Essential Workers

We will always remember the year "2020" as it showed us both sides of Humanity due to Covid. We have seen countless acts of generosity and heroic efforts of Front line and Essential workers, on the other side we saw greed in people hoarding the essential supplies and selling them at higher prices.

I was lucky and fortunate to work from home and didn't have to face the same challenges as Front-line workers or Essential workers. But was very anxious to help out, whatever way I could by donating and raising funds to the causes for people who got impacted by COVID. But my time came to do more when I started reading about the news articles of Essential workers, getting attacked by customers who refused to wear Masks became a frequent occurrence starting from May 2020.

On May 12, 2020, I read a new article about a target employee getting attacked for enforcing a store mandate of customers wearing a mask inside the store. An employee broke his arm in the process of making the store safe for customers. Irrespective of what each of us believes in Science and the continued debate of Mask or No Mask policy, we have to be appreciative of the help that we are getting especially when the employee is there only to help and has no other option than working in a store by taking a huge risk and was just implementing a store mandate. It is also not an easy job to wear a mask all day especially in hot summer and helping out customers to make their lives easy.

I couldn't think of a better way to say how grateful we are for the sacrifices, so started raising funds within my extended relatives and friends. I bought "Gift cards" for essential workers and "Thank You" notes, also started working on preparing a list of stores that I would make a visit to.

On the day before Thanksgiving November 25 2020, I started my morning by walking into the USPS store, distributing the gift cards and thank you notes along with it. The happiness of someone acknowledging their efforts is a beautiful image and the words of appreciation from the 3 USPS employees present in that location, I will never forget in my life.

I continued my trip with stops at Albertsons, Walgreens, a couple of gas stations in my locality with similar experiences. My next stop was a visit to a Target store and talked to employees who do the sanitization of carts. Each day they sanitize anywhere closer to 300 shopping carts - 600 shopping carts a day and apart from handling their existing day-to-day duties. Thanking them again with a Gift card and Thank You note is the least thing we could do to appreciate their efforts.

My final stop for the day was at Vons, considering it was the eve of Thanksgiving they were in the final preparations of closing the store. I distributed the gift cards and thank you notes to the 8 employees of Vons, all thanking me for the gesture. Just before I left the store, all the 8 employees got together and started clapping, for what we were able to do.

25th November 2020 will always be one of the best day of my life, all the appreciation that I got and the experiences I had, it was only possible due to my wonderful friends and family, I was just a messenger. I want to continue being that messenger and continue what we did for some of the essential workers to extend it to other stores/workers that didn't get the right appreciation for what they do every day in the current conditions of COVID.

"Thank You" again to all Front-line and Essential workers.!