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Collected Item: “the handshake in jeprody”

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the handshake in jeprody

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.

The story I wanted to tell was about something that is so common and frequent that it became extremely awkward and strange for me. This thing was the hand shake. Before covid hand shaking was a norm and everybody did it. It was the universal way to greet people in a polite and also professional way if you're working. But as Covid-19 came into the picture this norm would become altered and even disappear all together possibly. 2020 was going great until a virus in china was discovered and people started to die very fast shortly after. No one knew this mystery virus until a test came out that it was a very dangerous and deadly virus capable of killing people in days. The virus was only found in China but soon spread around the world. I live in america and as soon as this virus hit thing changed. The first thing was to wear a mask 24-7 when in public. Another thing that started to change that no one realized was the common handshake.due to the virus people became more scared to interact with people. This caused people to change their social behavior.

One such example was when I was out with my family and friends. We were all going to meet some people and when we arrived I did not realize I went to shake the person's hand. As soon as i did that the person came back with sorry i don't want to shake hands. Then I went to another person and they were different. They were fine but did elbow bump instead of a conventional handshake. This change is greeting people became awkward for me because I had to read the person and if they wanted to handshake or do something else. There were times were i would think they were all right and then they weren't and the greeting looked like some twister baird with my hand flailing around stupidly with no motive. I became embarrassed and didn't shake or greet anyone after that incident. After this event I realized that the handshake kinda just disappeared and people did not want or even think of handshakes. covid-19 changed the social que for meeting someone to glancing at them and saying hi and that it. I can't imagine how awkward this is for businesses. From this experience I realized the hand shake might disappear altogether after covid or be much less the norm.

Covid has had the power to restructure how we greet people and socialize by minimizing our interaction with others at just a glance. I hope the hand shake survives but if not the world will be very different without the handshake because it was such a norm in society for lots of years.

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?

handshake,akward,diffrent,changed

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

N/A

Give this story a date.

2020-09-29
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