Item
David Scamehorn Oral History, 2021/12/01
Media
Title (Dublin Core)
David Scamehorn Oral History, 2021/12/01
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Description (Dublin Core)
David Scamehorn had lived in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota for most of his life; he grew up in eastern Wisconsin, attended Macalester and the University of Minnesota, worked his entire professional career there, and had raised his family in St. Anthony, a northeastern suburb of Minneapolis. In this interview, David describes the difficult and arduous process of finding a new job in New York, and having the entire country shut down a week later as the first wave of COVID-19 swept the nation. He details his move across the country, dealing with adjusting to a new workplace virtually, and navigating the ever-changing regulations and restrictions of inter-state travel as he went back and forth from Minnesota to New York.
Recording Date (Dublin Core)
Creator (Dublin Core)
Contributor (Dublin Core)
Partner (Dublin Core)
Type (Dublin Core)
oral history
Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)
Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)
Collection (Dublin Core)
Curatorial Notes (Dublin Core)
Date Submitted (Dublin Core)
05/01/2023
Date Modified (Dublin Core)
06/01/2023
08/21/2023
Date Created (Dublin Core)
12/01/2021
Interviewer (Bibliographic Ontology)
Stuart Scamehorn
Interviewee (Bibliographic Ontology)
David Scamehorn
Location (Omeka Classic)
Manlius
New York
United States of America
Format (Dublin Core)
video
Language (Dublin Core)
English
Duration (Omeka Classic)
00:43:33
abstract (Bibliographic Ontology)
David Scamehorn had lived in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota for most of his life; he grew up in eastern Wisconsin, attended Macalester and the University of Minnesota, worked his entire professional career there, and had raised his family in St. Anthony, a northeastern suburb of Minneapolis. In this interview, David describes the difficult and arduous process of finding a new job in New York, and having the entire country shut down a week later as the first wave of COVID-19 swept the nation. He details his move across the country, dealing with adjusting to a new workplace virtually, and navigating the ever-changing regulations and restrictions of inter-state travel as he went back and forth from Minnesota to New York.
Transcription (Omeka Classic)
Stuart Scamehorn 00:03
Alright, so today's date is December 1 2021. The current time is 1:52pm Central Time. My name is Stuart Scamehorn, and I am here interviewing Dave Scamehorn. And so the current COVID statistics for the United States are the case total is at 48,377,000. In the current Wisconsin case total as of November 30, the new confirmed cases at a seven day average is 2722. Alright, so, Dave, if you would mind stating your name, including spelling, and then any demographic information you wish to share with the study such as race, ethnicity, age and gender identity?
David Scamehorn 01:10
Sure, my name is David Scamehorn, the last name is SCAMEHORN, I'm 55 years old, white male. And live currently at 8374 Salt Springs Road in Manlius, New York.
Stuart Scamehorn 01:29
Awesome, and then I kind of jumped over this, but this is being recorded as a part of the Western Wisconsin COVID archive as well as the Journal of the Plague Year archive, I send you over those two release forms, I don't know how much you you took a look at both of those, if you would like me to send you the links to check those out later, I would be more than happy to.
David Scamehorn 02:00
I reviewed both of those and signed both of those release forms.
Stuart Scamehorn 02:05
Awesome. All right. And then jumping back into the background questions. What are kind of the primary things that you do on a day to day basis.
David Scamehorn 02:17
So I'm employed at the Oneida Nations Enterprises as the Vice President for Strategic Analytics and Revenue Optimization. So my day to day activities really, primarily involve going to and from work. From a commuting standpoint, I travel about 30 minute drive from Manlius over to Verona, New York, and then, you know, miscellaneous, sort of required shopping, you know, to support a household. My wife and I are residing now in New York full time. And then we both enjoy being outdoors. So going out and hiking, enjoying some of the, the parks and so forth that are in the area.
Stuart Scamehorn 03:02
Yeah, awesome. And then, you did kind of touch a bit on that there, but, just kind of what is what is it like to live out in New York, compared to like Wisconsin, or Minnesota.
David Scamehorn 03:20
So, I've been, I've been living in New York now for about a year and a half. And prior to that lived in Minnesota for over 30 years and grew up in Wisconsin. And so the biggest contrast is sort of we're moving out to New York, you know, during the pandemic, was just a noticeable difference in attitudes about COVID. And about precautions that were people were taking, and just the conversations that people would have at a restaurant or at a supermarket and so forth, and so much more aggressive efforts, both in terms of vaccination rates, but particularly in use of masks. Across the board, so remarked on this a number of times, sort of as the mask use, effort was sort of ramping up that in New York, everybody was wearing a mask all the time, and then I would travel back to Minnesota and the opposite was true. If you wore a mask into a Home Depot or a restaurant, you usually were the outlier. And so that was the biggest real difference that that encountered sort of, you know, in a day to day basis.
Stuart Scamehorn 04:34
Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned kind of in there moving out toward like, during the pandemic and everything. Would you like to kind of elaborate a bit more on kind of what that whole process was like, what your experience was with that?
