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Talk about how the events of recent months have affected either your work or your ability to work.
COVID-19 has HUGELY affected both my ability to work and the work that I was doing. In a nutshell, my industry, which had been booming, full swing, prior to March 2020, currently no longer exists due to the virus. Pre-pandemic, I worked part-time as an Experiential Marketing Specialist, or Brand Ambassador (BA) in the promotions industry. This work required a person to be flexible about doing a multitude of tasks while onsite at a promotion. She must have a super positive demeanor, be friendly to everyone and above all, be comfortable working front and center within large crowds of strangers at all times, like at the Westward Music Festival (pictured here). Although my personality skews towards introverted, I have been able to be a strong brand ambassador, regardless. This has been partly because I have been willing to wear so many different hats as BA while having fun in the process. I have done everything from donning an official, Universal Studios minion costume on a float in downtown’s Parade of Lights, to giving hand massages to anyone at a busy festival, wearing a sandwich board while being bounced around in a drunken crowd during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, taking iPad leads at huge concerts and football games and so much more. Promotional work is social, entertaining and has enabled me to interact with different kinds of people from many walks of life with which I would never otherwise have had contact. I have enjoyed the work and am grateful for which I get booked. ... By early March 2020 when the highly contagious nature of COVID 19 became widely known (especially among large groups), my industry literally crumbled overnight. All work I did have in the pipeline literally disappeared into thin air. I was 100% job-free with absolutely no prospects of finding one drop of similar work to replace what I had lost. Unfortunately, I had tons of company. Everyone in my position suddenly found themselves completely out of work. ... Admittedly, I have had a degree of ambivalence towards working in an industry that sometimes has made its non-benefited workers chase after their pay and that largely exists at all to enable corporations to make more money. Thus, I have been willing to give only so much of myself, my time and energy to promotions. Possessing a master’s degree, I also know that I have other options if this pandemic (or anything else) makes exiting necessary. I can feel only so passionate about what this pandemic so clearly and painfully highlights as easily disposable, “non-essential” work. Despite these comments, I will also say that I have enjoyed striving to be the best BA I can be during the last 6-years and hope to contribute further to events when the work within the industry safely returns.
July 6, 2020
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Have any government policies had a direct impact on your life lately? If so, talk about the policy that’s affected you most and the impact it’s had.
Seriously? In Scotland, we have been under a hard government lockdown for FOUR MONTHS. The entire country shut down on 26 December 2020 and IS STILL SHUT DOWN AS I WRITE ON 23 April 2021. I struggle to make my American friends and relatives appreciate the strictness and length of this lockdown. All sports facilities, cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars, churches, hairdressers, barbers, libraries, coffee shops, and all retail except homewares & groceries, ARE CLOSED. EVERYTHING has been closed for FOUR SOLID MONTHS. You have to wear a mask to go to the supermarket. (No mask, no supermarket.) You drop your pet outside the vet and sit in your car. Universities are teaching remotely. You can order takeaway, but you are not allowed inside to pick it up - it is handed to you through a hatch or dropped outside the door. We are not allowed to travel outside our local area. We are not allowed to cross the border into England. If we fly internationally, when we return to Scotland we will be met at the gate by a security agent who will escort us to a quarantine hotel, where we will stay for 10 days, at our own expense, before being allowed back into the country. Up until two weeks ago, we were not allowed to meet outside in groups of more than 2 people from 2 different households. (Now we are allowed to visit, outside, with up to six people from 2 different households - I think - the numbers change weekly.) The one exception to this hard lockdown has been that our schools are open. The children have been back in school for most of this academic year. It is very interesting to me, and a little baffling, that we have managed to keep our schools open but shut down everything else - it feels a bit like the opposite has happened in the USA. But that's just an impression. We are "opening" on Monday, 26 April 2021. This means that pubs and resataurants will be open, for OUTSIDE seating only, until 8.00 p.m. And we will be allowed to visit with more people OUTSIDE. And retail shops and gyms and hairdressers will be open again, with social distancing measures in place. And we will be allowed to cross the border into England, though international travel is still unavailable. Even with this gradual opening, we will still be in lockdown.
April 24, 2021