This afternoon I went to get a smog check on my car. There was just the one guy in the shop. He wore a gaiter, I wore a mask. I was in his open-air shop for maybe ten minutes.
It was not quite up to the standards of “exhilarating,” but by the current standards it was definitely “novel.”
When I was done I drove over to the FedEx place to drop off a package. There was one other customer and three FedEx employees in the small-ish, indoor office. I was there maybe five minutes, everyone was wearing masks. I joked with the counter personnel about the truly helacious noise that the automatic sliding door makes every time someone walks in or out. I said it would make me insane, I would have to bring in my own can of WD-40 to lube it. They said they had already tried that and it hadn’t worked – you got used to the noise.
It’s “normal.” It’s not the same old normal.
