On January 1, 2020, we posted a very optimistic and happy post about our plan to move into a new home in 2020. January was full of goals and opportunities we assumed were realistic and within our control. We had our new home theater vision in mind with plans to vlog and share our home theater parties via YouTube. Then a COVID-19 worldwide pandemic happened!
Like many other people in the world this day in April 2020, we are dealing with coronavirus in a very personal way. A necessary visit to the emergency room revealed we are sick. Pneumonia in my lungs caused by the virus put me on a course of antibiotics. We have been #quarantined and #stayathome. My fellow home theater fans, you don’t want this illness.
News reports don’t focus on the sweats and high fever, the lack of air to the lungs, and the fear of not being able to breathe. News reports don’t remind people they might not want to take 41 Amoxicillin pills and 9 Azithromycin pills. News reports don’t focus on the endless painful coughing. News reports don’t focus on the skin rash caused by the antibiotics for the pneumonia treatment. News reports don’t focus on the metallic smell of the antibiotics seeping through your skin. The antibiotic smell returns no matter how many times you shower. News reports don’t talk about the skin dryness no matter how much shea butter is used. News reports don’t talk about the loss of taste and the extreme tiredness. News reports don’t talk about why people are hoarding toilet paper. If you get the illness with pneumonia, you are going to need EVERY roll and then some.
If you don’t want the pleasure of enjoying a strong bitch slap, simply #stayathome. Think of yourself, your children, your husband, your mother, your father, etc. We suffered during this illness. It is not pretty and NOTHING like the regular flu. Please take the coronavirus seriously and #stayhome until the quarantine is over.
We worked side hustle jobs at a Amazon warehouse. A coworker was sick, sweating, and coughing only feet away from me. The coworker complained and wanted time off to go home for over two hours. An assistant manager finally encouraged the coworker to leave for the rest of the shift. The damage was done in the hours we worked in close proximity.
A short while later I started showing symptoms. I waited for a regular appointment with my primary physician. I was struggling to breathe. I couldn’t wait for the primary appointment any longer. The many doses of cold flu medicine and cough drops I had taken had ZERO results. No over-the-counter medicine helped. I had taken a six doses of cold/flu medicines. I attempted to stand up and lost my balance. It truly felt like I had been bitch slapped by Mr. Strong Hand Turner. I felt so horrible I rushed to an emergency room.
Two chest x-rays revealed I double had pneumonia in my lungs caused by COVID. This explained why the cold/flu medicines didn’t work, why I felt so horrible, and why I struggled to breathe. I needed antibiotics not cold flu medicine. The ER doctor prescribed two strong courses of antibiotics for treatment. The sickness causing pneumonia in my lungs worried me something awful because I have underlying health issues. The news reported people are not dying from COVID. People are dying from the pneumonia caused by COVID. My primary wants another set of chest x-rays to ensure the pneumonia is gone. Today I am still struggling to breathe.
Less than a week later, my daughter who also works at the same Amazon warehouse became sick too. No matter my daughter’s age, she is still my child. I feel helpless watching her suffer with this illness and struggle to breathe. She is not able to get a test because doctors are rationing their test kits. We are not celebrities just normal people who don’t have influence to ensure we get tested. It is frustrating to see celebrities without symptoms get tested when normal people with severe symptoms cannot get tested.
At the time of my illness, my Amazon warehouse had not implemented shift start spacing, spacing out the tables in break rooms, and cancelling stand-up. No employee had a temperature scan and no employee who displayed illness could be forced to go home. On the day of close contact with the coworker, leaving your shift was completely voluntary and penalized with attendance points.
None of new “social distancing” actions matter because the pallets are only space approximately 2 1/2 feet apart. Warehouse workers work in close proximity to scan packages to pallets. Warehouse workers were breathing on each other, coughing near each other, and not social distancing when I was still at work. All the new “social distancing” steps Amazon is taking weeks after the virus hit in the United States should have been implemented early. Proactive protection of employees not reactive.
The Amazon warehouse workflow is not setup for six feet of social distancing with the volume of packages the warehouse processes each shift. Amazon is not taking steps to have less workers in the warehouse. Amazon proudly announced it will hire more workers. More workers breathing on each other to place packages on pallets only 2 1/2 feet apart. Amazon would have to change the entire pallet scanning flow to accommodate social distancing.
