Essential Workers Appreciation

First, I hope everyone is in good health, good fortune, and relatively sane. If not, I wish health, fortune, and sanity will come your way!

Since the Coronavirus lockdown started, essential workers’ roles, traditionally low-paying customer service jobs, have risen to the same level of urgency and potential danger as first responders. Even with all the newfound appreciation for these workers—delivery, janitorial, grocery, restaurant—there can never be enough respect and kindness for all that they do.

And if you think about it, essential workers have always been essential. Always.

Essential workers keep everything running. Janitors, maintenance workers, and waste workers make sure that our environment does not fall into disrepair. Grocery story and restaurant workers literally feed us. Nurses and doctors do their best to keep us alive and healthy. Emergency workers operate under crises to save as many people as possible. Drivers and transportation workers get vital supplies from point A to point B. And there are so many more that still play a critical role.

So to all the essential workers — thank you. Thank you for all the work you do especially under crisis, threats from the virus and rude people!

it’s not just the running of society that the essential workers maintain, it’s also the community which is just as important as the day-to-day operations. Essential workers have ALWAYS been important to smooth operations, just unrecognized.

To that end, I want to shout out to one particular grocery story clerk for the services provided about six years ago.

During my junior year of high school, my parents and I took a week to visit colleges. It was a fun trip where we literally drove down the east coast and visited all the colleges that I was considering. Of course, we researched and prepared questions for each college. We signed up for tours and I brought my bluetooth clip-on microphone so that I could hear the tour guide better.

Our first stop was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that’s when I was introduced to the delightful New England weather — rain! As a New Mexican, I normally love rain and since my parents were familiar with the area, we packed accordingly. Unfortunately, rain does lead to the itsy-bitsy issue of water and hearing equipments. Everything would be fine as long as I didn’t land in a puddle. We went to the first college in Cambridge and joined a tour. The tour guide was lovely, knew all about the campus, and when I went up in the beginning to ask her to wear the microphone, she was very agreeable. Everything’s great!

Unfortunately, the clip-on was not secure enough on the tour guide’s shirt and as we were walking outside from one building to the next, the microphone slipped from her shirt and fell to ground just inches from one of the many growing puddles!

The tour guide make a quick save and it was not on the ground for more than a second. I told her it was fine and still working and we continued. But there was still a problem. This was only the first of like 10 tours we planned to go on and if the microphone fell off on the first tour, the chances of it not happening again were not good.

The easiest solution is to turn the clip-on microphone into a necklace. I even have a fancy-schmancy neck-cord that came with the microphone … sadly still in New Mexico. None of us had a string to fashion a necklace out of so we went to the nearest grocery store and stopped by the balloon station.

My mom and I explained the situation to the attendant and asked if we could cut some balloon strings for the microphone. Not only did the attendant cut the balloon strings to the appropriate length, she also asked what colleges I was visiting and cut the strings in those school colors!

It was thanks to that balloon attendant that I could enjoy the rest of my college visits without worrying about the microphone. Without her, not only would I be unable to focus on learning about different colleges, but likely would have lost or damaged the teeny tiny microphone in the middle of some huge unknown college campus.

So thank you to that grocery store person in Massachusetts and thank you to all the essential workers out there!

This is Water - Piano Notes

This is an assignment that reflects on what ‘water’ is. It is based on a commencement speech by David Wallace Foster who tells a story “This is Water” (video found here).

The general story starts with two young fish swimming along in the water when they pass an older fish that says “Good morning folks! How’s the water today?” The fishes continue swimming on their way when one of the young fish turns to the other and asked, “What is water?” 

Reflecting on what is ‘water’ is reflecting on what seems so obvious and all-encompassing that it does not bear recording and thus is not … obvious. Here is one of my ‘water’ moments:

Hearing people can hear an actual musical note instead of a dull hammer thunk when listening to the higher notes on the piano. This was news to me when I was listening to Fur Elise for the hundredth time and only hearing half of the notes intersperse with ‘thunk thunk thunk.’

I know that there are sounds that I cannot hear without hearing aids but I recognized them with hearing aids because people talked about them regularly (fire alarms and bird whistles to name two). There are still some sounds that I know about that I cannot hear with hearing aids because they are too high for my ears to catch (i.e. an ’s’ sound in words still sounds like a gap of silence, ‘sh’ still sounds like a breath of noisy air).

Even with that knowledge, it still never occurred to me that hearing people actually liked listening to Fur Elise played on the higher notes of the piano - I've always played it one or two octaves lower. When I hear the higher notes on the piano, I'm not hearing the notes but the sound of the hammer hitting the string, the key hitting the piano. It's both a cool thing and a reminder. It's cool, because I hear something that normal people don't hear--by not hearing the high frequency, the lower frequencies pop out more--and a reminder because I can't take what I hear for granted and assume everyone else is hearing the same thing.

On a similar note, the first time I went to a Deaf Camp (age 8) coming from a 99.9% mainstream hearing school, it was an eyeopener for me. Much as the fish did not know what "water" was, I did not realized that not all hearing loss is the same, not all communication methods work for everyone, and what is the norm for one person is completely alien to another.