I'm writing this on a Wednesday evening. We had our busiest day at work today since last year. We processed over five hundred payrolls--between what I'll call six of us because there are five on my immediate team, plus half of someone else's time, plus a sweet kiddo who comes in a few days a week and gives us a hand. We moved over $30,000,000 (that's MILLION) in payroll funds around.
That, friends, is a whooole lotta greenbacks.
It is also a vast improvement on the numbers--both in terms of numbers of payrolls and dollar amounts--we've been seeing for the last little stretch (and a half). We're starting to see our restaurant clients come back. It's slow, but it's happening. It's nice to see.
It's also, frankly, kind of terrifying.
I know there are people chomping at the bit to get back out into the world and reclaim their freedom to move about as they please. People who want to be on planes, traveling the globe. People who want to go to baseball games. People who want to resume their fine dining experiences. I am not one of those people. (But you likely already knew that.) I was already a hardcore homebody when all this nonsense kicked off, but now I'm burrowed in like a tick. Remember that bit in the Disney version of Peter Pan where the Lost Boys find Indian tracks and dig themselves a foxhole in 1.6 seconds flat? Yeah, like that.
Yes, I have been out more in recent weeks than I have in the last year plus, but only to my dance classes which take place at vastly reduced capacity in studios that are probably cleaner than my house. And yes, it has been a freeing experience. It has also been a calculated risk with known variables. I trust the people who run the dance studios to adhere to their cleaning and disinfecting requirements. I don't lick the ballet barre. I do, however, eat with things like forks, which may or may not have been properly sanitized between uses, and may have been previously used by someone who couldn't give a toss about all the staying at home the rest of us have been doing.
Am I really that likely to catch something from a fork that got a half-assed bath? Probably not. I'm sure I'm more likely to catch something from Karen at the next table who thinks she's invincible and can't catch anything if she's wearing a tinfoil hat because, I don't know, 5G or something? Still, though. Not in a hurry to be dining in. I'm not thrilled about the prospect of dining outside, either, though "reduced risk" blah blah blah...
Look. The safest place is at home. With the door shut. And locked. While I'm hunkered down under the bed.
That might be a slight exaggeration. Maybe. But only because I need every square inch of storage space I can get, and that means that I have skinny Rubbermaid tubs under the bed holding things like wrapping paper.
I'm just not ready for the world to be open again. I probably won't be ready for a very long time. Are there places I'd like to go? Sure. Would I like to get to create my own frozen yogurt travesty again? You bet.
But maybe not yet, yeah?
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