COVID-19 has been very good to me. It
might sound like a horrible thing to say, but I’ve really enjoyed
these last couple of years. I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment
either. When the lockdowns started a couple of years ago, I was
dumbfounded at first. I mean, I’d been working restaurants for years
and there was always an element of fear in losing a job. Restaurants
close everyday for all sorts of reasons. I suppose I always knew
that, and at the end of every shift I ever worked, I was prepared for
that shift to be the last. Of course, being a restaurant person and
knowing this, I was always assured that I could simply walk into
another restaurant and get a job. Suddenly, all the restaurants were
closed.
What was especially stunning about the
lockdown was this: we had no idea when were going to be able to get
back to work. Like most of my colleagues, I spent that first
lockdown, ten weeks, doing what you’d expect from a restaurant
person. I cooked and I drank. It was a wonderful time.
Something very usual happened at the
end of the ten weeks. Come the end of May, I was faced with going
back to work. There was a great deal of discussion about it at home.
Ultimately, we decided it was probably best for me to forgo
restaurant work. Knowing that the restaurant where I worked was an
exceptionally busy one and I would be exposed to who knows what and
then bring it home was nothing my family wanted.
I don’t know how many other people
spent the early months of the pandemic soul searching like I did, but
I think there were a great many of us. I felt like everything that I
thought was important really wasn’t. And to further that thought,
there was this new insight to what was important: being with family,
being healthy, and trimming the extraneous.
I decided to go back to school. This
has been a pattern of mine over the years. When I’m faced with new
challenges, I’ve always gone back to school. I know that not everyone
has this available to them. I’ve heard many people say that they
can’t afford to go back to school, but I feel like it’s the other way
around: you can’t afford to not go to school.
Ultimately, I did go back to work in
the restaurant. I did it for a year. One year, 365 days, not one day
more. I was over it, I really was and it was a tricky year to say the
least. But I needed to get out of the house a little bit, I was with
old friends and doing tasks that were not very taxing on me. At the
beginning of the year I was in the head space as a student. By the
end of the year, I was already thinking about design, and being a
graphic designer, which was the course of study in school.
Leaving the restaurant was no difficult
task.
Moving onto the next career is another
story entirely.
It comes to me now that there are very
different rules to procuring work than how it’s done in the
restaurant. It’s not quite as easy as walking into a graphic design
firm, filling out an application, asking to see a manager and having
a conversation about when I can start. I mean, now there are other
things to think about: portfolios, resumes, leave behinds, followups.
It’s something completely new to me. I’ve never really had to look
for job.
It’ll be interesting to see what
happens.