Amazon has classified my Leave and Disability request as “You’re requesting leave due to your own serious health condition.” To appear other health issues are the reason I requested leave. My leave request is clearly due to quarantine, pneumonia, and COVID-19. No where on the L&D form sent to me by Amazon does it indicate I requested leave due to quarantine, pneumonia, or COVID-19. I first reported my illness weeks ago. I have not received a call from the L&D team or the special COVID team per human resources.
Amazon claims they are paying employees with quarantine documentation. I submitted a doctors note. I have #quarantine almost two weeks per doctor’s orders. I have not received one call from the Amazon Leave and Disability team or the Amazon COVID team despite several calls and emails. The phone reps claim there are so many Amazon COVID leave cases the L&D case workers are overwhelmed and it will take weeks to get back to us. That part is true. It’s been weeks and I haven’t heard anything about getting paid from Amazon. My daughter is in quarantine without pay as well.
Even worse, how many coworkers did we pass the virus onto unknowingly in the warehouse. I didn’t show symptoms right away. My last shift was on a Thursday night. I felt so sick I only worked 2 1/2 hours. I was struggling to breathe and felt seriously ill. I spoke with the Amazon safety team and they agreed I should leave. I left for the rest of the shift just like my coworker who was coughing. On our last days of work in the warehouse, we interacted in close proximity with at least 30+ other co-workers as the pallets are only 2 1/2 feet apart.
My fellow home theater and movie fans, when you feel and tell yourself you can’t stand being in the house one more second think again and #stayathome. COVID-19 is real and personal in a bad way. Following the rules, we are staying at home enjoying great movies, television shows, books, music, and #clubquarantine. We are doing our part by keeping our asses inside. Front line hospital workers have enough to deal with. We don’t want to cause them any more work to care for us.
Moving is still our #1 priority. We are leaving the big city. We’ve had several discussions about the federal response. What if COVID was more deadly like Ebola or SARS? That thought gave us pause. REAL PAUSE! A big city would be a wasteland and not a place we would want to be during an Ebola or SARS like pandemic. We are frustrated with the U.S. federal response to this worldwide crisis. We will speak to our dissatisfaction with our votes in November 2020.
Realizing we cannot change the federal response to this crisis, we focused on what we can do to be good employees, good citizens, good neighbors, and home theater fans during this time. Basically, we will keep our asses in the house until the quarantine is up. We will only venture out for medical appointments. I might have to return to the doctor before quarantine ends due to continued chest tightness and pain.
We also realized we need more yard space. We need a completely fenced-in yard. We need privacy, distance, and personal space from our neighbors during a pandemic crisis. We get along as a family, enjoyed movies in our individual rooms, cooked new meals, and enjoyed entertainment options individually. We read many Twitter and Instagram complaints about being stuck at home. We didn’t have any of those complaints. We love our working poor class home. It fits our needs for #stayathome. We felt safe, comfortable, and grateful to have a door to shut.
We are part of the working poor and just grateful to have a place to lay our heads, heat from the cold outdoors, food on the table, and safety. Every day the stock market is crashing, number of US deaths upwards of 6,000, and millions of unemployment claims. We are working poor so we feel for everyone who lost their jobs. We will be without our side hustle jobs soon too. Deciding to take away two weekly checks out of the budget after having the extra income for 16 months adds more fear. We are living la vida broker but the choice is simple for us. Amazon checks or unsafe work environment. We are not dying for Amazon.
Comfort food is essential during a global crisis. We are sad and a little fearful of the unknown. We found comfort in homemade foods like chili, beans, soup, and barbecue. Comfort foods gave us a small sense of normalcy during this crisis. We wish we had stocked up on more home theater concession treats. We didn’t stock theater snacks because we were packing to move.
After our taste buds returned from the sickness, we discovered new recipes online. We are great cooks, cook from scratch, and bake a variety of homemade breads on a regular basis. The rush to the grocery store for bread didn’t affect us because we prefer homemade bread. We will stock up and purchase a large family sized deep freezer in the future and prepare pre-cooked home theater freezer meals to fill it. We have used our quarantine time to research new recipes. We are making a list of our lessons learned for cooking when you can’t leave home.
We joyfully discovered we have a lot of entertainment options in our home already. We sit on our deck for fresh air without leaving our home. We can quarantine in our space for three years and never be bored of the variety of options we have for entertainment. We have lots of physical books, books on cd, music, Wii games, PlayStation games, board games, card games, puzzles, exercise equipment, and our home theater setup. We have crosswords, search words, and Sudoku books. One of us is a fashion designer who knits, crochets, and sews for hours at a time. We play chess online. We enjoy cooking and baking from scratch. There is always cable television, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Disney Plus, and Hulu for a good time. We enjoy our many entertainment options and used what we already had without the need to run out and purchase entertainment.
