Today I took my son into town to play in a council kids play area with a sandpit on the main road sidewalk. There would be a reported 12,226 COVID-19 cases today and one death in New South Wales. Yesterday, New South Wales recorded 11,201 COVID-19 cases and three deaths.
The sandpit lid had been locked and closed. The large bin filled with toys that my son usually plays with was also padlocked. Sydney councils do not want kids to have fun during the coronavirus pandemic, but they are welcome to spread COVID in childcare, schools, and malls.
The Coronavirus Clock Ball Drop
New Years Eve is tomorrow. People will mostly avoid New Years Eve celebrations due to COVID-19.
I had the idea to celebrate New Years Eve at home with a New York Times Square ball drop, only the ball will be shaped like a spiky coronavirus.
I wanted to visit the Spotlight shop to purchase a paper crepe cube, decorate it into a coronavirus clock, and do the ten second countdown before midnight, December 31, 2021, as the coronavirus ball drops into the New Year.
“Quick, let’s go kick the ball in there,” I focused my son, pointing fervently into the building where the Spotlight store was. He quickly tailed me into the building, towards the Spotlight store. I didn’t have a face mask on. The face mask rules seem to have been abandoned in New South Wales, Australia. There’s no public health order to wear face masks anymore. I have been walking into every shop without a face mask regardless. It has been no big deal.
As we entered the Spotlight store, a girl behind the cashier counter acknowledged us with a smile.
This was the business’s chance to ask the usual COVID-19 compliance check questions, or to kick me and my son out for being unvaccinated and unable to show vaccine passports.
I tested her, “Hi. Do you have large party decorations, large paper balls?”
She pointed me to the stairs leading down one level. Then she hesitated for a moment. I knew that hesitation was because she was going to ask me to wear a face mask but decided against it.
Instead, the girl said, “There are only ten minutes left before the shop closes.”
I raised an eyebrow, “I thought you guys are open until 8pm?”
She smiled, “Normally we’re open until 9pm, but we have restricted trading hours due to COVID.”
The interaction with the cashier gave me the all clear.
The Face Mask Confrontation
With ten minutes left until the Spotlight store closed, there were barely any customers inside.
I mentioned to my son, “Let’s go get water balloons,” to focus him.
As we came down the stairs, I noticed a shaggy gray-haired old female employee stacking a shelf. She heard my son chirping his way down the stairwell.
As we came close to her, she turned with aggressive anxiety, and closed the gap between us with her body in my space, to prattle, “Oh, where’s your face mask? Do you have a mask? It’s a condition of entry that you have to wear a mask.”
She is talking in a frantic voice.
I looked back at her and said, “I don’t have a face mask.”
She stammered, “How did you get in?”
I said, “I went through the front entrance. The girl at the front counter talked to me. But she didn’t say anything about a face mask. She just let me in.”
In the back of my mind I was thinking, “I don’t watch the news that much, but I am pretty sure that face mask restrictions are now not part of any government public health order. Why are you asking me to do that in Spotlight? Why are you even coming up to speak to a customer when the customer has not asked you for help?”
As I took a step back to assess the situation, I noticed that nobody was around at all downstairs. It was just the employee and me ten minutes before the business closed. My son was running playful circles around me. This interrogative employee didn’t know what to do with me.
I thought, “This is going to be embarrassing for her or for my son.”
Being Rushed Out Of Spotlight
After our brief exchange, the old haggard woman suggested, “If you don’t have a face mask on, you can use the back exit or the front entrance to leave.”
There’s a back exit and a front exit. This Spotlight employee was worried that if I go to the front entrance, people would see me. She wanted to hide me from all the good, double vaccinated customers.
In her mind, I was this sick, bad for business, COVID-19 shedding unvaccinated antivax face mask renegade who had not complied with the state government COVID-19 public health order Orthodoxy.
She quickly hurried into a back room, speaking loudly to a manager or other employee, panicking, “A guy just walked in without a face mask! What should I do?”
I thought, “She’s trying to hurry me out of Spotlight. I haven’t done anything wrong. People have let me into Spotlight without a face mask on. Now I’ve got this seventy-year old wannabe security guard trying to peck me out of her Spotlight store.”
Knowing that this old woman had run off to seek people to throw me out of the store was mildly embarrassing. I looked around. The only other person was the young female at the other service counter near the back exit who happened to hear the haggard old woman clucking.
Making A Graceful Exit
I walked over to the young lady at the back exit checkout, mindful that I had been asked to leave unless I wear a face mask.
I wondered, “Do you guys require face masks to shop in here, do you?”
In a casual, apathetic voice, almost like she did not want to become involved, she mentioned, “Yeah, we do. It’s a condition of entry.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just let me make my own decision.
I said, “Okay. I don’t have a face mask on me. But if you need that for me to shop, I might just leave. Do you want me to walk through the back door?”
I was thinking of Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, being asked to head to the back of the bus, where all the colored people sit. I had offered to sit at the back of the bus for Spotlight.
Once again, the unconcerned girl remarked, “You can walk through the front door or through the back door.”
I said, “Alright then.”
I was mindful that I had my son in there with me. I didn’t want to have some big argument with the staff at Spotlight to claim a Pyrrhic victory.
I walked with my nigh three-year old son to the back door, continuing to muck around with him along the way.
“Oh, look! Let’s go this way!”
He is jumping up and down, acting silly, dragging himself up the steps to the back exit.
The Birds Are Free
When we got outside into the car park, I looked up the road and exclaimed, “Ooh, let’s go back up that way!”
On the walk back to the building entrance, we spotted a pigeon outside the automatic doors.
My son said, “The birdie can’t go inside.”
The automatic doors had shut on the bird so that it could not fly inside.
I walked forward to trigger the automatic doors to open, and corrected, “The birdie can go inside if it wants to.”
It was a nice lesson for my son. I tried to shield him from what had just happened in Spotlight by owning the process, so that he would think nothing of it.
As we made our way up the escalator and back to the car, who knows how much of this newfound segregation in Australian society sinks into his clever little mind.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