David Scamehorn 04:53
Yeah, so prior to the pandemics so in the January February timeframe of 2020, I was looking for a new job had had to roll in Minnesota, and was contacted by a recruiter for Oneida Nation. And my wife and I decided that we really liked the area with a lot of the natural sort of scenery, and parks and so forth, and upstate New York. And the job itself was very attractive. And so we decided to come out for an interview. And this was in the middle of March. And it was really the week we came out the casino, everything was operating fully, nobody was there were no precautions or masks. Really COVID, there was some conversation about it at the time, but nobody really quite knew much about it, or what would you know if this was going to be a thing or not. So I went through that process, accepted the job offer, got back to Minnesota, and by that weekend, that was when all the sports functions shut down. Basically, everything shut down within a week of that trip out out to New York. So very interesting. Starting a job, where a business is more or less shut down, was certainly much more difficult than anything I've done previously, professionally, just because the lack of the ability to meet people and interact with them face to face, everybody had to learn how to use Zoom and other sort of, you know, remote communications tools to be able to handle those interactions. And it's easier if you have a basis with somebody where you've met them and work with them closely previously, it's a lot easier to use something like zoom. Whereas if you're meeting somebody for the first time, you know, it just leaves a lot to be desired. And just in terms of trying to read their body language and some of those types of queues. So that was a challenge. And then we got into the business here at Oneida, hotels and casinos, everything was really shut down, beginning there in March, and then reopened in June. And so in the middle of June, I actually then moved out into an apartment in New York, we had my two sons, both at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, they had some remote learning things in place. And so combination, we decided that we do a slow motion transition and move out to New York, which really we only completed in the last couple of months here. So went out to New York living in an apartment. In the immediately some of the challenges were New York had a very aggressive quarantine policy in place, so every time I would go back to Minnesota and then come back to New York, I either had a 10 or 14 day quarantine period, which was challenging, I learned how to use Instacart to get groceries delivered, for example, because I was not, you know, the letter of the law there, you're not allowed to leave your residence for any reason. So trying to navigate through that. Fortunately, I had very strong support from my employer through that, which certainly made all the difference, but still very challenging, and just, you know, just a different level of stress on top of what would already be a stressful situation in terms of across country relocation.
Stuart Scamehorn 08:33
Yeah, and that, yeah, that's definitely a, it sounds like that would be a very challenging kind of ordeal to have to go through, especially, you just you've accepted your, your new job out there, and all of a sudden, the entire country is is starting to shut down on and you mentioned that, all the casinos and hotels and stuff started to reopen at about June. So did you run into really any, any issues with that whole process of starting to reopen? Were there any big challenges that you had to consider with that whole process kind of starting up again?
David Scamehorn 09:21
Sure. From a business perspective, right, we had a lot of challenges, so we had to understand. So the guidance overall was keeping both our guests and our employee base safe. And so that meant a lot of COVID testing that we offered on site. We were a testing hub early on. More recently, we've been tracking vaccination status for employees, encouraging them to become vaccinated and making certain that in various more high touch and critical areas of the business we're vaccinations are more or less required that we're here into that we make changes To support the use of masks across the facility, which in a casino setting is a little bit runs counter to sort of natural inclinations of our security teams. To do that, we had a smoking section in the casino, which we removed completely, because it wasn't compatible with what we were trying to do. From that standpoint, we had to reduce capacity, well, close initially, and then open with greatly reduced capacity, all the restaurants, associated businesses. I think the only thing that really stayed open were our convenience store gas stations through the pandemic. And so, an ongoing series of challenges, really a lot of primary focus of the leadership team was around, what is our policy? How do we reopen things like our concert hall, we've just started to do that recently dealt with 100% vaccinations required for the employees that are working in those venues, things like that, those are tricky decisions to have to make. Because you've got a lot of different political points of view in terms of what's the right course of action. And so trying to navigate through that and keep everybody safe is has been extremely challenging. And then professionally, more person personally, for my situation, I was trying to build out a new team. So we're trying to hire people in the casino industry, and Oneida is no exception, historically has been, has not been really open to the idea of remote employees. And so we've had a bit of a culture shift there where, for example, we have remote data analysts on my team, some of the other teams will rotate, they'll have, you know, some days where they're off sites, most of the days, maybe they'll be on site, both to reduce risk of exposure for COVID, and so forth. But also, I think, a growing realization that a more flexible work schedule for certain areas of the business is beneficial in terms of retention recruitment. And that, actually is another area where we've had some challenges like most industries, just in labor shortages. And so we did not have the ability to, to keep full staff, for example, in housekeeping in our hotels, so we had to have a lot of rooms, sort of off the market because of that. Now, recently, we've taken some steps to improve our offering in the marketplace and be more competitive. And so now we started to see the benefits that can get in all of our rooms open again.
Stuart Scamehorn 12:44
Well, you did just take my my question that I was about to ask you and answered it before I had a chance to. So I guess instead, I will pivot back a little bit in the conversation. You obviously you mentioned, you have two wonderful sons that attend the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. So how has, how has COVID impacted a kind of, how you keep in touch with them, and just kind of how you you communicate with friends and family in general?
