Five years ago today Diamond’s office shut down for COVID and went work-from-home. Tomorrow, bids for Diamond’s assets are due to the bankruptcy court.
When work-from-home started, I was writing the May 2020 catalog, which went unpublished. Yesterday, I began writing the May 2025 catalog.
This has been the longest month.
Before the COVID shutdown, I intended to leave Diamond in the summer of 2020. I talked with my grandboss Dan Manser about it before he left; we were going to go over my resume once he got settled into his new position. I shared my #ComicsBrokeMe story on Twitter two years ago, and while I won’t recap it here I knew I needed to make a change. When my health improved, when things settled…
COVID threw all of that out the window.
Work-From-Home was supposed to be two weeks. Two weeks! On St. Patrick’s Day, as I was packing things in my office that I was sure I would need at home, Andy Mueller said on his way out the door he’d see me in two weeks. I told him six was more likely. “Six weeks to bend the curve.” I saw Andy next in June, on his last day. He’d come to the office to turn in his key card and his laptop. I shoved the laptop in my desk drawer, then forgot about it entirely.
At the end of March, I started working out of the office occasionally. I couldn’t log into my office computer remotely, so I decided, “Ah, the hell with it, I’ll go in.” (My computer was shut off.) I took photos of the office that day, with all of the cubicles, filled with stuff belonging to the people who weren’t there. I don’t know that I stayed the whole day; I adopted a “Do what I need to do and get out” philosophy. But no one seemed to mind that I was using the office, and it was a nice change of pace from staying at home, so I started going in semi-regularly, once or twice a week, when I needed to be there, when there was something that just worked better at the office, when I needed to print something.
I probably contracted COVID in April on one of these trips to the office. I had four bad days, two of them really rough. I could feel the inside of my lungs. I was sure, Sunday night, this was the end. Monday morning, I felt perfectly fine, like a storm had passed. I fatigued easily for a few weeks after, though.
I remember a rainy afternoon in mid-April. One of the vice presidents called me to discuss what the company was doing. We were, for income reasons, going to furlough almost everyone. Go down to a skeleton crew. Bring everyone back around Memorial Day, about six weeks hence. He called because 1) he wanted me to be part of the skeleton crew, he felt I was essential, and 2) with the COVID unemployment $600 bonus I would be financially better off to take the furlough and receive unemployment instead of working, and he wanted to give me the option. There was no doubt in my mind, and I told him I would stay. No regrets. Yeah, I could have used the money, but a company and an industry needed me. If Diamond faltered, it wouldn’t be because I hadn’t done my best.
And that’s how it went for several months. I would split time between home and the office, keeping an unofficial hybrid schedule. By mid-summer, there were maybe a dozen others working out of the office, but we all generally kept to ourselves. We didn’t all come back at Memorial Day. People would come back when we had the revenue to support them, and some didn’t come back at all.
I often had the north half of the building to myself, and I would play the music loud; Kula Shaker was in heavy rotation, for some reason. (I have moods.) Before COVID I listened to several hours of podcasts, heavy on the BBC, daily. Now I scaled the podcasts back and instead went to streaming WETA (a Washington classical station) or WDCB (a Chicago jazz station) for most of the day. But I also wallowed in music that spoke to the moment and how I was feeling. I looked forward to elbow’s #elbowroom Sessions, and I still remember the joyous feeling I felt when Jack, Dame Diana Rigg’s grandson, ran on camera in one of the videos. Or discovering Siiga, an artist from the Isle of Skye, who was featured on the Scotland Introducing podcast; his album, Gemini Rising, got me through some very bleak times. Or Lapwing’s “Hope Christmas Gets You to Me,” which I will listen to gladly, even if it’s not Christmas.
Working at home, though, I binged Have Gun, Will Travel. Not the television series, though I would sometimes watch it in the evenings. I’d listen to the radio program with John Dehner. Or sometimes I’d listen to Gunsmoke or Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. I remember listening to an episode of 13 Minutes to the Moon–the second season, interrupted by the COVID lockdown–focused on the Apollo 13 disaster, and being absolutely devastated by it emotionally, even though I know how the story turns out. (Good work, Kevin Fong.) And there was a BBC Radio 4 documentary Laura Grimshaw did on the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (Anarchy Must Be Organized, hosted by the late Neil Innes); it was a comfort listen on a tough day.
I didn’t do any of the Doctor Who: Lockdown tweetalongs. The one time I did, or tried, it was the unofficial tweetalong for the Paul McGann film, and I kept having to deal with work things that afternoon. I was able We were supposed to return to the office in November. We didn’t, due to the Alpha wave. We were supposed to return again the following September; the Delta wave nixed that one. A year later plans were made to downsize the office; there would be no Return to Office.
I worked in the office on Christmas Eve 2020. That also would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday, and so I visited the cemetery on the west side of Baltimore before going to the office. It was a cold day and a rainy one. I parked along the circle above where my grandparents’ site is and walked down the hill. I stood at their graves silently. It was quiet. There was no one there. After a minute or so, I said aloud, “Time to go to work.” And, from the inside of my coat pocket, the Google Assistant on my phone, in her British accented voice, said, “Go get ’em, tiger!” I nearly jumped twenty feet in fright.
I keep coming back to this story about a movie night and a little girl getting excited by my Grover mask. COVID was hard. The last five years have been hard. My health issues (#ComicsBrokeMe) have been psychologically hard. It all builds up, it takes a toll.
The collapse of Diamond’s distribution monopoly over the past five years feels at times as though it’s fallen uniquely upon my shoulders; my Bus Number is 1 (and an elderly couple decided to challenge that recently when they ran a red light while I was crossing the street), and I’ve taken hardly any time off since work-from-home began. I’m repeating the path that broke my health. My cardiologist told me in January, “You need to be kind to yourself,” but I’m not sure where to start.
We’ll see what happens with the Diamond bankruptcy.
March 2020 has lasted forever, and I am so terribly tired.
