Paradoxes of Pandemic Preparation and Protection

"Stock up and stay home."
  -- Go out every day or two, to see if the stores have managed to replenish necessities cleaned out by panic buying and hoarding.

"Wash your hands as often as possible."
  -- Sign in the drug store: "Restrooms closed for the duration of the epidemic." Also, hand sanitizer not available until further notice. If you're not carrying your own, you are S.O.L.

The grocery store still has a dispenser of sanitizing wipes where the shopping carts are parked. No one has yanked them all out and run away with them.

At the bike shop, it's hardly business as usual, because very little is as usual right now. The winter never really happened, so it's looking like early bike season a month earlier than early used to be. In previous weak winters, sometimes people would show up with their bikes, but more often they don't. This year, we've had a small early surge. It's too small even to be a surge, but more than a blip. One customer who dropped her bike for an early tuneup is a Massachusetts refugee who was told to work from home and decided to come up to Wolfe City and work out of her second home rather than stay down in plague-ridden Massachusetts.

The bike business was already hampered by tariffs and by the massive disruption of Chinese manufacturing as the new coronavirus erupted over there. But the shop owner had to get bikes in, so we're waiting for a few dozen to show up. They will all need to be assembled in case we get a season instead of a nationwide total shutdown.

The schools are closed for three weeks. That means our trainee is available for more hours, although he still has to keep up his assigned schoolwork. We haven't had a lot of customers come in and hang around, so the social distancing thing sort of works. Trainee is a bike racer, so he's already averse to getting sick. The rest of us live in the animal fashion of the working poor. We know instinctively that we cannot get sick or injured. If we don't get any business because there's a nationwide shutdown, or we can't work because too many of us are sick, we know that it's the end for us. There is no national support system, and little hope that this crisis will change that.

Americans have long prided themselves on doing as little as possible for each other. I don't know where that E Pluribus Unum bullshit came from. The obvious operating principle throughout my working life has been Every Man for Himself. We are free to associate, and many do, but those associations have clearly delineated membership. Many of them make no secret that their perimeter is fortified and their members are armed. Others are more benevolent. I suppose we're lucky that the hard-core authoritarians have not quite managed to seize control of national policy, since the benevolent ones have failed utterly to inspire national acceptance.

If we should have to shut down, or I have to be quarantined, I could work from home. I have almost all of the basic tools for a commercial bike repair shop. I can't work on hydraulics at home, and I have not kept up with the 15 or 20 different bottom bracket tools you need to service all comers, but I could get a lot of routine crap done. Somehow the bikes would need to get to me. Either the customers would have to truck them out here, or the shop would have to bring them. They could also provide any special tools a particular repair required, and douse everything with the appropriate chemicals to purify it after it came back from the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It would be cumbersome. More likely nobody would bother.

For now, we sanitize obsessively and wash our hands until they're scaly. We'd been doing gloves for a few years already, just to keep some of the grease, lubes, and solvents off of our skin. We have not adopted masks yet, except for the procedures that made them advisable already. But now you look at every incoming person as a potential suspect.

The cellist arrived at Portland Jetport at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Because she fell while hiking a couple of weeks ago, she's been on crutches, and applied for a wheelchair to get through the airport. That meant that I was standing in the greeting area while everyone else got off of two flights that had arrived at about the same time. I watched them stream in and come down a stairway and an escalator to reach the lower level where the baggage claim and the street exits are. A few wore masks. One or two wore gloves. No one made much effort to stand apart, because the system is not set up for it. We arranged ourselves around the conveyor belts in the baggage claim area like bears waiting along a river bank for salmon. When the right one comes along, dart a paw in and snatch it out. The cellist's wheelchair driver waited patiently. He was a quiet, tall young man, probably part of the refugee community that has settled in urban Maine. His presence was calming.

The cellist and I have barely touched since she got here. She extended her stay when the governor of Maryland shut the schools, so she'll be here longer than the two-week quarantine period required for people coming from known hot zones, like Italy. Meanwhile, I'm still potentially exposed every day that I go to work or make a quick sweep through the grocery store because we still can. We don't want to dig into our stash of isolation foods until we know that we have no choice. Otherwise, we might have too little at the point that everything shuts down for real. If one of us gets sick, the other one is almost certain to. But she couldn't stay where she was, because her living arrangements are pretty marginal down there. Her chances of exposure were much greater. That thing that Kurt Vonnegut supposedly wrote, about going into the arts? Yeah, that's bullshit.  Go into fucking finance, people. Become a corporate lawyer. Just go ahead and rape the planet and fleece the chumps for your own fat gains, because it's all for nothing anyway. We can't vote away the Apocalypse any more than someone can pray away the gay.

