When the Covid-19 Pandemic hit North America, we all knew that it was happening in Europe, but we always thought it wasn’t going to happen to us. However, as we all know that wasn’t the case. It did eventually hit us here. When it did life got totally flipped upside down. The biggest issue is that we didn’t properly know how to prepare for the pandemic because we didn’t know how it was going to hit. We spent the last week before things totally shut down scrounging for items like toilet paper which ended up not even being an issue. This time was unexpected for everyone. A positive outcome from this though was a new way of looking at things. One of the biggest takeaways from living through a pandemic was that we were too set in doing things in one certain way, we learned to adapt and be flexible throughout the pandemic. The pandemic taught us that we always need to have a backup plan regardless of how simple a task was or how many times we had done it.
Our guest speaker Andrea Boland spoke about how she navigated the uncertainty of travel restrictions while working for West Jet during the pandemic. Andrea spoke about implementing online applications to make a traveler’s job safer and simpler during the pandemic, this is very similar to large retail outlets implementing online ordering systems to alleviate the stress of in store shopping during the pandemic.
My life got flipped upside down during the pandemic while I was working at Canadian Tire. We had to navigate safety, not only for the customers but also for ourselves as workers. We went from doing our daily tasks without a concern for how close we were to customers and how many were around us at one time to suddenly needing to social distance. Its not easy to assist a customer with a product while trying to mindfully stay a safe distance away from them. But alas, these were issues that we had to navigate during a time of mass uncertainty.