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Iowa Politics with Jeff Stein — Mon. Jan. 17, 2022

By Jeff Stein Jan 17, 2022 | 5:20 AM

What A Difference A Pandemic Makes
 
We had a winter storm in Iowa last Friday. Not a blizzard, not an off-season surprise…just a good old-fashioned dumping of snow.
 
Not long ago, we would have made sure to bundle all the kids up for school…perhaps starting a bit late, or coming home a bit early, depending on the timing of snow in a particular location. And that was in part because parents had to get to work. A little snow…or for that matter, a lot of snow…wasn’t going to stop offices and businesses from being open. It was almost a challenge to be met…making it in to work and comparing notes will co-workers about who had overcome the worse conditions on the way.
 
Now, post-COVID…a lot of places were like ghost towns. Our whole attitude about “showing up” has changed.
 
For one thing, we have something called “remote work”…something almost unheard of before. Now anyone who can possibly work from home has done it at least a little bit…and it’s terribly easy to pivot and fire up the company laptop in your spare bedroom and even connect with co-workers who are similarly in their basements, dens, or bedroom that used to belong to a child who’s now away at college.
 
Sure, schools were cancelled in a lot of places…but others flipped a switch and turned it into a ‘remote learning’ day; all things that were not even considered less than two years ago.
 
It was really quiet around the radio station Friday. For virtually the whole day, I was the only one in the building. Office staff and account executives worked from home, and others logged into audio systems and computers remotely. Our engineer even got our FM signal restored after a power outage from a computer 50 minutes away.
 
Doesn’t seem that long ago that as children, we huddled around the radio to hear if our school was mentioned as cancelling classes, so we could grab a sled and try out the new snow. Another sign of today’s times.