TheBanyanTree: Wherein Peter goes shopping

[peter macinnis]

In Australia, things are odd, Covid-wise.  Some states are almost free 
of it, and their shopkeepers, always excellent framers of public policy, 
are demanding that we "open up for business", assisted by the most 
porcine members of the lumpenproletariat, the ones most easily bedazzled 
by bread and circuses.

Victoria, to our south has a Labor government that fell for the claptrap 
claim that "private is better", and having sequestered the diseased, the 
new arrivals and the at risk in hotels, they got contractors to arrange 
the security.

Now one thing the gig economy does badly is management and training. You 
may see that as two things, but I don't: they are two sides of the same 
coin. The contractors assembled their staff with a clarion call through 
Whatsapp, and they hired all the takers. Training took all of five minutes.

As I have observed before, a major part of management is asking how 
things might go pear-shaped. Attentive readers may even recall that in 
one job, I opened a Public Service file with the snappy name "A 
Compendium of Disasters Great and Small", so that when somebody else's 
stupidity left us exposed, there was a sufficiently detailed plan of 
action already on file, ready to save us.

When you have untrained and uneducated macho wannabe alpha males in 
charge of dumb, diseased females who want goodies, a certain sort of 
trade will arise, and it did. At the moment, there is an out-of-control 
outbreak across the state to our south, and the border has been closed, 
sort of.  So we have spot fires around Sydney, and as a medical mate 
told me, "all it takes is a few idiots".

Enough of that: this is supposed to be about shopping. This morning, I 
got up early and headed for the supermarket, where most of the shoppers 
were my age, lining up at social distances to soak towelling in 
sanitiser to wipe down their trolleys and then to clean their hands.

About half of them were masked, including me: mine is a spiffing neck 
tube that pulls up, showing a map of Soho's London in 1854. The map was 
used by John Snow to prove that the Broad Street Pump was the source of 
a cholera outbreak, and each time I visit London, I go to the John Snow 
pub, where the upstairs bar is full of anaesthetists, epidemiologists, 
number crunchers and historians of science, med-geeks in other words.  I 
qualify by virtue of the last two.

There were no med-geeks in the supermarket to get the obscure reference, 
but no matter. Everybody was polite and distancing. When an old codger 
stood, blocking an aisle, deep in thought, two of us just stood and 
waited. When he came to, he apologised, and the other waiting person 
said "That's OK: thinking is important". No snarling was heard.

I bought dried foods, tinned foods and other stuff that will last, and 
nobody can call me a panic buyer, because it hasn't started yet, but as 
a good manager, I know what *might* go wrong with supply chains, and 
that's enough to make me anticipate a panic, later this month. Folks are 
going to get scared if those one or two idiots continue on, as only 
idiots do.

If things don't go wrong, well, we've got an assortment of things to 
nosh on, so if we *are* all locked down, we won't need to deliver 
gratification or bribes to the security thugs.

So that's Sydney in early spring in an epidemic.

peter