If you’ve spent ten minutes on social media today, I bet you’ve seen at least one post about staying home. Whether we are helping to #flattenthecurve or we #stayhomeforthem, most outlets are encouraging folks to stay at your house, don’t have people over, venture out for essentials only, and stay six feet away from everyone when you do. So many of these posts are inspirational, but the memes about staying home are funny too! Has anyone checked out stay-at-home parenting tips from Sarah Michelle Gellar? She slays me.
But what if you can’t stay home?
What if you’re working a job deemed essential that cannot be done remotely from the dining room? Many of us have jobs that require us to leave the safety of home and spend considerable time inside businesses providing essential services.
We work in grocery stores, liquor stores, school front offices, pharmacies, convenience stores, and restaurant drive-thrus. Some of us have solid policies from management about how to protect ourselves. Some of us may have policies that are a step or two behind the ever-evolving CDC guidelines. Some of us are nervous when we leave the house, concerned we aren’t doing enough to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Most of us have developed some best practices to at least calm our anxiety about heading out to door for work.
I encourage everyone, essential worker or staying home, to check the CDC guidelines every day and to follow them–even if you feel silly in a no-sew mask made from your old college t-shirt. Do it anyway. The following is a list of nine more ways you can protect yourself and your loved ones. This list was compiled from several people, all of us doing essential jobs. None of this guarantees our safety. But it can certainly help our mental/emotional health, which we can all agree is equally important.
- Wash your hands when you get to work. Wash them while at work. Wash them as soon as you get home. When you can’t wash your hands, use hand-sanitizer.
- Take your temperature. Our temperature is one of the easiest ways to tell if we are sick. If you’ve got a temperature, stay home. And if you don’t…even if you feel fine, take your temperature to verify and then at least you have peace of mind for the time being.
- Clean your workstation. If it’s a computer, cash register, or something stationary, follow the CDC guidelines and clean your area! I work out of my car. So before I exit the car, I set out a screen wipe for my iPad, hand sanitizer, and a spray I use for door handles, steering wheel, etc. Once I get back in my car I don’t touch anything until everything is cleaned.
- Wear gloves and a mask when you can. Even if you feel silly or someone at work tries to shame you, protect yourself. But be very careful when you remove your gloves that you’re not transferring anything on the gloves to your bare hands or face in the process.
- Don’t stand in groups. Maintain six feet of space. I encourage you, even if you get shamed for it, advocate for yourself and ask others to respect your six feet boundaries. I’d rather be that girl at work who overreacted than the girl at work who got everyone sick.
- Pick a pair of shoes and designate them for work. These shoes stay outside your house now. I love shoes. I hardly ever wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row. But now, I have one pair of shoes that go to work. I’m not sure this is absolutely necessary but it makes me feel better knowing I’m not tracking germs across my house or harboring them in my closet at the end of a work day.
- Change clothes when you get home. Before I got to work, I place a change of clothes in my laundry room by the garage door. As soon as I get home, I take my shoes off and leave them in the garage, I walk in and change my clothes, then I go back and clean any door handles I’ve touched along the way.
- I’ve become a daily hair washer. I’m not sure that my hair is truly a danger, but I’m more likely to touch my hair than my face throughout the day, meaning it’s got plenty of hand sanitizer in it anyway. Once this is past us, I’ll retrain my scalp to go a few days between washes. But until then, I’ll have freshly washed hair every day because it makes me feel better.
- If you think you’re sick PLEASE STAY HOME. So many of us are used to working through being sick. I can’t tell you how many visibly-ill-with-a-cold/flu folks I encounter every winter who are proud of their own fortitude and dedication. Don’t do that right now. Please. If your company has a sick leave policy that makes it easier to work sick than get the paperwork necessary to be excused, I encourage you to talk to management and see if those policies are relaxed during a global health pandemic.
If you are privileged to be staying home, please help essential workers stay safe. I know you’re going a little stir crazy in your house but please, if you can get your essentials without going inside a store, do that. Don’t take your kids with you grocery shopping or to browse through a place that remains open. If we can keep everyone’s exposure down to a minimum, it’s better for all of us!
If you find yourself feeling creative and you do have some extra time, please try your hand at creating memes. Seriously, can someone get on making funny memes for essential workers? Because I really need to laugh about my job.
