Hester Prynne's Office Desk

This week we began a new phase of COVID-19 monitoring on campus.  We've been taking temperatures and asking questions about exposure.  Last week we added a sign in sheet so that we have written proof that we asked the questions.  I now put those sheets in a binder.  Yesterday I went to the supply closet to get more binders.  This approach will be binder intensive.

I've been amusing myself by creating a different sign each day to tell people the date:

Of course, many people don't see my sign; they look at their phone to know the date or they ask me.  Still, it makes me happy to make a sign:

Yesterday we also started giving people a wristband.  We'll have a different color for each day.  We'll be able to see from a distance whether or not people have checked in.  I can see the anxiety about legal liability ratcheting up, and I'm not unsympathetic.

However, these wristbands are ugly.  They're the ones given out at bars and festivals so that it's clear who can drink and who can't (or who gets back in the venue for free).  Yesterday I thought about decorating it.  I thought about Hester Prynne, whom you may or may not remember was in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.  You may or may not remember that she embroidered that letter.

Yesterday, I made this Facebook post:  Like Hester Prynne, I am tempted to embroider or otherwise embellish the paper wristband that says that I've answered the COVID-19 questions properly. But no, I am not Hester Prynne, nor was meant to be. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my face mask as I'm told. (after T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").

And then I decided I needed a photograph to go along with it:

I'm calling it Hester Prynne's Office Desk.  Obviously, if it was her studio, she'd have more embroidery threads and beads and other embellishments.