David Scamehorn 13:29
Sure. And so, I think, you know, from the sort of broadest perspective, I think people have become more comfortable using technology to stay in touch. So a lot more sort of FaceTime and Zoom calls with people, different groups that may be used to meet face to face or meeting remotely. So my wife is a member of a weaving guild here in New York, they finally did have their first face to face meeting, but for the first year that she was a member, was exclusively online. And so those interactions requires more effort, really, to continue to stay connected to people. And it also cuts down on the frequency of state and will travel in general. So our ability to get back to Wisconsin, Minnesota to see people has been restricted. One example, sort of over the last year's holiday season, unfortunately, Stewart you and your mom contracted COVID And we had planned to have the off to New York for an extended sort of visit. We had to curtail those plans. I was actually back in Minnesota with your brother and we had two of us upstairs two of us downstairs, kind of doing whatever we could to sort of execute an in house quarantine system which worked. Henry and I did not get COVID and, but that certainly is wrench in whatever plans that we had made sort of for the December, January timeframe. And so some of it is just being willing, we're understanding and accepting that you can't, you don't have as much control over these situations as maybe you used to have. And just, you know, being more accepting of people reaching out and saying, Hey, I've got this availability, will this work and really trying to make the effort to connect with people in those terms.
Stuart Scamehorn 15:33
Yeah, that I'm speaking from personal experience that, that split kind of January period, where we were trying to figure out how, or if we were even going to be able to go out to New York was, was definitely a challenge. And so, kind of with that, I'm trying to think of how to how to word my next, my question here. I guess...
David Scamehorn 16:17
Go ahead, or...
Stuart Scamehorn 16:17
No, you go ahead. I'm still kind of...
David Scamehorn 16:19
I was just going to expand a little bit on some of the sort of impacts to the relationships and sort of our planning, while you're thinking of the question. But, you know, we had a trip planned for March of 2020, as a family to go to Iceland, that got canceled, though it was a little bit iffy if they were going to actually cancel it or not, because COVID was just sort of ramping up. And nobody really understood the seriousness of it. We have since decided to attempt to do that, again, in 2022. But now, with the new variants out there, who knows what the availability of those trips is going to look like, we have, again, trips planned back and forth a little bit to Wisconsin to see relatives and bring you and your brother out to New York for the holiday period and some activities that you guys have planned. But again, that's all sort of up in the air with with, you know, depending on what the situation is with the virus, and so you learn that you really need to pay attention almost on a daily basis to know what's going on with the virus. And what are the new developments? And what are the implications in for your plans. And so, I mentioned earlier that when I was traveling back and forth between Minnesota and New York, that I ran into a lot of quarantine situations while the quarantine status for New York was changing daily. And so it was all based on a trailing 10 day period of number of cases and so forth. And so there were a couple of times where I went to Minnesota under the assumption that I would not have to quarantine when I returned. But then by the time I got back to New York, they had changed the quarantine rules, and I was under quarantine. So difficult lessons learned around just how flexible you have to be. And then, but then also taking it seriously because you know, I one of the trips I flew back on and there was a requirement that you fill out a form for the state government indicating you're traveling where you work, while I was on a flight that came directly in from states that that were under the travel ban and a number of people just dismissed out right the fact that they needed to fill the form out and had planned to go out to dinner and stuff like that, and I I was playing into a 14 day quarantine. So there is a lot of frustration, I guess it's probably the best work around the fact that not everybody is taking it as seriously as they need to work in a consistent way. And so you feel like if you play by those rules, you're penalizing yourself compared to what other people are doing and getting away with. But at the same time, you understand, you look at those numbers that you quoted 48 million cases earlier that if we don't get as many people as possible to adhere to the advice that's given, we're all going to be in much rougher shape going forward.
Stuart Scamehorn 19:19
Yeah, absolutely. And kind of earlier on in that you mentioned, some some stuff about how we've got a couple of new variants popping up. Obviously, the Delta variant has been on kind of a big one that everyone's heard about, and then the the Omicron variant more recently popping up in South, South Africa. Are you worried at all about whether or not you guys will have to close your casinos and hotels again, or are you worried about potentially, these these new variants kind of becoming another big outbreak similar to how COVID was initially?
David Scamehorn 20:10
Sure, yeah, no. And we talked about that, both here within the business, but also for our personal plans and kind of things that we're planning, you know, as a family. Well, and I think just today now, there's, they detected a case in the US of the newest variant, and so yeah, it's definitely here, it's coming. Just trying to get a sense for how much more serious it is than the Delta variant and things like that will rely on the health professionals to give us some guidance there. The one thing that that I do feel, I think, is an organization speaking about my job, that we've been through the one shutdown, we understand what it takes to shut down and reopen successfully. And so from it's not that fear of the unknown, or Oh, my goodness, we've never done something like this before. We don't have that we talked about all well, if this spreads, and we get guidance from the CDC, that that we need to shut down, we'll shut down. And we know how to do that and navigate through it, it's not what anybody wants to do. But if it comes to that, we will absolutely take those measures to keep everybody as safe as possible. So, yes, there's some concern about it. But it's one of those things, again, it's acknowledging that you can only control what you can control and that's being prepared and informed, I think, for the situation.
