New England Interstate
116 John Street Lowell, Massachusetts 01852-1124
Water Polution Control Commission
Bulletinn 88
December, 2020
L.U.S.T.LINE
by Mahesh Albuquerque
I was getting ready to leave a meeting in Florida in early March when I experienced COVID impacts firsthand. My airline notified me that they were reducing flights and offered earlier flight options with no change fees. I stuck with my flight, but when I arrived at the airport, I noticed some people were wearing masks. The conversation on the flight home was all about the virus and the crashing stock market. Little did I know then of the speed and magnitude of the COVID impact across the world, or that we would all be walking around in masks, social distancing, and working from home for the rest of the year. This is now our new normal and I doubt life will ever get back to what it was pre-2020, just like it changed after 9/11.
Back home in Colorado and later that week, our governor—like many others across the United States—issued “stay-at-home” orders and other travel restrictions in efforts to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It all happened so quickly: one day we were all in the office and the next day we were all to begin working from home. For the past few years, we had been working on a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) that was shared with all our staff, and we even staged and practiced mock pandemic scenarios, with no knowledge that we would be facing the real thing soon.
There was, nevertheless, a tremendous amount of uncertainty in early March, but thankfully we humans are an adaptive species and I think we have for the most part adapted very well to this new normal. Sometimes, I believe we become our best selves when we encounter and overcome adversity. Here are some of the challenges we all have faced, and have overcome these last six months:
SEE COMPLETE ARTICLE
