’s something that you had to do.  Otherwise, it’s not like I had to go anywhere.  You do have to get the food, so that’s maybe in the beginning, something that changed.  It wasn’t like “oh gee, I’m out of milk, let me run over and get milk.”  Sometimes, you go to the store to get milk and bread and you come home and you forgot the bread.  So you turn round and go right back.  Now that this is starting, things like that were not, … you just couldn’t do that.  You weren’t really that comfortable doing that.  You had to make sure that you had your list and you were going to get everything that you needed at one time.</p> <p>DK:  So it sounds like you were trying to limit the number of trips that you made to the store.</p> <p>WK:  Yes.  Even as far as myself limiting and the whole family at that point started to curtail activities.  You know, going here or there.  And then even starting to question at that point, “gee, you’re invited to this function and it’s a very good friend of yours and you want to go but you’re like do I go, do I not go?  What’s going on here?”  Deciding “at this point I’ll go, but I just wont stand near anybody and I won’t shake anybody’s hand or give them a hug or anything else.  I’ll just stay away from them and that should keep me safe.”</p> <p>DK:  So, you were spending more time in the house?</p> <p>WK:  Yes, spending more time in the house.  Everyone else in the house at that point started staying home more.</p> <p>DK:  How many bodies are in your household?</p> <p>WK:  At the beginning, we had four of us in the household. </p> <p>DK:  I assume that some of them were spending more time outside of the house, working, going to social things?</p> <p>WK:  Yes. [interposed].</p> <p>DK:  Did that change quickly?</p> <p>WK:  I want to say. …  It’s kind of hard to remember the beginning, because it was so long ago and the new norm has been everything locked down, everybody home for such a long time.  It’s hard to remember exactly when that started, but I think in the beginning, people started staying home more.  My husband was starting to work from home and so that kind of had more of an impact than with the schools closing.  My husband working from had an impact on my daily life because I was so used to being home alone and you could blast your music all you wanted all day long and you just had the house to yourself.  Now, all of the sudden, you have two other people there that have to have some type of a quiet, they’re working.  The conference calls still go on, they still need to have their business meetings.  Life didn’t stop, it just kind of adjusted.</p> <p>DK:  What’s that like?  To go from having the house just between you and the dogs all day, to now, having working adults in the house trying to create mini office spaces?  What was that like?</p> <p>WK:  In the beginning, my husband used the kitchen table.  That only lasted for like a day or so, and then I kicked him upstairs, up to our bedroom to use as an office.  Because down here, I couldn’t have the TV on, you couldn’t vacuum, you couldn’t do the dishes, you couldn’t do the wash, he’s trying to concentrate and trying to work, trying to have business meetings.  I have this whole great big house that now I can just sit, because there’s two other people here that are in spaces that are more open, that are trying to do their stuff.  So, it was a bit of a change.</p> <p>DK:  How did your grocery buying habits change?  Did you take advantage of any online shopping?</p> <p>WK:  It changed.  I would say, it changed dramatically.  Before, you would just go to the store.  If you had to go two or three times a week, no big deal.  If you needed to go, you just went.  Now, in the beginning, I was a little bit more leery.  Some of the stores offered senior hours.  Or if they didn’t, I would go right in the morning at like 6 o’clock when they would open up and get your groceries there.  The stores had already started to put up the safety guards for the cashiers, some of them had the lines going down the aisles so everybody was going one way so you weren’t running into each other and in certain areas they spaces, especially checking out, they had things on the floor that would keep you six feet away from everybody else.  Then, finding that things just were not in the stores.  The first thing, of course, that went was the toilet paper.  Toilet paper and then all your paper products and your hand sanitizers, all of your cleaning things, anything that had bleach in it.  It just disappeared.  You’d go down the aisle, they would be completely empty.  We were lucky in that case, as far as we did have some that we usually keep on a regular basis.  But still, wherever you could get it, you would go and get it.  Even if you got a roll, that was fine.  We didn’t go to the point of trying to hoard it, if we did find some.  I would buy my one package and that would be it.  Even in the beginning, the hoarding with the toilet paper was something completely new.  Usually, in the past there’s a storm, there’s something going on, people go to the store and buy milk, eggs, and bread.  But this time, for some odd reason, people bought toilet paper.  You can do without milk, you can do without your eggs, your bread, but toilet paper is something that’s very essential.  You do need it.  So hoarding of that started right in the beginning.</p> <p>Then, using the online, I’m not computer savvy.  I don’t shop online, I don’t understand it, I don’t like going through the apps and having to do all the little things that you have to do.   