Everything Is Viral

Very early one long ago morning, I sat down at my computer with a cup of coffee and began complaining to my journal about my weight. I’d been working out like mad, counting every calorie, and yet my weight wouldn’t go down. From there I moved on to my impression of the NFL’s opening weekend, which had just passed, before giving myself some notes on a couple of writing projects I was involved in.

I appended the entry a few hours later with the following sheepish note: “You knew more about today than I did when you read today’s date. And you must have felt pretty funny reading my complaints about my weight. Because you knew something about today that I didn’t. Your hindsight told you things about this date—a date that will live alongside dates like December 7, 1941, in the national consciousness forever—that foresight never could have prepared me for.”

The date was, obviously, September 11, 2001.

The astonishing changes that have manifested themselves between the conclusion of the previous post and the current moment — it’s Sunday evening, the 29th of March, as I begin — are known to everyone, and will remain known to everyone, for ages hence. But they only revealed themselves to us gradually, almost insidiously, and we were civilizationally as oblivious as I was personally back on that cloudless New York morning in 2001. Anyone encountering this blog at any point in the future will look at the date and think: “ah, March 2020, this is going to be very interesting!”

The writing had been on the wall for months. America had already placed restrictions on air travel from China. Even as we were preparing for our trip to Florida, I had expressed concerns about it being a bad time to be spending so much time in airports. We were asked by the gate agents in Copenhagen, before Maddie’s passport issue changed the conversation, whether we had been in China, or in contact within anyone who’d recently been in China, within the last 14 days. On arrival in the states, while I made my lame jokes with the American customs officer in Miami, we watched men in uniform escort some Chinese tourists out of the queue and off to some other room, and we knew what it was about.

The virus was a topic in the news, and in our conversations, during our stay in Florida.

But we begin this post on February 24, a crisp winter’s day, with a few pictures I took while walking Didi down by the lake.

It had been the rainiest winter in Danish history, and although most of the rain was now behind us, the lake’s level was remarkably high.

This blue heron didn’t seem to mind.

Despite the gray skies, the chill temperatures, and the forlorn look of the woods around the lake, there were small signs of impending spring.

From my desk at work the very next day, there were even blue skies… and a rainbow!

But this was a little sleight-of-hand on nature’s part: a wild storm was descending on Denmark.  northern Jylland would shortly be getting whipped with hurricane force winds, and we ourselves were subjected to days of gale-force winds… enough to shred the already peeling paint right off our trim.

Meanwhile, the virus was getting more and more media attention.  I heard or read someone, somewhere, observe that daily life had the feel of the opening reel of a horror movie: we all went about our business more or less as usual, while the foreshadowing around us began inexorably creeping into the foreground.

At work, our chef actually made a Chinese lunch one day — at least, a Danish Frenchman’s interpretation of a Chinese lunch.

The virus was still something far away from Denmark.  We knew already that its arrival was inevitable, but there was a great amount of denial at work.  An astonishing amount, really.

Mads and I had been following and discussing the developments since January, and had both been slowly but surely upping our supplies.  I’d been urging my colleagues to do the same, but they brushed my suggestions off.

On the previous Sunday, the 23rd, I’d seen a news segment on what was happening in Italy.  They’d already had a few deaths and were already taking extraordinary measures.  During the segment, there was B-roll of Italians queued up outside a Lidl supermarket in some northern city: armed police looked on as Italians in face masks stood patiently with their shopping carts, awaiting their “turn” to be permitted to go on in and shop.  Some rationing was already in force.

This hit home with me.  Not much in Wuhan looked familiar to me.  But this Italian city was literally and metaphorically closer to home.  The cars in the lot, the clothes on the people, the Lidl itself, the neighboring architecture — it could very easily have been a scene from the Lidl in Farum.  The writing was no longer on the wall for me: it was like a sign written in fire across a dark sky, and the message was simply: “THIS IS REAL.”

I’m not boasting of my foresight: on the contrary, my point is that I’m not an especially farsighted person, and yet even I could see that bad things were headed our way… anyone could have seen it coming, I believe almost everyone did see it coming, but nobody wanted it to come.  So we came to some kind of unspoken civilizational understanding that we’d just kind of kick the can down the road a little more and see how things played out.