We seriously have endless hours of entertainment already in our house. Our movie and television series collections are the shit. We packed up our home theater components prior to the outbreak. With our home theater speakers and projectors neatly packed in moving boxes, our 65-inch televisions in each bedroom handles our movie watching needs just fine. Many streaming services downgraded the streaming quality during the COVID-19 crisis. We used our bluray collection and cable stations for clear pictures. We have enough movies in our media collection to watch eight movies every day for three years and never repeat. We also binge watched many Netflix specials and movie series. The quarantine was the perfect time to sit in our individual bedrooms and enjoy our spaces in peace. We are proud to be movie geeks and home theater fans.
When coronavirus hit the United States in February 2020, we were already packing up for the house move. An unpredictable blessing was having most of our home furniture and accessories already packed in bins. We had less surfaces to keep clean and sanitized. The home packing had been a blessing because we cleaned and sanitized everything before we placed items in moving bins. The moving bins have been sealed shut with tape. We have a small peace of mind knowing our household items are clean and coronavirus free.
We also learned which friends to never invite over to the home theater again. If they don’t care about social distancing during a pandemic to save their lives, they surely won’t care about our lives. Several of my friends went to Florida on spring break, a college professor went on a cruise, and another friend went on a church retreat. We’ve had zero contact with them. We only learned of their plans via phone conversations. All minimized the outbreak and stated it was not serious.
Like many other home theater fans, we watched CNN in horror and frustration because of packed beaches, parks, trails, pandemic parties, and churches highlighted on the news. With over 7,100 deaths in the United States, many people are stupidly trying to add themselves to the death count. If the beach goers still think COVID is a hoax, the body pains and antibiotic treatment when they get infected will change their minds forever. If you get sick, you will be testifying about your personal experience like I am in this post.
We visited the emergency room and doctors offices before medical professionals started rationing and reusing personal protective equipment. We are happy the intake staff, nurses, doctors, and pharmacists still had proper PPE and a stock of antibiotics medication for pneumonia. As this pandemic continues to spread, hospital are running out of personal protect equipment and medications to treat people are being rationed. The hospital professionals who treated us were protected from the illness. The hospital employees returned to their families safe from our illness. We would be devastated to know we caused a medical professional to become ill. Front line medical staff are need now more than ever. Especially, with the predicted death toll and infection rates.
An odd thing we noticed and opportunity for proactive improvement is our trash plan. We are so grateful during the COVID-19 crisis trash has continued to be picked up weekly. Our thoughts turned to what we would do if trash wasn’t picked up weekly? What would happen to our neighborhood if sanitation workers became sick in large numbers? How would we store trash until service resumed? We do a great job of recycling and separating our trash. However, we generated more trash because we are quarantined. We eat every meal at home, so cooking adds more trash. If we had to go 3 weeks without trash pick-up it would cause yard issues we don’t want. Again, we need distance between our home and our neighbors.
While talking with a friend via phone, we stumbled on the topic of what would happened to the three nuclear power plants (all within 150 miles) if the nuclear power plant workers became sick in large numbers? You can’t replace nuclear plant workers easily. We didn’t want to think about that scenario and literally stopped talking about it.
Life will go on eventually. Months from now we will have moved. We will reflect on the illness and quarantine lessons we learned as individuals, employees, and as a family. Life will never be the same for us as I am fearful the sickness has caused long-term damage to my lungs. I am still struggling to breathe. This illness with pneumonia has taught us valuable lessons. We will prepare for all contingencies. We will make appropriate changes so we never find ourselves in this position again as a family.
We will quit our Amazon side hustle jobs. We will seek second jobs that do not place us in the direct line of a pandemic outbreak without proper protection equipment, hazard pay, on the job social distancing, screening of employees for sickness, and management appreciation. We will never work in an “essential role” again.
Each employee at an Amazon warehouse must choose what is best for their family. We have decided we are not willing to die for Amazon customers who could care less if we can breathe or die. Why continue to work for Amazon when management doesn’t care about warehouse employee safety, take proper precautions EARLY to prevent warehouse spread, and won’t even pay us after our jobs caused our sickness?
Amazon is too big of a company not to have a proper business continuity plan for global pandemic preparedness. A continuity plan should have been created, tested, and in place. Our warehouse management seemed to be making up safety processes as they went along. For warehouse managers to believe the company was surprised by this is bullshit. Amazon is a beast of a company with unlimited financial resources. Amazon should have been able to lead by example on how a company prepared for, protects, and pays its front line employees during a pandemic. That didn’t happen at our site. They were just making shit up and creating the process in the moment.