The internet has developed its own familiar symptoms of proud ignorance, conspiracy theories, doomsayers, spiritual advisers, real scientific medical information, pseudoscientific crapola, and malware. It's a perfect laboratory demonstration of every debate about social, political, and environmental issues. It's like watching a Petri dish getting obliterated under a slimy, furry culture going out of control.

Good luck, everybody.

Customer Appreciation

Humans are wired to remember the negative more than the positive. This characteristic probably began as a survival-enhancing trait, because our ancestors who catalogued and avoided negative experiences had a better chance of reproducing and bringing their next generation to breeding age.

As the eons have passed, the survival value of a negative focus has diminished, particularly as our technological society puts out crash pads around every sharp object and nurtures helplessness, but it remains vestigially. Any of us can notice things and connect dots to make small or large patterns that alarm, anger, or depress us.

I riff on customer behavior a lot, because I have absorbed so much of it over the decades. We in the theme park/specialty retail business should wear dosimeters to indicate how many assholes have irradiated us in the course of our careers. Given the bias toward retaining negative impressions, the collection of crap rays builds up and hangs around with more force than the accumulation of happy nice rays. I'm not excusing, just explaining.

Some people have higher susceptibility than others. You'll meet career sweeties in service positions. You'll meet people who have enough self control to contain an appropriate but ill advised response to a customer's radiation. You'll meet snarling burnouts who should change jobs, and would if they could. You'll meet people who are learning that they don't have what it takes to put up with the demands of an unfiltered public surging in with their needs, wants, and attitudes.

The seasonal fluctuation in our particular businesses, bike and ski, create high work loads and deep lulls. Each of these brings a specific kind of stress. And the devotees of one season consider the peak of our other season to be down time, so they come in to chisel and waste time when we are most busy with the other half of the clientele.

Specialty retail has its own challenges. We get chiseled during cross country ski season, because cross country skiers are basically cheapskates. I am one of you. Cross country skiing appealed to me because I could use skis for their ancestral purpose, to go from place to place, and because I could ski for free, limited only by available snow and my own skills. So I share the desire to pay less and ski more, compared to lift served skiing. Bicyclists cover a much broader spectrum, because bicycling can be done over a vastly greater range of conditions. But, because machinery is involved along with physical exertion, bicyclists not only encompass pathological bargain hunters, but mechanical and athletic arrogance in the spectrum of behavior. There's a little of that in cross-country skiing, but among skiers the chiseling dominates.

What does all this mean to customers and shop staff? Last week, with a staff chronically one person short for the workload on any given day, we had bored skiers, tired of summer, coming in for the off season deals, deals, deals. This draws a qualified staff member to sell stuff at suicide margins while in-season repair work continues to pile up. We should make them hold a gold-plated chisel as their emblem. At the same time, we got the out-of-town smart shoppers who will loudly tell their friends not to buy anything from us because they know some place down home that is going out of business and is basically throwing stuff out. That guy should wear a headdress made out of a dead vulture, to proclaim his devotion to feeding on the death of others.

I see from the condition of things people finally bring in for repair that they don't care whether it was properly set up the first place. The things they manage to survive make me wonder why I ever cared so darn much about doing a good job myself. Gone are the 1990s, when thousands of people took to the trails and actually tested products and our workmanship.

Weirdly, the current trend to know nothing and shop entirely by price manages to coexist with a culture of helplessness in which customers depend more than ever on products not only meeting but exceeding their specifications. Take that guy who rode the Mount Washington Century on a 23-22-21-20 spoke front wheel and did not end up in some hospital with his spine pinned together and his whole face in a cast.

When the shop fills up with loud, confident, and wrong experts explaining our products to their friends, while I scrub away at some greasy, rusty, neglected and abused piece of disrespected equipment, it can be hard to summon a feeling of noble justification for my occupation. We in the back shop turn to dark comedy. Occasionally we indulge one or two of those appropriate inappropriate responses.

All this is what we have to survive to be there for the truly interested, interesting, and appreciative riders. It's no one's fault that the pleasant lift from them can be eradicated in the next ten minutes by some behavioral fart. It's just people being people. And we are people laughing at people being people. We'd miss the jerks if they went away. It's fun to come up with ways to bitch about them. With negativity bred into us, our choice is to take it too seriously or to mock it.

