Yo ho ho, a hermit's life for me

Just got an email from the top brass with the following directly-relevant parts for me:

• If you don't volunteer to return to the office in Phase 2, you will not be required to do so. In fact, for the remainder of 2020, returning to AMA offices during any phase will be on a voluntary basis.


• Employees who commute to work on mass transit will NOT be eligible to return during Phase 2, and not more than 20 employees per floor (in Chicago) will be permitted to return in Phase 2. Similar distancing parameters will be adopted in our other offices.

Since I normally take the CTA to work, that means I'm specifically banned from returning to the office. I'm very glad they're taking this seriously--there is value in working for an organization run by physicians--but it does mean that I'm suddenly added to the fulltime work from home crowd. For the foreseeable future, it's me on my couch on a laptop.

There's psychological value in that, since I can step out of my sun nook and thus step away from work, but maybe I should come up with a better work setup.

Swimming in pants

A while ago, I wrote about how I bought something at a shop called MDNT45 rather than buying the similar Demobaza version, and since then I bought a couple other things from them too. When my stimulus check came on, I sprung for a pair of pants from them, but first I emailed to ask about the measurements, since my inseam is 36 inches and it's almost impossible for me to find pants that fit. They emailed back that they could adjust the length for no charge, and the Small said it fit a 29-33 inch waist (mine is 30 inches), so I said that a Small was fine. The pants took a while to get to me, but there's coronavirus-related shipping delays everywhere, so that's okay. But when they arrived...well:

( I am, you might say, stretched )

I could pull them completely off without unbuttoning them. I'm very thin, but I'm not that very thin. When I emailed to ask, MDNT45 said that it was too bad, since if I had told them I wanted the waist a smaller size they could have adjusted that too. It was a bit dismissive, and I didn't want to argue, so I took the pants down the street to a tailor and paid $13 to have them altered.

Several people asked me why I didn't raise more of a fuss about it, which is a good question. There are a couple reasons: the first is that while I still kind of doubt that's a 33-inch waist in the picture, I don't have any proof because I didn't measure it before I took it to the tailor. The second is that while I was annoyed at MDNT45's response, English isn't their first language and it's possible they meant it in a sympathetic way--that they could have made another alteration if I had asked. And since they already didn't charge me to have the pants lengthened, I thought they had earned at least a bit of forbearance. And when I got the pants back from the tailor, they fit perfectly, so that's that. I paid $200 for the pants, but it was worth those $13 to not have to have a drawn-out argument, especially when I didn't know whether I was right or not. It's really important to me to have a basis for my own complaints.

Now I have another pair of pants, and since I don't have to go back into the office for the rest of the year, I'll get more wear out of them. Full cyberpunk elf aesthetic is a go!