Getting Tested for Covid

It has never been easier

It has never been easier or faster to get tested. If you are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 or think you may have COVID-19, you should get tested.

For the last four days, my lovely wife Kathy has had a cough and body aches. She just turned 65 and is having her “welcome to Medicare” exam at the doctor’s office in seven days so she decided to have Covid testing first.

“You don’t want to spread that stuff,” she said.

As is typical of the lady element she got up three hours before her appointment to “get ready” and left an hour early. She decided to drive deep into the North Carolina wilderness for testing because waits of three to four hours with an appointment are being reported in our city.

The State Testing Center

It is a twenty-minute drive on a two-lane country blacktop to the testing center. It is a state health department building and there is a tent in the parking lot. She drove up and a middle-aged lady slumped out and made a gesture like “Here is another stupid old granny”. She knocked on the passenger side window and mumbled “Scan”.

Now both my wife and I distrust phones when we have to show QR codes for tickets. You just touch them and everything disappears and then you will never find the QR code again while a crush of menacing people builds up behind. So we print them out. The QR code ends up the size of a magazine.

The QR Dance

“Move it back, move it back,” the woman shouted as she and Kathy did the QR code scanning dance we have come to know so well. After a period long enough to become fluent in Portuguese the scan was successful!

“Oh, OK,” said the lady and she handed Kathy a pen, test tube, and sticky label to fill out. “Move to the parking space.”

Kathy swabbed her nose but then could not remove the yellow cap on the tube. She held the swab between her fingers trying hard not to contaminate it as she wrestled with the cap. After five minutes of building hysteria, the cap loosened and the specimen was safely parked in its new home.

Put on Hazard Lights

Next instruction: put on Hazard Lights. Now both Kathy and I have used Hondas, hers being the newer model. When I go to buy a car I try to get one with as little new stuff as possible as I know I will never figure it out. I have never known where the hazard lights are and neither does Kathy. She consults the owner’s manual…no hazard light instructions. I guess it is too obvious?

Nearing tears Kathy gets back in the car line and asks how to turn her hazard lights on. This is met with a lot of grunts and huhs but she is allowed to go ahead and scan her test tube. Then she is directed to go back to a parking space to register on a website so she can get results.

That Infernal Phone

Now, neither Kathy nor I ever sign up for anything on a phone. The keys are too small, you can’t hit them, and if you do it won't register. We use a regular computer keyboard like the one I am pecking on one-handed right now.

She starts to register then is directed to get back in the car line. She has to enter the dreaded birth date. It looks like she will have to go back to 1956 by hitting on each preceding month, about 800 taps.

No, there is a wheel! It is about the size of an aphid still she gets it to the correct date but then it will not enter. She hits the year and month over and over as the car line expresses displeasure. Finally, the whole screen goes blank, she has to start over.

When she gets back to the birth date she finds a “Done” she had missed and sweet miracle she gets past that screen. Dread builds as it is clear the car line has become a clot of menace.

Text or Email

One last screen. Does she want the results by text or email? Now Kathy and I never carry our phones. We should but we do not. Most of the time Kathy does not know where her phone is and it is never charged. So she wants an email. She pushes the email button over and over…No Luck!

She has to get back into the other car line to find out that text has to be selected and email can also be selected, email alone is not an option.

A disgusted lady looked her over as she handed in her tube.

“Lady you are a bird!” she said. “You are done!” And she was.

Kathy and I had a discussion about this when we got home. How many high-risk people over 70 are not getting tested due to intimidation over the process? They would have to bring someone under forty with them to navigate the phone registration which might be tough.

In Conclusion

Those of us that spent most of our working career before computers know the struggle is real. Not knowing passwords, not understanding how to register, not being able to find a website, screwing up Zoom calls and Teams meetings are experiences that occur over and over creating a state resembling PTSD. Each time computer use with time pressure is faced is one more opportunity for failure and humiliation. Every “advance” in computer development makes things harder. I am relying on you to solve this while I look for my phone.

Thanks to Kathy for Editing and dragging the story out of the Creative Non-Fiction Category “But that just isn’t what happened.”

Here is something else:

Shout out to Sianna Lani