Stuart Scamehorn 21:37
And I think that's a, that's a very good way to, to kind of put, that's a that's a really good way of phrasing kind of a good mindset to have, during this whole thing on. In kind of touching on that you, you talked a lot about different concerns, in stuff relating to the pandemic, what, what has concerned you the most, kind of through this entire thing?
David Scamehorn 22:09
Oh, yeah, that's a little bit of a far reaching question I you know, mostly it's keeping people that I'm close to safe. So you and your brother, as college students, you get exposed to a lot of stuff, I mean, that's a constant source of concern. My parents are both almost 80 years old. So certainly not a demographic that, that you would ever want to be exposed to the virus. Fortunately, they have adopted a very strong approach to it. But you know, the virus is relentless in some of these situations. And so in terms of things that I worry about, certainly, keeping loved ones safe is at the top of the list, not as concerned necessarily about a job, you know, very confident that that will sort itself out, and that Oneida Nation will will do the right thing by their employees. And so it's not, you know, I'm not going to be asked to do something that's dangerous, for example. And that's a good thing for me to be able to say, that's not necessarily true, I think, for everybody. And so I guess I would have concern, in general, for people that have public facing jobs, who may feel compelled to have to work even though it may not be safe. And so health care workers, for example, teachers, all of those people, law enforcement, fire departments, you know, that that's definitely a concern. And then you think about the vaccination opportunities that we have here in this country compared to what they might have in other countries. And I guess they have a lot of concern worldwide, you know, what this is going to end up doing, you know, to people who don't have the opportunity to get vaccinated and be able to take some of the preventative measures that, that we sort of, we're not only accustomed to having that as an option here, we're, you know, as a society, we've got certain people who've decided not to do that, which is difficult to justify, I think, in terms of trying to keep everybody safe and unhealthy.
Stuart Scamehorn 24:26
Yeah, absolutely. And you, you did kind of tiptoe on on this next question a little bit about your kind of questioning kind of what the future kind of holds for, kind of on the more global scale but kind of bring that back towards the community and everything. How do you think this pandemic has kind of transformed, just kind of going forward, how you're gonna interact with your family, your friends, and just kind of the community in general? Yeah, that makes, that does make a lot of sense. And then, you mentioned it, I kind of in that, in answering that question. And you've mentioned it a couple other times, I'm, you've mentioned remote work, quite a quite a bunch, and kind of, we're probably looking at trending more towards that in the future. And obviously, when you were in quarantine, when you were in the process of moving out to New York, you had to do some of your work remotely. What was that like, kind of having to start a new job, but also having to balance working remotely, with kind of learning everybody's names and kind of getting used to this new environment?
David Scamehorn 25:13
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, since I think we're still kind of in the middle of it to a certain extent, you know, what, what doe, everybody talks about all When do we get back to normal? And I think it's not really getting back to what normal was like. Yeah, in February of 2020, it's whatever the new norm normality is going to be. And I, and I do think it has forever shifted some of the norms around things like I talked about remote work is an interesting one, which really restructures some of our communities, so you see an exodus of people from your huge urban centers, to more rural settings. Which, yeah, I think that's a permanent shift in some of the economic drivers for people working in these really dense sort of higher cost areas. So that is going to be, I think, interesting to watch over the next 10 years or so as people sort of shift around. And then the other, the other big trend that's out there is just sort of the employment situation and the number of jobs that are available. And sort of, you know, a lot of people reevaluating what's important to them in their life. And I do think the, the pandemic has been responsible for that, you know, you had a big period of shutdown, where some people weren't working. And so they were at home, doing a lot of sort of introspective types of activities, hobbies, interacting with other people, loved ones, and so forth, and decided, hey, I don't want to give certain portions of this up, to commute into a city center for a job, you know, more traditional type of thing. And so and you've got some broader demographic trends at work. Just the huge number of baby boomers were all nearing retirement. That are some of these shifts may have occurred over time anyway. But I think the pandemic has just accelerated all of that. And sort of allowed people you know, it's been a catalyst, I guess, to really see some of that change come through. Yeah, that is an it has been an interesting process. And so my role. First of all, the job that I took was really to establish a new capability in hiring a new team. So we had to interview people. And in some cases, we interviewed and hired people without actually having a face to face interview. That's very different. I've worked in a number of industries and companies over the years, including most recently, where my boss was in Belgium, and I was in Minneapolis. And so our communication, there was a limited window daily to communicate. So it's very, from my standpoint, I was pretty comfortable with the idea that I didn't need to be face to face with everybody that's involved in the work. But the nature of analytics is highly collaborative. And so there, we've taken steps to kind of try to offset the fact that now we have people who aren't physically in New York working on the team, which has been great because we've been able to add people to the team with some scarce skill sets. But what we've done, the one thing that we've done that's worked really well is we have a daily touch base meeting. And the once a week we review projects with that we have a little bit longer time, but otherwise it's it's scheduled just for 15 minutes on the other four days of the week. Everybody gets on, and we just say hey, you know, what are people thinking about? Any burning questions? What happened in the business or any, you know, all topics are open. It's really to try to replace a little bit of the hallway conversation. you would have in a more traditional environment. And I think it's been very helpful and valuable. I don't know that it completely replaces some of the things where two people might be talking about a project and a third person happens to walk by and hears it and jumps in and helps you lose those types of interactions with remote structure. And so definitely there are trade offs. But I think it's just a reality. And you have to figure out how to make it work, as opposed to saying, Oh, no, we're going to go back to 100% in the office, traditional schedule kind of thing. And like I said, I, there's been pressures in that direction, for a number of years growing in this COVID situation is really just accelerated that.
