Quarantine Diaries, Day 31

22:00 Completely forgot to wash my hands after returning home. Don’t think I touched my face. Still, the horror. 😱

21:00 We now do groceries once every four days. I don’t think the capacity of our refrigerator would allow us to do it less frequently. Today’s grocery run was an exception. I had missed a few crucial things during the visit yesterday and decided to pop in after my evening walk. I’ve now begun to use the height of the stack of baskets at the entrance from which you must pick one, as a measure of how busy the store is. Three feet tall, the height this evening, means not at all. The notice to pick a basket used to be a hastily improvised thing, printed on a A4 sheet in Dutch and English and stuck to the turnstile with a sellotape. It had changed today to a more permanent thing printed on a big plastic placard in the store’s branding. This probably means that the social distancing measures are here to stay for a while.

The clerks at the checkout counters now have a large screen of transparent plastic screen in front of them to shield them from customers’ coughs and sneezes.1

The self-checkout screen still tries to sell 5€ worth of air miles using a dark pattern. Not only am I going to have no use for air miles for the foreseeable future, I hate the one extra time I am forced to touch the screen to dismiss it.

Air milesAir miles

20:30 Encountered a lovely sunset on my walk this evening.

A beautiful sunsetA beautiful sunset


  1. And apparently talking loudly can be bad for public health too.↩︎


Date
April 15, 2020