Everyone is just waiting

[pameladean]

For a long time I did not used to go to bed early. For the last week I have not gotten into bed much before five a.m.

The 24-hour registration period for people over 65 to pre-register for the upcoming week's vaccine lottery runs from 5 a.m. today until five a.m. tomorrow. Fine, I thought, I'll just get on there a bit before 5 and get it done. I was more than ready for bed by four, naturally, but I stuck it out. When I get up in what passes for my morning,  there is a whole flurry of things to do; and I didn't know exactly when I would actually be able to start waiting again.

I hit the waiting room at 5:03 a.m. and there were 7200 and some odd people ahead of me in line. Estimated waiting time: more than an hour.

I am waiting, so far. I don't have anything to do right now except to go to bed. No medication left to take or administer, no showering or dressing or making tea and breakfast, no looking through the recipes for dinner, no checking email. Well, I am checking it, but I don't get much at this hour, not being in regular correspondence with people in extremely different time zones.

Aha. Estimated waiting time: 57 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 4831.

The number goes down in little bursts. I wonder how many people are leaving the line, not having been able to allot a long enough wait.

Sandy Denny is singing "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"

Estimated waiting time: 13 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 3821. It has not been close to an hour, let alone more than one. I'm starting to feel bad for all the people dropping out. They probably don't have the luxury of staying home, or have to wrangle kids, or both. I'm still here, though.

The moon is not technically down, but I can't see it. I don't know what the Pleiades are doing.

Eight minutes, 2769 people.

Fairport Convention is performing "Sloth."

All right, I'm done. They want you to use the mouse to sign the form. It looked as if I'd done it with a very blunt pencil on a wobbly table, even after several attempts. It will have to do.

Forty-six minutes from start to finish. I am now able to be picked randomly to schedule an appointment for the first of two shots. But it's a start.

Bob Dylan was singing "Shelter from the Storm" while I was filling out the form, and now, in a You-Tube video I am still really excited about, is singing "Love Minus Zero, No Limits" with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell playing backup; this performance is part of the Concert for Bangladesh in August of 1971 and I will cherish for some time my vague thoughts, on first stumbling across it, of, "I don't think that was his usual band at the time if he had one; wow, they are really good; the guy with the tambourine looks really familiar; WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?"

Sleep well, all, and may we all have a way to be vaccinated soon.

Pamela

Comments

[halfmoon_mollie1]

I don't even have that chance. But our gov mentioned something like this yesterday. I'm glad you are on a list somewhere!

[pameladean]

I hope your state will provide a process to at least get things started soon.

P.

[mrissa]

Thank you for taking care of our Pamela.

[pameladean]

Doing my best. <3

Oh yes!

[lsanderson]

I just got on a waitlist. I thought about hitting it early. But I didn't. Good luck.

Re: Oh yes!

[pameladean]

Well, hitting it early only got me on a waitlist too. I think that's all it was supposed to do, because they have to do the random selection part rather than just let it be first-come, first-served as it was last week.

P.

[graydon]

Excellent news!

May the lottery and the logistics all prove favourable!

[pameladean]

Thank you!

P.

[quadong]

They have enough server resources to send you a continuous updates on how many people are waiting, but not to take a few text strings from you (and a small nonsense signature image) so you're just registered? Or is there some human interaction during the registration process?

[pameladean]

No human interaction apparent on my end. I kind of enjoyed the updates.

P.

[sara]

Hang in there. My folks got their first shots yesterday.

[pameladean]

Oh, excellent! I get so excited and sometimes teary any time I hear that somebody has managed to get a shot.

P.

[lcohen]

glad you were able to wait and made it onto the list. evanston has online registration but they're only doing health care workers and people over 85 at the moment so i've got a ways to go.

[pameladean]

Minnesota apparently felt put on its mettle because we were 43rd among states for actually distributing the vaccine. They are still doing healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes, and individual doctors and clinics are vaccinating seriously old people. But they decided to reserve a few thousand doses for anybody over 65 and for teachers and childcare workers. Last week they put up one website for the entire group and the rush for appointments crashed the website and broke the phone system they also had ready for people who don't use the internet. Now they've broken out the childcare workers and teachers into a separate process and left us old people to have a lottery amongst ourselves.

I hope you can get a vaccine soon.

P.

[thanate]

Congratulations on getting into the line; my mother's waitlist opened at 9AM and she got through around noon, with up to 5 weeks before she gets called back based on the numbers reported in the newspaper. But slow progress is still progress.

[pameladean]

Yikes, I hope it's less than five weeks for your mother! It could certainly be five weeks for me too, unless we start getting more vaccine.

P.

[kore]

That is a BULLSHIT long time to wait but so glad you got a chance!

[pameladean]

It didn't seem long because of last week's reports of people sitting around for three, four, five hours and then never even getting put on a waiting list. Six thousand people did make appointments and get their first shots last week, but I think I read that about a million tried to do so. Less than an hour? Fine, I'll take it.

