In BLeeve Blog's first guest post from the West Coast, Gary Marsh, a decade-plus friend, advisor and occasional boss whom I've still never met in person, explores the unintended consequences of Sheltering in Place (SIP).
With a nod and playful wink to Dr. Stephen Covey, whose insightful book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is on the bookshelves of many business pros, we have been Sheltered in Place (SIP) for so long that we have begun to develop a few habits that are frankly turning us into ineffective people.
Here are mine:
Like Chicago politics and the mantra, ‘vote early, vote often,’ the first habit of a highly ineffective person is to drink early, drink often. I’ve been on a personal mission to help save our local wineries by ordering more wine than my cellar holds. Now I’m lining the bottoms of my closets with boxes and stray bottles of wine. Because I need to drink French and Italian wines sometimes, I activated an account at Kermit Lynch in Berkeley. I’m now on a first-name basis with some of the boys over there, and we’ve even traded some of our favorite quotes from Jim Harrison’s writings, such as an essay in “The Raw And The Cooked” detailing how after being caught in a thunderstorm in a small plane he thought he might not survive he retrieved from his cellar a bottle of La Tourtine and La Migoua and slowly drank them both “while meditating on the essential criminality of flight and how even birds have the wit not to fly in thunderstorms.”- At 5 p.m. sharp, quit working and do a little celebratory dance that you don’t have to go to the gym… because the gym is closed! No excuses required! Besides it is 5 o’clock and… a “Quarantini” anyone? It’s just a regular martini that you drink all alone in your house. You can cheat a little bit and have the second one on the porch, as long as you remain alone.
- Only call your mother in the morning, if you are going to call her at all, because she’s known you since you were a little boy/girl and you can’t fool her about ANYTHING! If it’s afternoon and especially early in the evening, she’ll pick up even the slightest bit of slurred speech. Like the line in the movie Sideways about drinking and dialing, don’t do it.
- You’ve wanted to conduct this experiment for a long time and you figure there is no better time than during SIP. So for dinner every night you do take out from In-N-Out Burger on College Avenue. Have you seen the lines of cars out there? Even the cars are social distancing! These are evenings, naturally, when per bad habit #1 you were only drinking Rose earlier in the day and driving is completely safe, because technically Rose doesn’t count as alcohol. Just ask the French. Anyway, the In-N-Out program is to alternate cheese and no cheese nights, always double-double with fries, of course. The experiment, if you have not gathered it yet, is to see if you can live only on burgers.
- Stay up late. Oh heck yes! In fact stay up super-late. We’re talking 2 and 3 a.m.! You know you have been “SIPing” for too long when you are binge-watching sitcoms after midnight. You didn’t think they were funny when they originally aired, but now you watch them because you are looking for meaning in life. Things are getting a tad desperate when you seek meaning from a sitcom.
- Sleep in late. Like really late — 9:30, 10. I even made it to 10:50 one morning. I think that was the morning I finished a second night cap around 3:30 a.m. Besides, when you go blazing into work promptly at 11, the ambitious people that started their days around regular working times will start to be getting tired by 11, and they will be impressed by your energy.
- Decline the next Zoom meeting you are invited to. Just say you are busy. If bad habit #6 didn’t impress people, #7 surely will.
In closing, I’ll share something that came in through email, because all of us are getting a lot of email messaging these days. Some are funnier than others: “You think it’s bad now? In 30 years our country will be run by people home schooled by day drinkers.”
Gary Marsh is a Santa Rosa, California-based writer and principal of Marsh Marketing, a consultancy that specializes in real estate entitlement advisory and public relations services.
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