A lot of Americans are being awfully hard on Trump, but he was actually way ahead of the curve compared to European heads of state, including our own.  His travel restrictions preceded Denmark’s by six or seven weeks.

So life in Denmark went on as usual.  On February 27, we submitted Molli’s gymnasium applications.

And later that evening I swung by the Lidl in Farum and bought things I never buy.

…to add to the stockpile of other stuff I don’t normally buy in bulk.

Things remained tense as we moved from February into March.  On that same February 27th, an editor from a Danish news station became the first Dane to test positive for the virus.  He’d spent his winter vacation skiing in northern Italy and had not been self-quarantining since his return.

Browsing the news on my phone become an almost intolerable exercise in hysteria tourism:

We were informed at work the next day that one of our colleagues had spent her winter vacation skiing in northern Italy, and had stayed at the same hotel as the Danish guy who’d been diagnosed.  She was sent home for two weeks.

The virus was now in Denmark: over the next few days, six or seven Danes were diagnosed with the virus.  “Social distancing” was not a phrase in common usage, but people were already making adjustments of their own, and employers were beginning to give their employees recommendations on how to to prevent catching or spreading the virus within and without the workplace.

It around this time that what will surely be the most famous chart of the century began to appear.  I actually took this screenshot not as part of my “chronicle all the corona things” impulse, but because I collect good, communicative charts for professional purposes  (much of my work involves visualizing data for people who have a very limited ability to understand what numbers mean).

Things were starting to get a little weird.  Even something as innocuous and, unfortunately, ordinary as train cancellations seemed portentous.

It really did feel like the opening act of a horror movie — specifically, Shaun of the Dead, whose clueless and eponymous protagonist just wants to have beer with his mates at the pub and patch things up with his girl, while we the viewers are noticing the impending zombie apocalypse taking shape around him.

By the weekend of March 7 and 8, the Danish outlook had evolved from “corona curious” to “corona aware.”  Close to a thousand Danes had by now been put into “self-quarantine” because their web of contacts connected them to someone who had been diagnosed.  No Dane had caught the virus in Denmark, yet, so far as anyone knew, but that was now considered an inevitability.

In cursory looks around the net, I can see that Denmark’s health authorities and government were by this point taking the virus very seriously; unfortunately, they were still promoting silly and ineffectual measures to the public.  It was recommended that gathering of 1000 or more persons be avoided or canceled–as though a gathering of 900 people, or 500, or 50, were somehow virally impenetrable–and people were being asked to avoid shaking hands.

These were all recommendations.  Suggestions.  Pro tips!

So life went on in egregiously unserious ways.

By now, for example, — now being a point at which “community spread” within Denmark had begun — it was known that one “ring” of virus transmission had been traced to a sports hall in a town not far from ours.  To my surprise, however, the girls’ handball games weren’t canceled that weekend.  All social activities seemed akin to wandering around outdoors in a thunderstorm: most likely you’d be okay, but you could be hit at any time from any angle.

I was nevertheless eager to live up to a promise made in a previous post: having shot dozens of terrible pictures of a Maddie game with my new camera, I’d been waiting for a chance to get some pictures of a Molli game with the new camera.

And so I brought the camera to a game of Molli’s at Værløse sportshall that weekend.  A game I felt in my gut should not have been played.

As we arrived, the older boys’ team had just concluded their own game.  We watched the last few minutes of the game, and it dawned on me I could use them to test the settings of the camera and see what kind of results I’d get.

By the time I got the camera out and started taking pics, however, the game had ended.

I did however manage to take some pics of them as the teams thanked each other for a good game.

Did you wonder what I meant by “egregiously unserious?”  This picture actually illustrates my meaning perfectly.

No, really, let’s zoom in a little.

See what they’re doing?  Over on the right.  They’re bumping elbows instead of shaking hands.

Because you’re not supposed to shake hands while this virus is afoot.

So these boys who’ve spent the past hour grappling physically with one another, hitting one another, holding one other, spraying sweat all over one another… they’re going to be good by not shaking hands.

Egregiously unserious.

And yet we, with Trine’s immunity issues notwithstanding, we allowed Molli to play in this intensely physical sport.

