Things will eventually get back to ‘normal’ — or maybe not

Go on, admit it. There’s no shame in it. We’ve all done it.

How many times in the last week have you started or ended a sentence with “when things get back to normal”?

However many it’s been to date, the number is likely to go up as exponentially as the number of COVID-19 cases does, as whatever “normal” was slips further into the past and whatever normal will be seems to be an increasingly distant point in the future.

Last week was not a good week for those wishing for a return to normalcy. More restrictions on who can or should be working or out and about took hold. Big employers announced layoffs. Small businesses did calculations of how long they’d be shut vs. how long reserves would hold out. The answers to the important questions – when will this end and what will end it? – remained frustratingly out of reach.

That would appear to make it an odd time to consider the question of what normal will look like, provided it ever returns.

But just as big a component of the story as the virus itself and its health effects is how Americans, as individuals, consumers, employees and businesses, aren’t just hunkering down in their home bunkers, waiting until either the virus passes them by or someone devises a remedy.

Instead, they’re figuring out temporary fixes, improvising workarounds, pivoting to new ways of doing things, not just to preserve their own businesses but to help others get through the crisis.

Some of those new ideas will evaporate as soon as the COVID-19 threat does, but others will become permanent fixtures of life for individuals, businesses, society and the economy.

Big events shape the moment they occur in, but they don’t always have a lasting impact. We’re still living in the world shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. The Great Recession and 9/11 were far more immediate events, the number of people alive today who experienced them firsthand is far greater, but did they produce real lasting change in the way this country works? Enduring change often comes not from a single big event but from an accumulation of small events, unnoticed at the time.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is having a visible, immediate impact on our lives, from the shuttered businesses and vacant freeways to closed schools and limited direct social contact beyond our immediate households. The longer it endures, the longer the economic impact will linger, much as it took years to flush the system of bad loans, weak banks and foreclosed houses.

In response to the health threat, churches are holding services by internet streaming. Doctors with patients scheduled for routine appointments not requiring in-depth exams or physical procedures can make telephonic house calls. Office workers are being sent home to do their jobs remotely. The state school system has, for the moment, moved to a home-schooling model.

How much of this will stick when the threat subsides and we’re allowed to wander the streets again?

Consider for a moment the photos of empty offices with expanses of unoccupied desks, their former tenants all working remotely. The observer is supposed to notice the absence of people. Instead what might catch their eye is what’s left behind – stacks and bookcases and filing cabinets full of reference materials and files and reports and forests of miscellaneous paper that no one has looked at since 1993 but are kept around because there’s a chance, however infinitesimally small, someone someday might want one of them.

Businesses have been nibbling at the edges of how much space they pay for versus. what they actually need, and telecommuting has been a promise of the future for longer than there have been computers and telecommunications capable of making remote work possible. For some workers – say, freelance business-column writers and small-newsletter publishers – work from home has been a reality for years.

What we’re experiencing now is a broad, nationwide test of whether, for certain businesses, remote work works to the benefit of both employer (less space to be leased) and employee (no commute, more schedule flexibility). Maybe everyone will decide they miss the joys of the slog to work and spending the day at the office as much as the office misses seeing all its employees in one place at the same time. But just maybe more than a few will discover the emergency workaround is a better approach than the way things had been done before, and that becomes the new normal.

One of the encouraging stories to come out of this debacle is the discovery that ingenuity and resourcefulness are still potent qualities in American manufacturing, especially in small and medium companies. Consider the local examples: distillers around the state, such as Gig Harbor-based Heritage Distilling, have turned to producing hand sanitizer. A Bothell maker of ventilators is teaming with giant General Motors to increase production of the critically needed breathing devices. A Mukilteo commercial upholstery company is not only making masks for a local hospital, it’s helping to construct a network of companies around the globe sharing designs, production expertise and connections to front-line healthcare providers that desperately need medical supplies.

Some of these arrangements will dissolve when the threat does. But for other companies, they’ll not only have found new products, new markets and new partners, they’ll have discovered within themselves the ability to pivot quickly to new opportunities and to actively confront emerging problems.

“Everything changed” and “end of an era” are the popular mantras when a huge news story hits. Often, though, little changes and life goes on the way it used to. The Pandemic of ’20 may go down in the history books – provided we still have those decades from now – as a blip on the timeline, of great importance in its time but of no lasting consequence.

But as long as we’re living through this bit of history, we might well be on the lookout for how this moment changed the “normal” of the lives and society of those reading about it years from now.

This story was originally published March 28, 2020 at 7:01 AM.