Stuart Scamehorn 30:54
Yeah, and you just kind of building off of that, do you think that companies in general, or I guess, Oneida Nations Enterprise specifically will won't really ever go back to a fully in person workplace? I know, you had talked a bit about how there were some pushes before COVID, to kind of go more online. But do you think you'll ever kind of go back to that, that normal of, that sort of traditional workplace?
David Scamehorn 31:32
No, I don't, both for us here and in general, I don't think so. I mean, every job is different. And so some jobs, certainly, if you're guest facing and are in on our properties, and things like that, you can't do that remotely. So depending on the role, and the types of things that you need to do to get the work done, you know, some jobs support a remote model, and some don't. But in general, I just don't see, I think it's an increasing expectation from people who work in in certain fields that they would be able to at least have a flexible schedule. So be able to work occasionally, remotely, maybe in person some of the time, or fully remote from a remote location. So the ability look at Silicon Valley with the extreme high cost of living, and a lot of people choosing to live elsewhere and remote in to those jobs. I don't see that going away, anytime soon. But at the same time, all of this is, you know, collectively as a, as a society, I guess we're figuring this out as we go. And so who knows, five years from now, maybe the technology will be such with transportation breakthroughs, maybe that we can get together a lot easier. Yeah, I don't know. But I think for now, or for the foreseeable future, I think some combination of remote and in place, employment is definitely going to be there.
Stuart Scamehorn 33:00
Yeah, and then just building off that even more in kind of a bit more, more broadly. Do you think there's any other things that just kind of generally, as a society used to be the, the big normal thing, that kind of as a result of COVID, you think is just gonna kind of disappear?
David Scamehorn 33:31
Well, I think everybody is watching, we reintroduce concerts and big sporting events where people are in person and shoulder to shoulder and without masks cheering, and all that. And it seems like people really miss that experience. And so I think to the extent that, you know, the status of the virus supports people congregating like that I think those types of things will definitely come back. But I don't know that you will necessarily see, you know, return to maybe some of the types of travel that that people used to do, particularly for business, I think may or may not, you know, fully return, there just isn't the need for the 20,000 person software conference for software tool, just to pick on on one instance, you can do a lot of that. Those software companies were very adept at presenting their material and getting their stuff out via electronic means during the pandemic. And so people may think twice about, you know, just the risks associated with that are the cost even associated with doing something like that going forward. So there may be some shifts in those types of industries. Travel in general I think it's gonna take a long time before we kind of figure out what the new normal looks like, around international. You know, vacation travel around business travel, particularly international business travel, just from not even necessarily due to risk, I think is assuming that at some point, the COVID risk becomes minimal, it's really going to be more from a time and cost perspective. People will make different decisions going forward than maybe what they made previously, both in their personal lives and professionally.
Stuart Scamehorn 35:45
I yeah, I, I agree, I think that, I think everything you said there was, was pretty, pretty spot on. I guess, kind of taking a little bit of a of a turn, you did mention transportation, in everything, kind of in that a little in your answer to that question. And so kind of tying into transportation very, very loosely is obviously, those are those are impacted, I think, especially public transportation would be impacted by local governments and everything. And so do you think that, I guess, do you, what was kind of your, your experience with the, the local government, when you were moving out to New York with how you, when I'm kind of, I'm kind of mumbling over my words, but you had mentioned earlier that when you were flying out there, you had to fill out a, a little, the little form that was done like Oh, you're coming from a state that is high risk, then you have to, you have to quarantine? Or, kind of what was your general, kind of experience more with that. And I know, you'd also kind of mentioned that some people just kind of disregarded that, and that they had planned Oh, yeah, we're gonna go have a steak dinner after landing, did that frustrate you when you were hearing stuff like that?