And I’m going to set the virus aside for a moment to share what I think are a lot of photographs that are not only the best handball pictures I’ve ever taken of either girl (a pretty low bar, when you get down to it), but also show some signs I’m actually getting better at wielding my Olympus.

And so, with no further ado, kindly forget about the virus for a moment and savor the chance to see Molli in her element: kicking ass and taking names on the handball court.  It’s a lot of pictures, but they’re way overdue.

I love this next shot — and yes, she scored.

I’m doing these manually, and in the next shot, as you can see, I actually got the settings so right that you can actually see the ball suspended in mid-air.

(Quick, Greg, get a picture of your settings!)

(Doh!)

Then I got too clever half and tried to improve on that… which I kind of did, but with the indoor lighting I had to make a choice: darker pictures where the action is caught, or lighter actions with more blur.

Lighter pictures with more blur won the day.

She is such a ferocious defender!

…and shooter!

She shoots, she scores!

She gets a penalty shot, she scores!

Molli’s team — she’s Furesø, remember, not Værløse, because at age 12 the towns combine into a single team for the kommune — won handily.  And when it was their turn to shake hands, the coaches stopped them.

Scroll through the pictures again.  Look at the physical contact, and remember that my photography isn’t up to the level of catching the sweat and saliva droplets flying around.  And then ask yourself what good is accomplished by enforcing a “no handshakes!” policy after having allowed such a game to have been played?

Egregiously unserious.

Speaking of which: a new guy started at PensionDanmark on March 1.  He’d been brought in from outside to manage two technical areas.  There was some grumbling about it, because each of those two areas had its own team leader already, and each of them saw themselves as a more appropriate fit for the position.  The usual sour grapes, fair enough.

His first day on the job, he plopped a nameplate-style sign on his desk that got a lot of tongues wagging.  There’s a hell of a gossip mill at PD, and a guy coming in with a target on his back is going to get more than his share: I tune out most such gossip, but this nameplate story actually caught my attention.  Since I get into work early, when the office is mostly empty, I had to sneak a peak at his desk to see for myself.

Can you imagine?

I’m still astonished.  It’s an interesting play.  What’s the angle?  I can usually divine the intentions behind unusual workplace behavior, but the only intention I can ascribe to this is a desire to make his new colleagues despise him.  Underestimate him?  Hold him in contempt?  I mean, really, what’s the angle?

So, uh… that was the “lighter side” of my camera roll for this month.

By Monday, March 9 (the date on which I took the picture above), the virus was pretty much the only news in Denmark.  Italy was by now on fire:

PensionDanmark announced several policy changes effective immediately: we should all remain at least one meter apart, should not shake hands or hug, should maintain distance on the elevators, and so on.  All scheduled in-house events with more than ten attendees were canceled.  Meetings should be kept as small as possible, with distance protocols observed.  All non-essential business travel into the foreseeable future was herewith summarily canceled.  Meetings with external vendors, partners, and so on should be carried out over conferencing media wherever possible.  The cafeteria would be ceasing buffet style service and would begin preparing our plates for us.  Cafeteria seating would be limited (they would remove half the chairs from every table), and employees were urged to take their lunches wherever they liked — at their desks (normally prohibited), in the meeting rooms (normally prohibited), or even outside (normally pretty stupid in Denmark in March).  And so on.

Egregiously unserious.

That evening, Trine and I discussed the trip to Sarajevo we’d booked back in November.  It was to celebrate my birthday and visit our old friend Peditto.  But I’d received an email from Austrian Airlines over the weekend informing us that because of the spread of the virus they were offering free rebookings for reservations in the month of March that had been booked prior to March 4th.  And our hotel booking could be canceled up to 24 hours ahead of time for a full refund.  So we made the painful decision to cancel the trip.  I canceled the hotel booking and began the long and complicated process of trying to reschedule our airline booking to June.  More on that later: but you can imagine how easy it was getting a hold of Austrian Airlines.

Things were getting serious in Denmark, as they were all over Europe, but people still weren’t.  On Tuesday, March 10, I took lunch with my friend and colleague David and we compared notes on the egregious unseriousness of the measures being taken.  We concurred that PensionDanmark — like most of Denmark — was trying harder to look serious about the virus than actually be serious about it.

