Anonymous #2

Layla: Okay so i'm going to be asking you some questions about your experience with COVID-19 and throughout quarantine. What is your career position? 

Interviewee: I am a senior applications engineer at a chemical company. 

Layla: Have sales dropped during the pandemic?

Interviewee: Yes. 

Layla: How much have they dropped?

Interviewee: i don’t exactly know the numbers but we definitely know it’s dropped a lot.

Layla: has anyone been diagnosed with the virus at your job? 

Interviewee: At this moment there was a coworker's husband that has been infected. They were quarantined and tested before she was able to return to work, so she was out for almost 21 days. 

Layla: Are there specific procedures that need to be done before entering the building? 

Interviewee: Yup, before we enter the building we are supposed to be wearing a  face mask, and we need to have it on all the time, um there are more cleaning people in the company. They clean the doors, glass, anything that is touched needs to be cleaned throughout the day. They used to only clean after we left but now its constant. They also removed all the chairs from the cafeteria, there are only three tables and there cannot be more than two people at each table. 

Layla: How many people are allowed in the lab now? 

Interviewee: Before there were ten people allowed in the lab, but now only five. So we only have 50% of the workforce in the lab now. 

Layla: has that slowed down any production, or any work that you guys have to do? 

Interviewee: Oh yeah, i mean, now you have only 5 people in the lab so we’re working with 50% capacity. We’re not allowed to go in, also in other rooms like the SEM room, we had to separate the two SEM’s because before we used to have one room with the SEM’s having up to four people coming in the room looking at them. Now, each SEM is in their own room, having up to only one person in each room.

Layla: were you forced to be quarantined when everything started?

Interviewee: Yeah when this first started we were told by the governor  not to go anywhere. We were quarantined for 14 days.  Yeah 14 days we were out of work, then we were allowed to go back

Layla: Do you guys have shifts,  or do the same amount of people still go to work?

Interviewee: At the beginning when everything started,  they decided to only bring In the essentials,  only the people that were very much needed for a project. Supervisors and managers were not needed,  so it was the president and senior engineers, and all senior employees that were showing up and then a skeleton crew to help out, everyone else is staying home and they were only selecting certain employees to come into work but not everybody was allowed to come into the building and they moved everybody's desk or cubicles to separate everybody so everybody would be six feet apart. 

Layla: Who do you have business with, like what countries, Companies Etc?

Interviewee:   a company has business with a lot of companies, Samsung, Panasonic, the Navy,  have a lot of contracts with the armed forces. Also we make semiconductor resist we have a lot of companies in Taiwan, China and Japan. Japan is the owner of our company so we have business with Tokyo, also California, Florida, Europe, basically all around the world.

Layla: Has the pandemic slowed down any business with any other countries besides the US ?

Interviewee: Yeah there's been a certain places like China that's been on lockdown, so we lost a lot of business from them. We used to do a lot of business with universities, But since they're shut down right now we don't do any work with the universities at the moment, other countries are on lockdown. Even up to now they're not at the same pace that they used to be. It's completely different, everything’s… slower. 

Layla:  Do you do anything in your free time?

Interviewee:I'm a soccer coach, so when the pandemic first came out we weren’t allowed to have any practices, training or anything like that.  It was only until face three that we were allowed to start Having small groups of players no more than 10, they were supposed to wear a mask.  you know, we also brought hand sanitizer. We were also given a thermometer to take the temperature of the players. That lasted for about a month and we went to the next phase where they were allowed to have more, not scrimmages but you could play with each other, things like that. A lot of our practices slow down a lot because people weren't going to practices because their parents were scared. Even right now we're still at a 30% capacity,  they have slowed down a lot,  compared to how we were because a lot of the parents are not trusting the system.  what we're in August right now we're back at training again.

Layla: Did they slow down after being in quarantine for 3, 4 months? 

Interviewee: The players you mean?

Layla: Yes.

Interviewee: Absolutely,  we trained all year round,  and this is probably the first time that we've had to force the kids to not to come to practice.  we had to force the kids to not train for that long,  so a lot of them were out of shape  when we came back,  some of them lost motivation sound of the more afraid,  there's a lot of things going on at the kids right now,  there's a lot of misinformation coming from a lot of different sources but um, the majority of our team is back. What We called the clinic which is the young kids practices we're probably at 30% capacity as well right now because the parents like I said  are not ready to bring their kids to practice yet,  these kids are younger than 12 years old,  so their parents aren't risking it  at this point. 

Layla:  do you guys make sure that your players stay 6 feet apart during practices?  or do you at least try to make sure that they keep their distance a little bit because I know when playing sports it is hard to not keep close. 

Interviewee: We try to make sure they're keeping their distance and we've been setting our drills to be pretty far apart from each group, so we do mostly like long passes receiving drills that don't require being next to anyone.  but we do water breaks. That's when they all go to each other and start talking to their friends, we try to keep them away but you know. But they all try to listen and keep their distance so so far it's been good no one's sick or anything,  we've been lucky enough this far.

Layla: Alright, thank you for your time.