I was asked to wear a mask yesterday. I said, and I quote, ‘I don’t wear masks’. I was then asked if I had an exemption. I showed, without comment, a two-year-old screen shot of something that had a yellow and white chevron border and the moment passed. It passed without rancour or ill feeling, well certainly on my part. I took my place in the waiting room and was the only bare-faced person there. Nobody appeared ill, nobody was coughing or sniffling and I would estimate the chance of respiratory viral infection spreading amongst us, a large room containing a few almost certainly asymptomatic people, whether we were all masked, none of us masked or anywhere in between, to be approaching zero. I thought to myself, as I flicked through an old copy of NZ Fishing News, ‘Why are people hanging onto this pantomime?’
Called in to have my knees x-rayed and was given a transparent face shield which I wore at a jaunty angle on top of the sunglasses pushed up onto my forehead. After the deployment of Dr Roentgen’s invention, I wandered over to the monitor to survey the images. I took the shield off, as optical clarity was not its strong suit, and the very nice radiographer said I could put my useless piece of plastic in the bin. She said this with a resigned raising of the eyebrows but I was denied the rest of her facial expression because of…well, you can work it out.
Farcical stuff, obviously, but I was expecting it. However, this is the first time I have spent a bit of time in a situation where absolutely everyone was wearing a mask and it is just not normal. The amount you lose in interpersonal interaction is phenomenal. I wouldn’t recognise anybody I saw in that half hour if I saw them again – and I have a very good memory. And my conversation with the radiographer was really just a cardboard cutout of a conversation; it’s not the real thing.
Getting rid of this mask habit, and, more importantly, getting rid of people’s acceptance that is normal and should be the way we behave in perpetuity, is going to be an uphill battle. Getting people to ditch masks now is going to be way harder than getting them to put them on a couple of years ago.
Righto, off to the dental hygienist in a minute. She will, or I hope she will, wear a mask and face shield (as she has probably done for her whole working life) for a perfectly valid reason. She doesn’t want spray from her spray/poky/ultrasonic tool thingies bouncing off my pearly whites and into her face – and I don’t want her saliva dripping on me. Nothing to do with viruses – nothing at all.