After eating our profoundly unsatisfying lunch, force of habit brought us round to the elevators; there was a queue, so we decided to take the stairs.

Having gone up the first flight or so, we glanced across the atrium and beheld an elevator crammed full of people.  Like sardines.

Egregiously unserious.

I asked our boss for a team meeting as soon as possible.  We had the meeting at 13:00.

I made my feelings on all of this known.  David expressed his agreement.

Louise, our boss, understood our position.

“I’d let you guys work from home,” she said, “but this has already been brought up, and senior management shot it down, because a lot of the team leaders are worried that their employees won’t get their jobs done working from home.  Now, I trust you guys, but management’s line is that if those of us who trust our people let them work from home, then the employees who can’t work from home because their managers don’t trust them are going to be like, ‘If they can, why can’t I?”

I said that wasn’t our problem, that was those managers’ problem.  And I said my wife’s immunity problem was my problem, and that all the silly kabuki virus prevention was pointless and stupid.  There was no reason for people who could work from home not to, and it was reckless and dangerous to pretend otherwise.

“Well,” she said, “you can go home early today and work from home tomorrow, but I don’t think I can make any promises beyond that based on what they’re saying right now.”

“There’s no point going home early today,” I said, “but I will work from home tomorrow, and if this company doesn’t get serious about this stuff, I have to get serious about it on my own, for my family’s sake.”

I’ve never thrown down a gauntlet like that.  It wasn’t hostile, by the way — Louise and I get along just swell, and she fully understands and supports Trine’s vulnerability and my need to prioritize it.  I sincerely believe that the first rule of crises is to take ownership of your own shit… if you wait for your employer or government or local good samaritan to take care of you, you’re hurting your own odds.  I thought everyone understood this.  The world is a nasty, dangerous place, and the idea that “the government won’t let anything bad happen to me” only makes it more dangerous.  It’s standing on the Titanic and wondering when one of those nice cabin boys is going to come save you.

So I worked from home on March 11th.  Shortly after I shut down for the day, I got a text from Louise to the effect that, “well, there’s no news from senior management, so I guess you have to come in tomorrow — sorry.”

I had no intention of going in to work the next day, so I didn’t respond.  I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I wasn’t going to risk bringing home a virus that could seriously jeopardize Trine’s health.  So I took Didi for a walk to clear my head.

There’d been buzz all day about a speech from the PM scheduled for 20:30 that evening.  It was expected that she’d announce that the recommendation of canceling events with more than 1000 people would be made a temporary law.  There was even talk she might lower that number.  Shocking stuff!

So we gathered round the television at 20:30, expecting more egregious unseriousness.

(“Press meeting on Coronavirus.”)

(“Denmark shutting down.”)

And so March 11 entered the book of days with September 11.

Even hoping to see your government take something seriously, it’s a hell of a shock to have your prime minister tell you that she is, effective immediately, and with the unanimous support of every political party in the nation, shutting the country down to the greatest extent possible.

Less than half an hour after the speech, I got an SMS from PensionDanmark: we were all instructed to make whatever arrangements necessary to work from home effective immediately until at least the end of March (corresponding to the closure period the PM had just set out).

Dawn, as they say, had finally broken over Marblehead.

And I learned via text that my colleagues were all scrambling to get groceries.  (It was the start of a rush that lasted about 48 hours.)

All at once, the girls were done with school, I was working from home, Trine was working from home, and…  well, things were going to be a whole lot nicer for one member of our household.

Two days later, on Friday the 13th, the PM addressed us again: this time to tell us that effective noon the next day, the Danish borders would be closed to all non-essential traffic.

Meanwhile, I should add, those roaring winds had yet to abate.  The evening terrace bore the brunt of the abuse.

…but that damn dangling branch still held fast.

It was only that Saturday that the winds finally settled down.  It was a bright, clear day, so Trine, Maddie, and I took Didi for a walk around the lake.

I’ve never seen the path around the lake so crowded.

There were people everywhere.  There probably wasn’t a single stretch of more than 50 meters without people on it… but everyone was keeping their distance from everyone else.