David Scamehorn 37:33
Yeah. Absolutely, you're frustrated by that. Because, first of all, you know, that's the wrong thing for them to do from a health standpoint, but then why why do I have to go sit in an apartment for two weeks, while they're out? You know, browsing around? Didn't seem, you know, equitable. Definitely. And, you know, the local government responses have been, you know, it varies, obviously, in some, the county, in sort of more local village and town government, governmental units have all been trying to figure out in charter path through the whole virus thing as best they can. Our Town government out here in New York, for example, has done a lot of Zoom meetings and tried to make things accessible for people. But at the same time, it's a big shift in the way people were accustomed to receiving information. And so there was some frustration in the community that maybe things were pushed through, you know, through during this COVID time period, that if they had been brought up during a more normal sort of sequence of communications that would have just received more scrutiny and input. But going forward, then, you know, how do you sort of keep the good aspects of the new things that we've tried, as well as bring back the critical elements of what we couldn't do for a while because of COVID. And that's the challenge, kind of across the board. And I guess the biggest challenge both at the local and state and federal level really is just, you know, equity in terms of, you know, our quality, I guess, rather, in terms of how people are treated and in the response to whatever the rules or regulations are, that are put out being we all need to adhere to the advice and there needs to be because people don't always respond the way they should there needs to be some sort of mechanism to enforce. So that that's a challenge.
Stuart Scamehorn 39:36
Yeah, for sure. And kind of, I don't want to take up, obviously too much of your time. And so I do have one kind of last combo question that is tying way back to the start of the conversation. You had mentioned that kind of around where you, you moved, there's a lot of good hiking trails, and everything like that. And I would presume that means that you've been hiking on on a lot of them. So I guess, have you picked up any kind of, kinda new hobbies or anything as a result of COVID? And then also kind of tying into that, how do you, how do you think COVID has really impacted people's health?
David Scamehorn 40:35
Now, let me start with, I mean, I think everybody's, everybody's been had an impact or personal journey around how do you stay healthy and in shape, and everything during COVID is really challenging. You know, you can't go to the gym, you can't do some of the things maybe you were accustomed to doing. In my case, I was, you know, spending a lot of time driving back and forth, and everything kind of got muddled up that way. So you get out of whatever your routines were, and you're in your serve regimens around, being healthy. And so that is a challenge that people have addressed in different ways. You saw huge booms, sort of in the home, health equipment industry, certainly being able to get outside, you know, and participate in hiking or whatever the those activities are, has been an important way to both stay safe and get some exercise. So I think from that standpoint, you know, it's been a while, it's certainly an ongoing challenge, I think, both for me personally, and for most people, just how do you make certain that you're taking care of yourself in a situation where you're trying to adjust in a lot of other different ways, which creates a lot of stress, and I guess, the bigger or another significant area of impact is just on mental health for people, I mean, you get this constant sort of stress, that overlays everything around, you know, people that I know, people or my family or people could be exposed to this at any time, and there's, you don't really have a lot of control over it. And so that I think has just given everybody a layer an extra layer of stress in their lives, which doesn't know, which probably translates into unhealthy behaviors and, you know, additional things that they need to deal with.
Stuart Scamehorn 42:31
Well, that I, I, that was a very great answer. And I think that this is kind of a good place to, to kind of end it off, I think we've been going for about 45 minutes, kind of 40 45 minutes there. I don't want to push you for too long about your answers. You've answered a lot of really good questions that I've had for you. So I would just, I would like to thank you for participating in this, this oral history.
David Scamehorn 43:15
Great. Well, thank you, Stuart, for inviting me to participate. It's been fun. It's always good to kind of step back from the day to day and think about things like this. So hopefully this will be useful for people and very much appreciate the opportunity.
Alright, so today's date is December 1 2021. The current time is 1:52pm Central Time. My name is Stuart Scamehorn, and I am here interviewing Dave Scamehorn. And so the current COVID statistics for the United States are the case total is at 48,377,000. In the current Wisconsin case total as of November 30, the new confirmed cases at a seven day average is 2722. Alright, so, Dave, if you would mind stating your name, including spelling, and then any demographic information you wish to share with the study such as race, ethnicity, age and gender identity?
David Scamehorn 01:10
Sure, my name is David Scamehorn, the last name is SCAMEHORN, I'm 55 years old, white male. And live currently at 8374 Salt Springs Road in Manlius, New York.
Stuart Scamehorn 01:29
Awesome, and then I kind of jumped over this, but this is being recorded as a part of the Western Wisconsin COVID archive as well as the Journal of the Plague Year archive, I send you over those two release forms, I don't know how much you you took a look at both of those, if you would like me to send you the links to check those out later, I would be more than happy to.
David Scamehorn 02:00
I reviewed both of those and signed both of those release forms.
Stuart Scamehorn 02:05
Awesome. All right. And then jumping back into the background questions. What are kind of the primary things that you do on a day to day basis.
David Scamehorn 02:17
So I'm employed at the Oneida Nations Enterprises as the Vice President for Strategic Analytics and Revenue Optimization. So my day to day activities really, primarily involve going to and from work. From a commuting standpoint, I travel about 30 minute drive from Manlius over to Verona, New York, and then, you know, miscellaneous, sort of required shopping, you know, to support a household. My wife and I are residing now in New York full time. And then we both enjoy being outdoors. So going out and hiking, enjoying some of the, the parks and so forth that are in the area.
