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!