Please take our survey

I get an automated phone call from a 1-888 number and hear a chipper woman’s voice that wants me “to do a survey on my feelings about COVID-19.” I can “press one for a text link to our survey.”

The caller says the firm is “Tell City Hall,” but the call’s been cited a couple of thousand times as spam on websites that list unsolicited phone calls. I hang up before the spiel’s even over.

Afterwards, I hunt down the company’s website and it seems real enough, a public opinion firm that uses random number combinations to generate cellphone numbers. But there are just too many scammers out there to even take the risk, frankly.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do a COVID-19 survey.

Here are my results. How do I feel about COVID-19?

Well, I assume you’re asking about how I feel about its effects. About isolation. There hasn’t been enough impact here yet to touch the people I know and love beyond that. I miss people.

I miss people I know. Heck, I even miss people I don’t know; those occasional marvellous uncaring souls who become your new best friend 10 minutes after they sit next to you in a sports bar. I met a guy in Ottawa once who regaled me with a legion of stories about his toughguy career in major-junior hockey, about playing as one of the only Anglos on a French-speaking team, about how many games it was before they would even back him up in a fight. About injuries and drinking and how he still plays rec hockey now, and only ever turns on the old jets when he has to put someone in his place. About how he makes a living with sports gambling and cash golf.

I told the sports editor about it later, and he looked the guy’s name up on the internet and all the hockey stuff was fake. He’d never played at all. But if I saw him again, I’d want to buy him a beer just to hear more stories.

I miss the people I work with; who would think I’d miss sticking my head into the office next door to tell a workmate my latest favourite bad joke so much?

I don’t like the way I shy away from carts trundling towards me in the grocery store; I don’t like the way other people shy away from me.

I like the way, when I go walking, that the streets are my own.

I hate the way those same streets sometimes feel post-apocalyptic, right down to the overused movie scene of a wind-driven stiff-sided plastic cup suddenly skipping down the silent street beside me.

I watch television, both shows and advertising, and am overtaken by the thought that people are standing too close together, that they’re having too much casual contact. It’s taken a fraction of my life to develop that concern

— I wonder, how long will it take to get over that particular tic? Months? Years?

I like that my work deadlines are softer, that the office rules are slacker. Casual Fridays? It’s dress-up Tuesdays when I bother to shave for a video editorial meeting.

At the same time, I hate that the differentiation between work life and home life has disappeared — I used to walk home from work, a good 45-minute hike, shedding the troubles of the workday like a snake shedding its skin. Now, it’s all one great unrolling player-piano of a day, a song that never ends. If I don’t find a way to exfoliate my workday soon, I’ll end up callous. (Yes, I’d tell that one to Ken in the office next door.)

So, here’s my COVID-19 survey.

It sucks. Russell Wangersky’s column appears in Saltwire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@ thetelegram.com — Twitter: @ wangersky.