I played around with the camera a few times and got some nice shots — it’s much easier in daylight than it is indoors.

That Sunday was the Ides of March.  My 55th birthday.

Unfortunately the day got off to a terrible start: Molli had gone for a run with her friend Freja, and in the course of the run Freja revealed that she was still recovering from what had been a nasty flu-type thing.

We had no choice but to lower the boom on poor Molli.  She would have to spend the next two weeks almost entirely confined to her room. She would not be permitted to get too close to the rest of us, much less touch us.  She would have to wash her hands thoroughly prior to any use of the bathroom or kitchen.  To the extent she ever forgot, she would have to sanitize with our limited supply of hand sanitizer and sanitizing wipes.  She was banned from seeing Freja for at least 14 days.  She would be allowed her daily 15:00 runs with friends, but would have to be adamant about keeping them at a two meter distance, and could not see anyone who had any illness of any kind at their home, but also could not see anyone who had anyone vulnerable in their home (in case she was in fact infected).

It meant that my birthday dinner was our first foray into the world of intra-family distancing… note the placement of Molli’s plate.

…which was weird.  Despite the feeling of gloom closing in around us, we tried to make it as festive as possible.

And we actually had a very nice dinner.

Yeah.  Fifty-five.  Ugh.

St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t very festive either.  We don’t really acknowledge it in our house, and it’s not a huge deal in Denmark, but all of that is just as well: the evening was pre-empted by a speech by the queen.

Once again, we gathered around the television to see yet another historic speech.

(Don’t know why Maddie chose that evening for a face mask treatment, but there’s so much I don’t understand about such things.)

The queen’s speech was short and to the point.

(“It feels both frightening and unreal…”)

Why, yes.  Yes, it does.

Queen Margrethe expressed herself clearly and succinctly.  She expressed her hope that Danes would follow the sensible guidelines set out by the authorities, and her stern disapproval of Danes who were not abiding by them.  One passage in particular was quite sharp:

Selvfølgelig er det skuffende og ærgerligt ikke at kunne mødes med sine venner, ikke mindst, når man er ung. Men I har jo både tiden for jer og andre måder at mødes på i denne digitale tidsalder.

Min opfordring gælder naturligvis ikke kun de unge. Man kan stadig se grupper i alle aldre, som opholder sig for tæt sammen. Nogle holder endda stadig fester og runde fødselsdage.

Det synes jeg ikke, man kan være bekendt.

Det er tankeløst. Og det er først og fremmest hensynsløst.

— 

Of course it’s disappointing and annoying not to be able to meet with one’s friends, especially when one is young.  But you have both time ahead of you and other ways of meeting in this digital age.

I’m not just encouraging the young.  One can still see groups of all ages carrying on much too close together.  Some are even still holding parties and celebrating round birthdays.

I don’t think this is at all appropriate.

It is thoughtless.  And it is first and foremost reckless.

Indeed.

And so the slow drip of days under quarantine stretched out.

My only trips off our property were for long walks with or without Didi.  On one long walk without her I came across a scene that would have been quite different with her.

It’s therapeutic just getting out and seeing grass and blue sky, and feeling the sun on my skin.

Our weekday schedules hadn’t changed much.  The girls have a fair amount of remote learning, but nowhere near enough to fill their days… and of course there’s no more handball.  And the Python course we’d signed Maddie up for through GC was postponed.  (Although this past Sunday an alternative online course began, and she seems to be enjoying it.)  And all socializing was done.  But Trine still kept her regular hours working from home, and I continued working full days for PensionDanmark and additional hours every day on Scandlines.

And the usual chores still demanded our attention on weekends.

Although not all weekend chores are really chores at this time of year…

So I’m spending at least 10 hours a day in the basement office, and have been gradually tidying and improving it.  It’s getting quite comfortable.

Maddie’s classroom is right next to Trine’s office.

And Didi is ecstatic to have us all home all the time, although I get the feeling she doesn’t feel we’re being quite as playful as we should be.

The night of the 21st, I got the following SMS from the police:

Strangely I was the only member of our household who got the message.

Spring is taking its time this year, but it is coming.