Scheduling, even in the beginning, it seemed like if you did find something and you got through a site you were able to order the things that you wanted, there were no delivery dates.  The delivery dates would be, for the whole month, they were gone.  So you had to find a store that actually had a date you could have delivered.  Or you wouldn’t even be able to go and pick it up.  So we did work with my son who lives about a half an hour away as far as as if he could get online get something, he would have my list and I would have his list just in case we were able to find things.  Then we would go over and you would drop the groceries on the doorstep and wave to the grandkids through the window because there was no physical contact.</p> <p>One of the things that changed too, right away, was if you did bring groceries home, or anything that came to the house, you wiped it down.  You had the sanitizing wipes and everything, everything got wiped down.  If a box came and it wasn’t perishable, you’d actually let the box sit there for a day or so.  And you’d even wipe the box down before you brough it in the house.  We started right away.  We went as far as we had a sign on the door:  “We have people with compromised immune systems, please do not knock on the door.  If you need to contact us please,” and we left a phone number there.  We started doing that.</p> <p>The social stopping didn’t start right from the beginning.  You still went some places, but you were starting to curtail, quickly, where you were going and what you were doing.  In the beginning, I know that I didn’t wear masks, not right in the beginning.  Even starting a little bit later on, at the end of the beginning, to get masks to be able to wear them, it was hard.  You could not find someplace that was selling them.  To order them online, it would take three to four weeks.  So, in the beginning, you saw some people wearing them and some people not wearing them.  In the beginning, it was like “okay, you don’t have one on, then I won’t stand next to you.”  Or, if you’d go to the grocery store and you were walking down the aisle and you see someone without a mask, I would turn around.  Or you’d go into a line and the cashier happened to have her mask down to her chin, even with the splash guard on, I would not go to her aisle.  Thinking that, “yeah I don’t have my mask on, but I am going to at least keep my distance.”</p> <p>DK:  You adopted physical distance from others even before the masks were normal?</p> <p>WK:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  More personal space?</p> <p>WK:  Yes that was the first thing because that was the easiest thing to do.  You stay away from people.  They’ve always done the sneeze thing, how far your sneeze will go.  It was cheap, it was free.  Easily accessible, you just didn’t go near anybody and you didn’t touch anybody.  That was the first part of trying to protect yourself and other people.</p> <p>DK:  You mentioned that some products became harder and harder to get.  Was it gradual, or was it abrupt?</p> <p>WK:  The oddest thing, the toilet paper was abrupt.  Boom.  The toilet paper disappeared.</p> <p>DK:  You lived through a number of floods, so how would you compare?  In the early days of this, you saw that it was going to get worse.  How does that compare to when the floods happened?</p> <p>WK:  With the floods happening, that was surreal.  We have lived a couple of floods.  Your house was completely gutted.  You had the National Guard walking down your street giving out water, the area where you lived, you could only get in through [showing] ID.  In your area, it was like a little war zone there.  But you would go outside your area, like up over the hill and it was perfectly normal.  The world went on, everything as normal.  With this, in your little world, things have changed.  When you go outside your little world, they’re not better.  They’re the same.  It’s not like when you have a disaster like that, it’s more confined.  It’s happening in that area and it’s gonna affect that area.  When you have something like this, you can’t go someplace where it was “normal,” where you didn’t have the fear of standing too close to someone.</p> <p>DK:  Were there product shortages?</p> <p>WK:  In the beginning, the only product shortage, and I can only do this from a personal thing.  The only products, like the first couple weeks in March, were the toilet paper.</p> <p>DK:  I mean with the floods?</p> <p>WK:  With the floods, yes there were shortages.  There was, in my little town,  I remember they opened up the Drug Fair.  They really didn’t have everything going on there, so they would only let like five people go in the store at a time.  But, at the same time, if I wanted to,  I could get in my car and I could drive over to the next town or the next town that wasn’t affected by the flood and buy everything I wanted.  There wasn’t a shortage there.  It was more confined to the area, and of course this is just my experience, just confined to the area where there was the flooding that had happened.  It wasn’t like I couldn’t drive a half an hour or an hour and get whatever I wanted.  Everything was normal an hour away.  During this, it seems like it seems like it was all over.  It wasn’t necessarily confined to a certain area.  Every place was seeing, I think the whole United States’ toilet paper was bought out.  I don’t know who had it in their basement but somebody did.  [laughter]</p> <p>DK:  I still want to know where it all went.</p> <p>WK:  Yes, I want to know where it all went.  [laughter]</p> <p>DK:  What was the moment, if you can remember, where this became real to you?  Where it wasn’t just something on the news but it was, this is real; this is happening?</p> <p>WK:  In the beginning, of course my older son was like, for the protection of his children, we could go and see them through the window and wave.  No personal contact, which I totally understand because that’s your parental protective mode:  to protect your children by all means.  That was understandable and I was okay with that because he was doing something that I would have done to protect.  Everybody in our little household was not going anywhere, starting to realize and use safety measures.  I think what really started to make it real was when I started to get frustrated, to get angry.  [throat catch] It may sound like a little stupid thing, I guess it was my nephew.  He was in Job Corps courses in Pennsylvania and we had just dropped him off there in, I think it was January.  Now, this was going on in the beginning of March and it was like, you hear these things going on.  At this point, of course, things were starting to close down.  The rumors of things closing down.  It was like, well now, I have my nephew there and I can’t, you couldn’t protect him.  You would call, and it was the only thing that really kind of hit me because everything else you could protect, or was being protected.  But this was something that was out of my control, I would call the school and ask: “are you closing, are you closing?”  Not being able to go there and say “you need to come under my umbrella.”  To protect.</p> <p>This thing was just, you knew that it was just going to get worse, and I knew deep down inside that there was no way in hell that this was not going to affect younger people.  I mean, that was just a ridiculous idea.  Being that, of course the cell phone reception there was terrible, so it’s not like you could call.  They weren’t giving any information because they didn’t have any information.  Other schools closer to the 10^th, 11^th, whenever, were already starting to close.  So here, this was not closing.  So that I think was, maybe not when it hit me, because I knew that it was going to happen, I knew it was going to go on, but I kind of figured we would be okay, but then I had somebody that was outside that I had no way to protect.  I think that was what really made you kind of angry.</p> <p>DK:  Right, because your older son and his household, they can lock the doors.</p> <p>WK:  Well, I know that he will protect his family.  He will protect his children to the end.</p> <p>DK:  Your younger son lives with you.</p> <p>WK:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  And you have one other nephew living with you.</p> <p>WK:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  And your husband.  And you have another nephew who had lived with you before going to school.  And so, at this point, March 10^th Rutgers decides they’re going to start spring break a couple days early.  Your other newphew’s school had closed around the same time.  So your son is now home, your one nephew is home.  So you, your husband, your son and your nephew are in the house.  So then, this other nephew, who lived with you is now. …</p> <p>WK:  Back home.</p> <p>DK:  He’s still in school on March 10^th?</p> <p>WK:  Right, right.</p> <p>DK:  So, March 10, he’s still in school and the school is not?</p> <p>WK:  They haven’t decided and it was crazy as far as, even when they were having the news conferences and stuff and they couldn’t say “yes, we’re going to close Friday.”  A lot of times it seemed like, in the beginning, now I can’t remember exactly when they started closing everything down, but I know when they did start, it was like “oh, tomorrow we start homeschooling.”  There really wasn’t a lot of warning as far as closings go.  They were just, all of the sudden:  “Guess what, it’s happening tomorrow?”</p> <p>DK:  Right, so your nephew, only because I have notes here, I’m cheating.  Your older nephew, who had been living with you and was now at school.  Then March 15, they’re telling him “hey, we’re probably going to close.”  And then March 16, you get the phone call from him saying “hey, come get me.”</p> <p>WK:  Yes.</p> <p>DK:  So that’s jumping a little ahead.  We want to stay in the early days, I don’t want to get too far ahead.</p> <p>WK:  Going to pick him up, and it was really odd.  I don’t recall, even at that point as things were closing, that I was wearing a mask.  I can not really say that, I know that definitely way in the beginning I wasn’t.  I think that in the beginning, I wasn’t out going all over the place, just going to the store.  At that point, just trying to keep a distance from people.  It was also that the masks were not available.</p> <p>DK:  I remember the masks being really really hard to get.  Even when people wanted them.</p> <p>WK:  Yes.  You had to order them and wait three or four weeks for them to come in.  So, even in the beginning, if you wanted to use them, a lot of people used the bandanas or just t-shirts or whatever to cover your mouth and your nose.</p> <p>DK:  If you could go back and have Wanda Koger from March 1^st sitting across the table from you, what advice would you have?</p> <p>WK:  Prep.  Get your essentials.  Start making, cooking is not one my things.  I would rather go out to eat.  