Amazon could learn a lot from Target warehouse management. A former Amazon Assistant Manager who left the same Minnesota Amazon warehouse for Target stated Target’s high risk employees according to the CDC are given 30-days paid leave because they are the most at risk. Target is leading the way in proactive employee precautions. I have documented my high-risk health issues to the site manager and HR on several occasions so it is not like Amazon warehouse management wasn’t aware of the potential impact to high-risk employees.
Each Amazon warehouse business continuity plan should have been tested for the worst case global pandemic scenario a long time ago. Amazon clearly has the financial resources to do BCP tests for their warehouses. A major fail on Amazon’s part. My daughter and I have paid the price with our health and my lungs will never be the same.
As a family, we were bitch slapped by this illness with pneumonia. This type of pain and sickness we are currently experiencing is not worth the Amazon paycheck. Amazon could care less about us and we are easily replaceable by the unemployed millions who are recently laid off. Amazon will not change and is currently in the process of smearing another employee who spoke out on similar issues. We know the Amazon L&D will never call us or pay us. The best lessons learned are those that bitch slap you to change for the better.
Be safe, learn from us, take the outbreak seriously, and choose your side hustle employer wisely. #StayAthome and #QuarantineAndChill in your home theaters. In January we had so many plans for our move, our new home theater set-up, and a fresh start in a new city during a new year. We told God our plans, then he laughed and said we are not smart or articulate. LOL! Hey! We might as well start our own smear campaign! Per news reports, its the Amazon way of handling warehouse employee concerns.
We are frustrated and upset Amazon management endangered our health and the safety of other Amazonians with a slow response to protect employees. Amazon failed its warehouse employees. My emotions are raw and so are my lungs from the antibiotics. My words are honest and a reflection of our experience working at a Amazon warehouse during this pandemic. Our health is just as “essential.” We have learned our lesson. We hope everyone else learns too!
Don’t worry about the people (jobs) God removes from your life. He heard conversations you didn’t, saw things you couldn’t, and made moves you wouldn’t.
TV One
Thank you to all the coworkers, friends, news media, and concerned strangers who reached out to us with messages of get well soon. We are recovering but slowly. Thank you!
A reporter asked what do we want or expect from Amazon. Our answer was PROACTIVE protection of employees not reactive. Amazon managers and some employees minimize the outbreak and its potential impact based on which news channel they watched. Some managers and employees stated the pandemic was political hoax and would go away. If managers and some employees didn’t believe the virus was a potential problem, why would managers or employees encourage social distancing or take precautionary measures EARLY to protect warehouse workers? No early protective action was taken. Pandemic precautions were reactive.
Many managers dismissed the seriousness of the virus and didn’t take our concerns serious. Even after we reported our illness, our concerns about the level of our sickness was minimized by site human resources. We had extremely close contact with 30+ employees on our last work days at the warehouse.
We DO NOT encourage employees to walk out or strike. Employees have children and elderly parents they care for daily. Amazon employees have rent and mortgage payments. Going forward we pray management protects employees by taking the pandemic seriously. If an employee becomes sick, we encourage them to stay home. We pray for Amazon employees to work in a safe environment so they can pay their bills. We encourage Amazon to make it easier for employees who stay home to get paid. We still haven’t received one call or contact from Amazon COVID leave team.
Our continued struggle to breathe is a daily reminder of the tough lessons we learned. We hope Amazon has learned lessons as well and never minimizes the potential impact of a well reported pandemic.
#NotDyingForWallStreet #ChrisSmalls
We appreciate the love and concern so many of you have given us. We are true long haulers. My lungs seriously will never be the same. We are social distancing per guidelines because 1) we have underlying health issues 2) our bodies cannot handle a second infection when we are STILL (to this day) suffering from the first infection and 3) we cannot afford any more medical bills.
We look at the news in shock at the behavior of people who still believe COVID is a hoax. The news shows many Americans are still traveling, holding large parties, and ignoring face mask requirements. We are seriously grateful to be alive. We though I would not make it out of that emergency room. We are heartbroken America has so many deaths from this virus.
We beg everyone to wear a mask, only leave your home when necessary for work, groceries, and doctors visits. Do not listen to the news reports that minimize the seriousness of this disease. Take every precaution to protect yourself and your family. 284,000 people have died from the virus please don’t make yourself 284,001.