I didn’t notice the nest in the cherry blossom across the street until after I took that picture.  Then I zoomed in and took another.

It’s a big nest — might even be a heron.  We’ll see.

I like to take pictures of the property at the start of every spring just to have a reference: so here’s how we look from the street these days.

One afternoon Molli got home from her 15:00 run around the lake and told us the path was now a one-way path.

I was a little incredulous, but Trine said she’d heard the lakes downtown — the ones dividing Frederiksberg from downtown Copenhagen — had recently had the paths around them declared “one-way” also, so she found it perfectly feasible.

Still, it’s a weird thing to encounter a sign like this on a path you’ve been roaming freely for 12 years.

The first Monday of our official quarantine — March 16th — we received a big box of fruit, vegetables, and nuts from PensionDanmark, and on our first Friday we had an online “Fredagsbar,” or happy hour, where over 100 of us were able to toast one another’s health — and there was a singalong of “We’ll Meet Again.”  (Which was introduced as “an old song from the war,” but which I have only ever associated with the apocalyptic ending of Dr. Strangelove.)  The company was also kind enough to have our office chairs delivered to our homes.  I know my own office chair looks very comfortable, and it is — but not for ten plus hours a day.  So I was glad to have my office chair delivered as a chance-of-pace seating arrangement.

It arrived on Friday the 27th of March, so I wheeled it into the guest room to detox over the weekend.

Exercise has been very important to me since we got back from Florida, but house arrest made me yearn for the open road.  I went for a bike ride on Friday instead of using my elliptical trainer.  I’d gotten out of the habit of taking long bike trips a year or two ago because I had a lousy bike that could barely handle getting me to and from the train station five days a week.  But I got a new bike this winter, a much nicer one, and it’s a pleasure to ride.  The ride I took on Friday felt so good I decided to quit the elliptical.

And since I’m the only one using it anymore, that meant it was finally time to get the damn thing out of our house.  It was a top-of-the-line model, purchased in 2008, and it has given me twelve years of great use.  (Ten, really: the last two years I barely had time to use it.)

I took a picture of my final cumulative stats:

And although it sounds like a lot (366 hours! 278,000 calories! 1505 miles!), it can’t be right… In the years when I have used it, I’ve average no fewer than four workouts a week, and never fewer than 20 minutes per workout — more often 35-55.  I’m pretty religious about getting 150 minutes of cardio per week: that’s 2½ hours per week.  Even allowing for workout “vacations” every July and December, that’s at least 90 hours per year, which after 10 years of solid use would be 900 hours.  Even if I’m forgetting some times of neglect, the drop to 366 hours is too huge to be accounted for.  (On the other hand, 1366 hours would be way too many, so it can’t just be a loss of a thousands place.)  So I’ll never know how much I really used it, except that I got my damn money’s worth.

Good night, sweet elliptical trainer.

And blam!

You know what happens when you take a giant piece of furnishing out of a room?

You realize your room is configured in a way that no longer makes sense.

And you realize that you have stuff in another room that would make more sense in this room… which then frees space up in that room for stuff from…

Well, the weekend of the 28th and 29th saw some dramatic changes in the layout of our home.  And has inspired still more changes we intend to make in the days and weeks ahead.

Something tells me we’re not the only people whose interiors are undergoing dramatic changes these days…

# # #

We were able to liberate Molli this weekend.  Trine and I gave her a great big hug, and we’ve got our normal dinner seating back, and I no longer feel a compulsion to sanitize anything she touches.  Apart from that there’s really not much difference: she mostly keeps to her room.

# # #

I had mentioned that rebooking with Austrian Airlines had turned out to be more complicated than I’d expected.  This is actually saying something, because given everything going on in the world, I expected a lot of complication.  I want to note just how much complication here in the permanent record firstly because it’s funny, and secondly because I want to retain the anecdote as a sort of snapshot of where we stand technologically today.

First, their message had been that rebooking would be made an option on one’s booking page online.  That did not appear to be the case for me.  There was no “rebook” button of any kind, anywhere.  But the message had also indicated that a special telephone number was available for these “corona rebookings,” and so I tried that.  Every 20 minutes or so.  For about two days.