So it would be, start making your meal plans with the basics.  Like what we did with my other son, we combined doing some online ordering together to be able to get things.  Prep, it’s going to be a long haul.  I have to knock wood on this [thumping sound], I mean, I am so so luck as far as financially.  My husband wasn’t laid-off.  He had to work from home and we didn’t have to worry, as far as losing that money, but at the same time just prepping because it’s going to be a longer time than you think.  Take advantage of the time of everybody being home.  It did have a benefit as far as being everybody eating dinner at the same time, at the same table.</p> <p>DK:  Was that not something, you didn’t do normal dinners before?</p> <p>WK:  We did, but this was a little bit different than the every day because sometimes we didn’t . Sometimes people had things to do, they had projects, classes, whatever to go to.  Scattered.  Now it was more that, now we have game night because everybody is together all the time.  Definitely take advantage of the time with everybody being together.  I should’ve exercised more.  Get your household in order while you have the time and you don’t have to rush anywhere.  You don’t have to be out of the house at this certain time and then going to work and coming home.  You’re home for the whole day.  When you’re off work at that time, it’s not like you have a half an hour drive home.  You walk down the stairs and you’re out of your office.  Take advantage of that time.</p> <p>It’s [been] more cooking than I ever want to see done in a house again.  Of course, it’s my experience, being that I’m retired and not having to go anywhere and been retired for the last couple of years.  So, it didn’t affect me, the lockdown, as much as it did other people.</p> <p>DK:  Are there any other changes that you remember from the early days?  Obviously people were in the house more.</p> <p>WK:  Yes, which had its good points and its bad points.  Very annoying when you’ve got the house to yourself.  Not annoying, but it’s just you’re used to having your own routine of you get up in the morning and you do this or that and you want to blast your music or have the TV on.  Three or four TVS, you walk through every room and there’s a different channel on every TV.  When you’ve got people home that are doing classes from home or working from home, you have to be quiet.  Those changes and just not being able to go over, you can’t go see the grandkids.  You really can’t go visit people and it’s frustrating that people want to see you or meet up with you and they’re like “Oh, I’m not sick, you know.”  Or they get slightly annoyed at you for not wanting to meet up with them but it was like, it’s not worth it.  You may not, but I don’t know who you’ve seen.  Maybe you went to a birthday party, maybe you did this or that.  You’re just not going to be able to get together in person for these people.  You know, keep a distance.</p> <p>DK:  Is there anything else you’d like to add about your experience, in the early days of the pandemic?</p> <p>WK:  I hope I’ve covered everything.  The beginning was such a short time.  It just seemed that you heard about it, maybe a little bit in the end of January, February and then all of the sudden in March, boom.  Things are closing down.  The beginning was short-lived.  I guess, looking forward, I wish I was more organized as far as having things done and also being able to be more able to just use the computer.   Because when you’re in the lockdown, things like that, there is no going to the store.  You have to do everything online or if you’d like to talk to people and things, a lot of it is online.  With the grandkids, they would call with the Facetime.  Those things were precious at the same time.</p> <p>DK:  Thank you very much for talking with me about your experiences in the early days of the pandemic.  I’m sure we’ll talk again about your later experiences, the longer period thus far of the pandemic.  Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me and for allowing me to record this so that people in the future will have a better understanding of that people’s experiences were at this time.</p> <p>WK:  You’re very welcome, I hope I got enough information out there.  It’s just kind of hard because it all, after a while, runs together.  But thank you.</p> <p>DK:  Thank you very much.  So this is the end of our session.  This is the end of our session and I look forward to talking with you next time.</p> <p>WK:  Thank you.</p> <p>----------End of Recording-------------</p> <p> </p> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History Interview with Wanda Koger, a New Jersey Resident Description An account of the resource Wanda Koger is a 62 year old resident of Piscataway, New Jersey. She lives with her husband, her younger son, and two of her nephews. On October 3rd, 2020, she was interviewed by her younger son, Donald Koger to document her memories of the days surrounding the March 11, 2020 declaration by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 had become a pandemic. She remembers thinking that things would only get worse as time went on. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Koger Subject The topic of the resource Working From Home #anxiety Adapting to live under lockdown anxiety Barchi beginnings college COVID Fears COVID-19 distance learning Introverts Media oal history Rutgers Self-Isolation Social Distancing Supply Distribution Failures Zoom