Stuart Scamehorn 03:02
Yeah, awesome. And then, you did kind of touch a bit on that there, but, just kind of what is what is it like to live out in New York, compared to like Wisconsin, or Minnesota.
David Scamehorn 03:20
So, I've been, I've been living in New York now for about a year and a half. And prior to that lived in Minnesota for over 30 years and grew up in Wisconsin. And so the biggest contrast is sort of we're moving out to New York, you know, during the pandemic, was just a noticeable difference in attitudes about COVID. And about precautions that were people were taking, and just the conversations that people would have at a restaurant or at a supermarket and so forth, and so much more aggressive efforts, both in terms of vaccination rates, but particularly in use of masks. Across the board, so remarked on this a number of times, sort of as the mask use, effort was sort of ramping up that in New York, everybody was wearing a mask all the time, and then I would travel back to Minnesota and the opposite was true. If you wore a mask into a Home Depot or a restaurant, you usually were the outlier. And so that was the biggest real difference that that encountered sort of, you know, in a day to day basis.
Stuart Scamehorn 04:34
Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned kind of in there moving out toward like, during the pandemic and everything. Would you like to kind of elaborate a bit more on kind of what that whole process was like, what your experience was with that?
David Scamehorn 04:53
Yeah, so prior to the pandemics so in the January February timeframe of 2020, I was looking for a new job had had to roll in Minnesota, and was contacted by a recruiter for Oneida Nation. And my wife and I decided that we really liked the area with a lot of the natural sort of scenery, and parks and so forth, and upstate New York. And the job itself was very attractive. And so we decided to come out for an interview. And this was in the middle of March. And it was really the week we came out the casino, everything was operating fully, nobody was there were no precautions or masks. Really COVID, there was some conversation about it at the time, but nobody really quite knew much about it, or what would you know if this was going to be a thing or not. So I went through that process, accepted the job offer, got back to Minnesota, and by that weekend, that was when all the sports functions shut down. Basically, everything shut down within a week of that trip out out to New York. So very interesting. Starting a job, where a business is more or less shut down, was certainly much more difficult than anything I've done previously, professionally, just because the lack of the ability to meet people and interact with them face to face, everybody had to learn how to use Zoom and other sort of, you know, remote communications tools to be able to handle those interactions. And it's easier if you have a basis with somebody where you've met them and work with them closely previously, it's a lot easier to use something like zoom. Whereas if you're meeting somebody for the first time, you know, it just leaves a lot to be desired. And just in terms of trying to read their body language and some of those types of queues. So that was a challenge. And then we got into the business here at Oneida, hotels and casinos, everything was really shut down, beginning there in March, and then reopened in June. And so in the middle of June, I actually then moved out into an apartment in New York, we had my two sons, both at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, they had some remote learning things in place. And so combination, we decided that we do a slow motion transition and move out to New York, which really we only completed in the last couple of months here. So went out to New York living in an apartment. In the immediately some of the challenges were New York had a very aggressive quarantine policy in place, so every time I would go back to Minnesota and then come back to New York, I either had a 10 or 14 day quarantine period, which was challenging, I learned how to use Instacart to get groceries delivered, for example, because I was not, you know, the letter of the law there, you're not allowed to leave your residence for any reason. So trying to navigate through that. Fortunately, I had very strong support from my employer through that, which certainly made all the difference, but still very challenging, and just, you know, just a different level of stress on top of what would already be a stressful situation in terms of across country relocation.
Stuart Scamehorn 08:33
Yeah, and that, yeah, that's definitely a, it sounds like that would be a very challenging kind of ordeal to have to go through, especially, you just you've accepted your, your new job out there, and all of a sudden, the entire country is is starting to shut down on and you mentioned that, all the casinos and hotels and stuff started to reopen at about June. So did you run into really any, any issues with that whole process of starting to reopen? Were there any big challenges that you had to consider with that whole process kind of starting up again?
David Scamehorn 09:21
Sure. From a business perspective, right, we had a lot of challenges, so we had to understand. So the guidance overall was keeping both our guests and our employee base safe. And so that meant a lot of COVID testing that we offered on site. We were a testing hub early on. More recently, we've been tracking vaccination status for employees, encouraging them to become vaccinated and making certain that in various more high touch and critical areas of the business we're vaccinations are more or less required that we're here into that we make changes To support the use of masks across the facility, which in a casino setting is a little bit runs counter to sort of natural inclinations of our security teams. To do that, we had a smoking section in the casino, which we removed completely, because it wasn't compatible with what we were trying to do. From that standpoint, we had to reduce capacity, well, close initially, and then open with greatly reduced capacity, all the restaurants, associated businesses. I think the only thing that really stayed open were our convenience store gas stations through the pandemic. And so, an ongoing series of challenges, really a lot of primary focus of the leadership team was around, what is our policy? How do we reopen things like our concert hall, we've just started to do that recently dealt with 100% vaccinations required for the employees that are working in those venues, things like that, those are tricky decisions to have to make. Because you've got a lot of different political points of view in terms of what's the right course of action. And so trying to navigate through that and keep everybody safe is has been extremely challenging. And then professionally, more person personally, for my situation, I was trying to build out a new team. So we're trying to hire people in the casino industry, and Oneida is no exception, historically has been, has not been really open to the idea of remote employees. And so we've had a bit of a culture shift there where, for example, we have remote data analysts on my team, some of the other teams will rotate, they'll have, you know, some days where they're off sites, most of the days, maybe they'll be on site, both to reduce risk of exposure for COVID, and so forth. But also, I think, a growing realization that a more flexible work schedule for certain areas of the business is beneficial in terms of retention recruitment. And that, actually is another area where we've had some challenges like most industries, just in labor shortages. And so we did not have the ability to, to keep full staff, for example, in housekeeping in our hotels, so we had to have a lot of rooms, sort of off the market because of that. Now, recently, we've taken some steps to improve our offering in the marketplace and be more competitive. And so now we started to see the benefits that can get in all of our rooms open again.
