Collected Item: “Apparently I Have Opinions About Hand Sanitizer Now?”
Give your story a title.
Apparently I Have Opinions About Hand Sanitizer Now?
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Text, story
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.
I graduated with my bachelor's degree in April 2020, shortly after my state began heavy COVID-19 shut downs. The plans I had for my career took an unexpected pause. After several months, I finally found work at a local convenience store as a cashier. To accommodate heightened concerns about hygiene and sanitation, we had several bottles of hand sanitizer set up around the checkout areas for both customers and employees. I didn't know how different hand sanitizer brands could be. I suspect that the sudden demand for it during the pandemic must have led to cheaper, lower quality versions being distributed more widely, but our hand sanitizer was the worst. If you pressed the lid of the bottle, you would suddenly find your hands full of a large, unwieldy blob of what felt like elmer's glue and smelled somewhere between a rotten banana and a doctor's office. Try as you might to rub it away, you would inevitable be left with sticky residue all over your hands until you washed them. I guess in that sense it was an effective sanitizer in that it probably made a lot of people actually wash their hands. I no longer work at the gas station, but every time I think of that first COVID summer and that job that I was both so thankful and a little disappointed to have, I think of the feeling of that hand sanitizer.
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?
#ArizonaStateUniversity #ASU #HIST643 #SensoryHistory #HandSanitizer #Graduation #Idaho #Smells #2020 #COVIDSummer #GasStations
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Self
Give this story a date.
2020-07