People are yelling at the state government a lot, but honestly I just put it all on the Republicans, not just at the national level, but the local ones snapping and snarling at the governor's heels and telling stupid lies and making even stupider proposals. Walz was not my choice at all, but I can't think of a better way to make me vote for him again than the conduct of the local Republicans.

P.

[dreamshark]

Where did this "waiting room" experience occur? I just went through the process (10 am) and it was smooth as silk. One screen flowed instantly to the next and I was done in 15 minutes. Would have been 5 minutes if I hadn't been stopping to make notes at every screen. I am astounded - I assumed that I wouldn't be able to get through until after 10 pm, when most elderly people have gone to bed.

Mind you, I think that all we have done at this point is get ourselves into the lottery pool for an early appointment. My back-of-the-envelope calculations put the chances of winning this week at about 1%. But the odds should get better each week as the pool of unvaccinated senior citizens shrinks and vaccine availability increases.

[pameladean]

Um, it occurred on the same site that you had a smooth experience with later on. I expected a backup if I tried right at opening time, but it was easier with my schedule than waiting. I really hate having tasks like this hanging over my head, and am happy to have spent 46 minutes getting it over with before I went to sleep.

And yes, I don't expect anything to happen at any particular time either. This seems really more like a backup plan. HealthPartners has not actually gotten in touch with me about vaccines yet even just to say "Hang on, we're working on it," but they may well get there before my name comes up in the lottery.

P.

[sartorias]

Good luck!

Lottery seems really cruel method, for exactly the reasons you mention.

[pameladean]

I put that all on the Republicans. Minnesota doesn't have enough vaccine, because Trump, and was also getting a lot of criticism for not rolling out the vaccine they do have fast enough. This lets an additional group of people get vaccinated. Last week they tried first-come, first-serve instead of a random selection, and the resulting rush crashed the website and broke the phone system.

The only state I've read about doing it well so far is West Virginia.

P.

[adrian_turtle]

I'm so glad you're registered, and I hope you win the lottery. Tomorrow is such a long time, and lonesome means such a lot.

[pameladean]

Thank you! I am too short of sleep to respond in kind, but many smiles and much satisfaction emanating your way for playing my reference game.

P.

[lydamorehouse]

This story is... kind of horrible? I mean, I'm glad you got in line early and that it worked out, but holy moley! That's a long wait!

[pameladean]

Having been reading about people last week waiting upwards of three hours and maybe still not being able to get on the waiting list, let alone get an appointment, I wasn't as fussed as I might be. Obviously everything should be going more smoothly, but in that regard we are still in Trump's shadow.

I was worried that I'd have to make the choice to leave the line and start over later because I didn't want my schedule (which involves various medications that are better taken at the same time each day) to get too borked. But I didn't come close to running up on that deadline, so it doesn't seem bad in retrospect.

P.

[athenais]

I'm happy you could wait out the line. May you be vaccinated asap! Gosh, the Concert for Bangladesh brings back high school memories for me; one of my best friends was obsessed with it and played it a lot when we went over to her house to study.

[pameladean]

Thank you!

One of my friends was also obsessed with that concert, but only with certain musicians. She didn't like Dylan at ALL. And I was being studiously unimpressed by the Beatles at the time, so I might not really have appreciated that track even if I'd heard it.

P.

[jjhunter]

This has the feel of waiting-in-line stories from federal election voting in November.

Music and humanity permeating logistics wrought inhumane in their outsized import relative to design attention. The way we queue for the really important things, even apparently online.

Thank you for sharing your story. Would you be comfortable with me linking this? It feels like an important reflect of the moment, which may stretch for months yet and still has an end in sight worth even this ridiculous waiting for.

[pameladean]

Thank you, that's what I was trying to get at. I'm very pleased to see your summary.

Please feel free to link. I wanted to make a faithful record of the experience. I suppose most people would have put it on Twitter, but I still feel more at home with a nice journaling site.

P.

[17catherines]

This seems like such a weird way to distribute vaccines! Not that we can talk, we haven't even started around here, but the need is far less urgent for us.

May you win the lottery! (And one day, I really will come back to Dreamwidth and do a massive update, but my lockdown experience was one of extreme busyness...!)

[pameladean]

It is weird. But there aren't enough, and how many would be provided was subject to apparently arbitrary changes by the federal government under Trump. I'm hoping we can catch up soon. Biden did invoke the Defense Production Act, which Trump would not do.

P.

[carbonel]

I don't know Proust at all well, so I don't know if your style writing style deliberately matched his after, but I did see what you did with that first line.

I'm glad you're registered, and I hope something comes of it. I am nine months shy of 65, and I hope there will be sufficient stores by the time I reach that age.

[pameladean]

I don't know Proust at all well either, and was mostly going for a mood influenced by one book, or rather a standard translation of it. I'm very pleased you noticed.

I sure hope you can get vaccinated well sooner than nine months. I think Biden will be able to ramp up production, and his people could hardly do worse than the Trump administration has at getting them where they need to be.

P.