The effects of the coronavirus have caught most of us off guard. In February, I never would have predicted that I wouldn’t be graduating or playing my senior season of lacrosse. It’s very saddening, but I stay positive by reminding myself that my grandfather’s era of seniors were being drafted into the Vietnam war directly out of highschool, and I am grateful that the class of 2020 is not in a similar situation.

On the bright side, I am considered an “essential worker”, so I am still able to make money. Our store hours have been reduced from 10:00am-9:00pm to 11:00am-7:00pm. This means that my hours, along with my coworkers, have been cut. However, I am still glad to be making money in a crazy time like this. Since school is no longer structured in a schedule, I have been able to pick up more shifts and I have more flexible hours.

The attitudes of the customers have been good and normal for the most part, however there have been a few hysterical people every few shifts. Notably, there was a lunatic customer on one of my Sunday shifts. I typically close the back of the store, meaning I wash dishes and prepare the essentials for the next morning, and don’t interact with customers as much as the other employees. Because of this, I do not wear a mask during the entire shift. I only wear it when I go up front. However, my manager called me up to make a sandwich for a customer, so I stopped washing the dishes and came to the front. Since I had my mask off while doing the dishes, I forgot to put it back on when I started to make the sandwich. The customer got extremely upset and started swearing at me and calling me a punk, even threatening to fight me since I “had no regard for his life”. He demanded that we give him our corporate number and that he “didn’t know how much longer me and my manager would be working here”.

Our general manager told us to make sure we wear our masks at all times from now on to avoid similar incidents. Me and my manager began wearing masks full time and shrugged off the incident and didn’t let it get us down. Afterall, you always will have to deal with lunatics, it’s part of the business. Hopefully this virus will settle down soon so that things may return to normal for everyone.