Five and a Half Years
Things have been going, on the whole, pretty well.
After getting laid off from my job in Indianapolis, I bid the Midwest a fond farewell to take a position out in the Los Angeles area. It was an adjustment, but things are okay out here. The wife and I might be the only people in the area watching Indy Eleven games from our couch, and I'm never going to accept the awful no-cold-snap corn they have here, and I'm going to miss being able to grab cheap seats ten minutes before kickoff and walk to a Colts game on a whim. And all of that, of course, is nothing compared to being so far away from friends again. I miss those people. (And, in one case, their baby!)
On the work front, though, things are going fantastically. I like to joke that I'm the head of process chemistry. Realistically, I'm just the first scale-up chemist the startup hired, but it's great to be The Expert in something like that in a team of medicinal chemists. And while I was icked out by the "AI"-ness of it all on their homepage at first, during interviews it became apparent that this is not a company where they just ask an LLM how to do chemistry – instead, they generate a bazillion data points with cool robots and combinitorial chemistry, then train ML models, and use that info to design another round of experiments. I don't really interact with that workflow directly, but it's fun to see from the sidelines. It's been about five months since I started and I've never felt so valued as an individual contributor and also given as much responsibility to manage big projects while also recognizing that I'm a real person. And my coworkers are awesome. It's a mostly younger-leaning team, and even the dude-iest AI dudebros love to dunk on the hucksters who claim their plaigarism machines can think.
About a week and a half ago, it appears that I brought something home from work that I had successfully avoided for more than half a decade.
Covid is not fun. My brain was scrambled eggs there for a couple of days. I'm not sure when I'm going to clear this cough, and I'll be working from home until I have consistent good days. Worst of all, I only had one test at first, and it came back negative early on – and so instead of being completely paranoid about locking myself in a room and avoiding giving it to the asthmatic wife, I passed the baton. So as I recover, I get to take care of her like she took care of me. It will have been a very unpleasant couple of weeks. I'm just relieved that my job's policy is "stay away until you are no longer sick, because duh, and we do not keep track of sick days." Beats the heck out of the policy my job had in 2020: "we make pharmaceuticals, so you are an expendable essential worker, and also we won't enforce any mask mandate, and also you get to work outside in the smoke and 110° heat doing 60+ hour weeks." Not that I'm still upset at that situation.
But I had really held a lot of pride that I never got it. I know it was somewhat luck of the draw, but I put my thumb on the scale where I could. I was the last one at my job in like 2022 still masking up all day, but once we were a few years into the vaccination campaigns I figured I was being overly cautious. I still (and can't imagine a future where I won't) put on an N95 for public transit, espeically flights. I had my appointment set up for my 2025-6 shot, although that's going to probalby have to be delayed. It was just really surreal seeing that second line on the test show up for the first time ever.
It seems like as the years go on and evolution does its thing, Covid continues to get less leathal and more contagious. In the long run, I was bound to get it eventually. Doesn't make it suck any less, though. And at the rate the current brain-worm-addled government is doing damage, I think the already-slim chances that we'll ever be done with Covid have been reduced to zero.