The first 30 days: Our quarantine story

At work, we have a Slack channel called “ooo-wfh”, meaning Out-of-Office and Work-From-Home. It’s there for colleagues to announce if they will not be in the office. On March 13th, the following messages started to appear in the channel:

On the same day, President Trump declared a National Emergency. March 13th, 2020, would become Day 1.

It’s been 30 days since March 13th. A lot has happened this month. I have been writing daily emails to my team. You can read many of them if you check out my LinkedIn posts.

In this article, I want to summarize the major events that happened to me and my household during this time. I feel like this is a once-in-a-lifetime situation so I want to document it as well as I can. I’m guessing many of you will be able to relate to one part or another.

One of the first things that we did as a household, was to set a long-term expectation. In the first few days, when our kids would ask us when they could expect to go out again, we would say, “at least June,” or “September.” I was not crazy, nor did I really expect the pandemic would last that long. The idea was for the kids (and ourselves) to accept the fact…