For the most part, life while sheltering in place hasn’t been that much different since my last entry three weeks ago. Same routine of working from home, exercising in the evenings, grocery shopping on the weekends in a mask while using a precious bottle of sanitizer in my car in between stops. My supply comes from a bottle that I had from two years ago when I moved into my current place, along with small bottles I received over the years from my HR department at my start-of-year organizational meetings. I hardly used it before, but it’s certainly good to have a supply now.
I now figure that my rate of gas usage is such that I would only need to fill my tank once every six weeks at the point I would normally refill, though I now I keep it above half a tank just in case there’s some disruption of the supply chain. Not that I really need to worry about that, since it is now clear that the world is awash in unused oil due to the shutdown of so many fuel-consuming activities in the world, reflected by its empty freeways and airports. Even with these developments, it was striking to hear that oil prices temporarily went negative last week, meaning that traders actually had to pay people to take oil off their hands. Further reports suggested that despite agreements to reduce production, the world was literally running out of places to store the oil that was already pumped from the ground, with filled tankers milling around at sea, unable to find a place to unload what had previously been precious cargoes. The prospect of unrest loomed in many countries whose livelihoods depend almost solely on the revenues their wells produce.
I have a little bit of experience with the disruption that low oil prices can produce in people’s lives. My first real job after finishing my coursework in accounting was with a company near Bakersfield, CA that pumped a sludgy crude from the underground reservoirs in the western end of Kern County. A little over a year after I started working for them, the economic crisis that afflicted Asia in 1997 reduced worldwide oil consumption drastically and sent oil prices into a tailspin. Because the price of the oil that my company sold was tied to international markets, my company’s operating revenues took a similar dive, and after making as many other expenditure reductions as it could, it was forced to lay off about ten percent of its staff. As it turned out, I was one of the victims, and in the space of about an hour I went from a normal workday to carrying my belongings out the door in a box, never to return. It was a frightening and disorienting experience, but fortunately it was not long-lasting, since I found work again about six weeks later. Those were better times.
There is no question that the social distancing and corresponding economic shutdowns that have taken place across the world have been absolutely necessary to save people’s lives, and I, for one, do not support lifting them any time soon unless there are substantive alternative measures in place to control the spread of the virus, the existence of which I am extremely skeptical at present. Nonetheless, it is also important to remember those whose livelihoods have been torn out from under them in an instant, knowing that many others are likely to experience similar fates as the reverberations of the shutdowns find their way to virtually every area of modern life. This may not be very hard for most, since it is likely that even now it has reached, if not to our own immediate families, to many who are near and dear to us.
The attached picture is one I took at one of my schools a couple of weeks ago. The sight was touching in the moment.
Until next time.
– Vino Knight-Trane