Finally I hunted down their “online customer service form,” which actually had a flow set up to handle rebooking requests.  I filled that out in painstaking detail, submitted it, and about four hours later I got a confirmation that the form had been received, but that due to high volumes it might take them some time to be in touch.

And then on the evening of the 12th, the day before our scheduled departure, I got a text message from an Austrian airlines bot informing me that our flight had been canceled.

I clicked the rebooking link, and the bot asked me if I wanted to rebook.  I said yes.  It asked me to provide dates: I selected June 5 and June 7 as my desired dates — these were the dates I’d requested in the online form.

Up to this point I’d marveled at this ingenius use of bots… it was very clever, very good customer service.  But then we went from happy shiny futurism to the dystopia of Brazil.

The bot died on me — just froze up and died — but shortly thereafter I got an SMS informing me they had had to change my booked flight at 14:10 on Friday, March 13, from Copenhagen to Zagreb.  I had never booked any such flight.  But that didn’t matter: the madness had begun.  I was responding to their texts like mad with words like, “No,” and “Cancel,” and “I do not accept.”  Nothing helped.

Over the course of the next three days, my phone was buzzing regularly with news of flight cancellations, rebookings, reroutings, last-minute gate changes, baggage claim information…  strangest of all was a message I got after period of silence on Saturday night, from an unknown number:

“Due to the current situation we are not able to offer you food or beverage on your flight.  We apologize for this change.  Regards, SAS.”

We had never booked any flights with SAS, nor had Austrian made us aware of having offloaded any of our four legs (two in each direction) to SAS.  I had no idea what they were talking about — until the next morning, when that cursèd Austrian bot spammed me with a series of texts whose end result appeared to be that I was now being rerouted from Sarajevo to Berlin on Austrian Airlines, and would be flying from Berlin to Copenhagen very late at night on an SAS flight.

On which, of course, I would apparently be left without food or drink for a full 55 minutes.

There is a happy ending, however: on Saturday, March 28, I got an email from Austrian Airlines.  They were finally responding the the form I’d submitted on the 9th or 10th.  They would honor my request to rebook for the weekend of June 5th to the 7th.  They just needed me to call them and confirm that the flights they’d chosen were okay.  They were, so I called them and confirmed, and our booking is set.

We may just be setting ourselves up for a repeat of the whole cycle, but what the hell.

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The quarantine has been extended through the long Easter weekend here in Denmark.  It’s Monday evening now, as I wrap this up, and the PM had a presser earlier today announcing that things seem to be going well, and she believes we’ll be able to gradually begin opening up again after Easter as hoped — contingent on continued progress like what we’ve been seeing for the past two weeks.

(As a libertarian friend paraphrased it, “Just keep following our rules, little children, and maybe we’ll let some of you have some of your rights back–but only if you’re really good and never forget to say mother may I!”  It’s over the top, but there’s a nugget of truth in there.)

She also made clear it would not be straight back to normal, and said the government is holding talks with the employer, labor, and professional unions (remember the Danish government is prohibited from direct involvement in labor and employment issues), and the educational establishment, to chart the way forward, probably with staggered work and school hours, continued emphasis on telecommuting, and other measures designed to keep as much social distance as possible for as long as possible.

It sounds like it’s been extended to the end of April in the states, which is probably more realistic given the magnitude of the country…  although I’d guess that various cities, counties, states, and regions will continue establishing individual approaches because one size does not fit all in America the way it does in little Denmark.  The federalist model will continue to predominate because the federalist model is the only one that makes sense in such a country.

We’re keeping to our routines and staying sane.  We all exercise every day, and we’re getting plenty of sleep, and we’re adapting to the need to order groceries a week in advance (although we got an email yesterday that as a “loyal” Nemlig customer, they were going to unlock a feature for us that might allow us to get back to next day deliveries: we’ll see).  A great weight has been lifted off us with Molli’s emancipation this past weekend.

Meanwhile, I look forward to someday browsing through this whole blog, from the day of Molli’s birth up until whenever, and feeling myself clench up when I notice the next post is from March of 2020.  I look forward to it because I just know I’ll be thinking to myself, “maybe I’ll just scroll ahead on down to May… because man, once we got over the hard part, 2020 was one of the best years ever!”