Fighting for your life in the fun business

A friend and customer is in the fitness business. She's ferociously active, and energetically generous about sharing her knowledge and support with the people who come to her for training.

In a small town the ugly aspects of business competition come to the surface the way rocks gash the hulls of smooth-sailing boats in shallow water. The fitness industry is a busy one. Lots of people try to find an angle and work it. Businesses that attract enough clientele to meet their overhead will survive. In that arena, business owners will pursue any advantage, including propaganda, disinformation and the weaponization of zoning regulations to take down a competitor.

My friend managed to set herself up in a niche with a clientele that seems to like her methods. But it's yet another plucky little crew that can't spare too many members before the implacable forces of finance make survival mathematically impossible.

It's made my friend a little crazy. She goes into a bit of a spiral whenever one of her clients does what customers so often do: they go shop around.

In the bike shop we've been through these waves many times. Each time you wonder if the receding tide will leave you high and dry  forever, your bones to bleach on the parched sea bed. And I watched the cellist go through it with her 15-year effort to establish a steady flow of students through her music studio.

Each business, the fitness center, bike shop and music studio, is offering something that has practical benefits, but which is more publicly categorized as merely fun. The people who work in those businesses depend on them for the practical necessities of life. But in each case the business and the activity it represents competes against many other activities that provide the same benefits in different ways. They also compete against activities that offer completely different attractions.

People will only do things that seem like fun as long as they seem like fun. If it's something clearly not fun, like emptying the garbage, cleaning the cat box, or going through chemotherapy, there's still a perceived benefit. But when the benefit includes fun, you'd better be fun.

There are ways to get away with being a bit of a grouch, but you'd better remain a lovable grouch. Most people don't want to be dragged through the rough by a stern taskmaster for something they consider optional. So whatever frustrations you may feel, you must project a positive outlook. At least be entertaining.

If you have a large population to draw from you might have better luck finding "your people" to join you and support your endeavor. In a small town that number might be too small to sustain life.

From the consumer's point of view it can be as bad. What if the surviving provider of whatever it is you want strikes you as an a-hole? Maybe the locals don't care or a lot of them are a-holes too. In that case you get in and get out as quickly as you can. If an alternative comes up, you check it out.

Even if the local (insert business here) isn't run by jerks, even if you actually like them, an inquiring consumer, advancing in knowlewdge and experience, is liable to explore anyway. They should. And when times are good, even the small business owner will have a bit more equanimity about these walkabouts. In the end, a business can only keep doing what it does best, to the best of the collective ability of its staff.

The game changes. In the 1990s our shop fought it out with competitors here in town as well as shops many miles away. The Internet hadn't brought point and click shopping, but people were willing to travel a long way to check out trails. Going a long way to check out a shop came naturally. In that regard we made out well a lot of the time. Customers might come to us from shops that did not have the advantage of trails right nearby on which to train the sales and repair staff.

Now that mountain biking has shrunk to a small and dedicated subculture, we don't even get the chance to audition. The cool kids, some of whom we used to cheerfully trounce on group rides, mostly go to one shop in a nearby town where the owner represents the religion more to their liking. From his end, he needs the few devotees who are willing to keep investing the money and time to have relatively contemporary mountain bikes in order to meet his survival expenses. It's a good thing he likes to work at his business, because he needs to till that patch for all it's worth. We miss our old clients, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

It's easy to be a motivational speaker and tell people to adapt and change. Motivational speakers have been drawing from the same basic repertoire of bullshit for thousands of years. Of course they're always happy and upbeat. They've figured out how to get by without needing an actual job. That never changes.

Small operators in the fun business usually get into it because they like or love the activity in question. If it's love, and it's unquenchable, you can only follow it and hope it does not lead to misery and ruin. Misery and ruin seem especially cruel if you'd had a good thing going for a while. And they're particularly inconvenient when they're setting in just as you think about kicking back a little, perhaps easing into something resembling retirement.

Love or not, your willing shift to another livelihood may face steep obstacles if you're a little on the old side or lack the funds to pay for retraining.

For now my friend gets by. The shop survives. The cellist, my beloved, is a disembodied voice on the telephone, calling from where she found a toehold on the inhospitable cliff of her profession.

We fight for our lives in the fun business. To all of you out there like us, as alone as you are, you are not alone. We can't really do much for each other except commiserate. But that's something.