On March 11, 2020, pandemic began worldwide and affected our everyday lives including our daily activities, school, and jobs.
Our stories revolve around Valery Gaspar, 36, a local credit union employee and Andi Yarnel, an Amazon employee.
When Gaspar’s credit union job went remote shortly after the pandemic began, it didn’t affect her negatively at all – she saw a huge increase in productivity at her job until she got let go.
“At first, our managers didn’t follow the guidelines and tried putting ‘six-6- feet apart’ stickers and glass dividers before everyone else was [doing it]. After two weeks of doing that, we eventually moved over to working remotely,” she said.
It did not take too long for Gaspar to get back on her feet and she went on to work with Better.com, which was a perfect fit for her since she had just gotten used to working remotely and said, “I had a really easy transition moving from the credit union over the Better.com, I actually became a manager not long after I started working for Better.com.”
Gaspar mentioned one of the perks of her new job was working from home, “Working from home was probably one the better thing to happen to me during the pandemic, I was able to do so much more and be way more productive, although one downside to it is landscapes make a lot of noise when I am in a Zoom call with my job and I had to mute myself sometimes because of it.”
Working or schooling from home wasn’t the only major change for some people, places like Amazon or other warehouse jobs were still operating through the pandemic, which was the case for Andi Yarnel who had seen it all.
Andi Yarnel, 22, who had previously worked with Amazon went through some serious changes when the pandemic initially started and said, “Amazon handled the pandemic pretty well in the beginning by giving every employee a few paid weeks off if we caught the coronavirus. They let us keep our phone out on the workfloor as well as got rid of metal detectors and lockers from the locker room, and moved around a lot of our work stations to enforce social distancing.”
Keeping up with work and productivity was not too hard for Yarnel. He was on top of getting vaccinated so that he could follow Amazon’s vaccine mandate in order to keep their co-workers safe.
Yarnel said, “I made sure I got my vaccination for the coronavirus to help keep co-workers, family and friends safe, I made sure to use my time off options for when I absolutely needed to use them due to increased production from the pandemic and keeping up with work wasn’t hard since we were already being worked hard to keep up with fast work loads, but Amazon kept hiring new employees left and right so it was kind of hard to keep a real steady pace with all these new faces I saw everyday.”
At the same time, Andi was also going to college remotely, “I’m glad I decided to take college online instead of in-person before the pandemic – I think I would have struggled getting used to both a full-time job and part-time school at the same time.”
Yarnel has since then recently been unemployed from Amazon and currently looking for work, they still wear their mask and take a small hand sanitizer everywhere they go.
They said, “I will honestly kind of miss working at Amazon, I made a few cool friends there and won’t get to see them as much as I would when I worked there, but now I avoid going anywhere unless absolutely necessary and take my mask and hand sanitizer with me. I do plan on getting my booster shot to stay protected from the coronavirus and just hope this whole pandemic ends soon.”
With everything Valery and Andi went on to say, it honestly felt quite relatable considering almost everyone else had to go through the same situation with some maybe having a harder time getting through the pandemic whether it was going through a strange transition to either work or take school from home, to going through big changes and not working from home in a worldwide pandemic.
