Coronavirus

Something humorous to lighten the darkness a bit. At least, I find it funny.

I'm attending a conference next week about IT for courts/judicial. This year, due to COVID, it is being held remotely.

Most, if not all, attendees are state/federal judicial employees, so it is illegal for pretty much all the attendees to accept "gifts" worth more than a certain amount of money. When you go to a conference in person, there is usually free refreshments and cheap swag provided by various vendors. The individual refreshments and swag items are provided by different companies and are each well below the threshold of acceptable gifts, so everyone eats a few cookies, has a coffee or soft drink, and walks out with a few pens, a travel mug, and some other stupid crap with vendor logos printed on them. No big deal.

This year, however, since the conference is being held remotely, they are bundling all the swag and some snacks and offering to ship it to attendees. They keep sending out notices extending the deadline to "claim your conference gift," because no one is claiming them, because now the swag is called a "gift" and, when bundled together, it crosses the threshold value that many states have.

I find this situation humorously absurd for so many reasons, not least of which is that two people in my department claimed their gift without thinking it through, and now have to fill out a pile o' paperwork and return their little boxes o' trail mix and junky office supplies. We are laughing at them and mocking the situation, good-naturedly, via text and email, since we can't laugh manically in person in the lunch room. I feel there needs to be a good gif or meme for this.

More dark humor.

We keep receiving emails at work admonishing us for too much "close contact" at work.

Last week they changed our contact tracing forms so that we now have to provide a reason why we had contact with any one we listed on the sheet, which I think is actually a pretty good deterrent considering how much we all hate the paper work. But I guess it wasn't enough of a deterrent, because today we were informed that the Judicial Marshalls have been directed to enforce compliance with the no close contact rules between employees. I would not want to be the Marshall that has to tell a Judge that they need to take a few steps back.