Item

"Handwash Everyone"

Media

Title (Dublin Core)

"Handwash Everyone"

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

I worked at a McDonald’s in March when the United States went into lockdown. Before the lockdown, the drive-thru line was long, the lobby was full of customers, and employee’s rushed around everywhere. The restaurant was always loud with fryers beeping, headsets beeping, customers ordering and complaining, and employee’s trying to have conversations with each other while taking orders all at the same time. People were constantly sneezing, coughing, or sounding like their voices were hoarse, and no one thought anything of it. Everyone went on about their business. After the pandemic, the restaurant was quieter. No more customers were in the lobby, fewer people came through the drive-thru, and fewer employees were at work, less food was being made, so the fryers beeped less often, as did the headsets that warned us when customers wanted to order. One new sound we could all rely on was the alarm that went off every hour, followed by a manager yelling out that everyone needed to wash their hands. The sound of a raspy voice from a customer, a sneeze, or a cough echoed from the speaker above side one in the kitchen, though the entire restaurant and employees would all look at each other in disgust, sure that this customer must have the Corona Virus. The employee in the first booth taking the payment would instantly remove their gloves and rush to scrub their hands before retrieving a new pair of gloves. The person in the second booth who handed the food out the window would be stretching their arm out the window as far as they could in an effort to stay as far away from the person as possible before repeating the same ritual as the last employee in disinfecting themselves. Sounds that usually just fell into the background noise and people assumed were allergies or just a simple cold suddenly elicited a significant amount of fear in my friends and co-workers. While things have mostly gone back to normal, the handwash alarm and manager yelling for a handwash is an hourly reminder that Covid-19 is still around.

Date (Dublin Core)

March 15, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

self

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Alexzandra Blassi

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

audio
text

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Business & Industry
English Consumer Culture (shopping, dining...)
English Food & Drink

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

sensory
sound
McDonalds
disinfection
customer
employee

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Arizona State University
HST643
sensory history

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

08/19/2022

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

09/06/2022
10/07/2022
10/20/2022

Date Created (Dublin Core)

03/15/2020

Item sets

This item was submitted on August 19, 2022 by Alexzandra Blassi using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: http://mail.covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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