Collected Item: “HIST30060 Texts from a supermarket service manager regarding COVID cleaning”
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HIST30060 Texts from a supermarket service manager regarding COVID cleaning
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Screenshots
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
These are screenshots of text messages sent from a supermarket manager to a group chat of service team members of a major Australian supermarket in Altona North, Melbourne. They detail the new cleaning regime that became part of the responsibilities of working in a supermarket during the pandemic. These include instructions about wiping down surfaces with sanitiser and keeping 1.5m distance from coworkers. These texts came a few days after Victoria's third lockdown was announced. I worked at the supermarket at the time and it was an extremely chaotic period, made more hectic by ever-changing restrictions and developments in COVID-safe practices. We would get texts like these quite frequently during this third lockdown because it was so important that supermarket essential workers kept abreast of COVID developments and worked to make supermarkets as safe as possible.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
supermarkets, Melbourne, hygiene, cleaning, texts
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Charlotte Cameron
Give this story a date.
2020-07-10