Stuart Scamehorn 12:44
Well, you did just take my my question that I was about to ask you and answered it before I had a chance to. So I guess instead, I will pivot back a little bit in the conversation. You obviously you mentioned, you have two wonderful sons that attend the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. So how has, how has COVID impacted a kind of, how you keep in touch with them, and just kind of how you you communicate with friends and family in general?
David Scamehorn 13:29
Sure. And so, I think, you know, from the sort of broadest perspective, I think people have become more comfortable using technology to stay in touch. So a lot more sort of FaceTime and Zoom calls with people, different groups that may be used to meet face to face or meeting remotely. So my wife is a member of a weaving guild here in New York, they finally did have their first face to face meeting, but for the first year that she was a member, was exclusively online. And so those interactions requires more effort, really, to continue to stay connected to people. And it also cuts down on the frequency of state and will travel in general. So our ability to get back to Wisconsin, Minnesota to see people has been restricted. One example, sort of over the last year's holiday season, unfortunately, Stewart you and your mom contracted COVID And we had planned to have the off to New York for an extended sort of visit. We had to curtail those plans. I was actually back in Minnesota with your brother and we had two of us upstairs two of us downstairs, kind of doing whatever we could to sort of execute an in house quarantine system which worked. Henry and I did not get COVID and, but that certainly is wrench in whatever plans that we had made sort of for the December, January timeframe. And so some of it is just being willing, we're understanding and accepting that you can't, you don't have as much control over these situations as maybe you used to have. And just, you know, being more accepting of people reaching out and saying, Hey, I've got this availability, will this work and really trying to make the effort to connect with people in those terms.
Stuart Scamehorn 15:33
Yeah, that I'm speaking from personal experience that, that split kind of January period, where we were trying to figure out how, or if we were even going to be able to go out to New York was, was definitely a challenge. And so, kind of with that, I'm trying to think of how to how to word my next, my question here. I guess...
David Scamehorn 16:17
Go ahead, or...
Stuart Scamehorn 16:17
No, you go ahead. I'm still kind of...
David Scamehorn 16:19
I was just going to expand a little bit on some of the sort of impacts to the relationships and sort of our planning, while you're thinking of the question. But, you know, we had a trip planned for March of 2020, as a family to go to Iceland, that got canceled, though it was a little bit iffy if they were going to actually cancel it or not, because COVID was just sort of ramping up. And nobody really understood the seriousness of it. We have since decided to attempt to do that, again, in 2022. But now, with the new variants out there, who knows what the availability of those trips is going to look like, we have, again, trips planned back and forth a little bit to Wisconsin to see relatives and bring you and your brother out to New York for the holiday period and some activities that you guys have planned. But again, that's all sort of up in the air with with, you know, depending on what the situation is with the virus, and so you learn that you really need to pay attention almost on a daily basis to know what's going on with the virus. And what are the new developments? And what are the implications in for your plans. And so, I mentioned earlier that when I was traveling back and forth between Minnesota and New York, that I ran into a lot of quarantine situations while the quarantine status for New York was changing daily. And so it was all based on a trailing 10 day period of number of cases and so forth. And so there were a couple of times where I went to Minnesota under the assumption that I would not have to quarantine when I returned. But then by the time I got back to New York, they had changed the quarantine rules, and I was under quarantine. So difficult lessons learned around just how flexible you have to be. And then, but then also taking it seriously because you know, I one of the trips I flew back on and there was a requirement that you fill out a form for the state government indicating you're traveling where you work, while I was on a flight that came directly in from states that that were under the travel ban and a number of people just dismissed out right the fact that they needed to fill the form out and had planned to go out to dinner and stuff like that, and I I was playing into a 14 day quarantine. So there is a lot of frustration, I guess it's probably the best work around the fact that not everybody is taking it as seriously as they need to work in a consistent way. And so you feel like if you play by those rules, you're penalizing yourself compared to what other people are doing and getting away with. But at the same time, you understand, you look at those numbers that you quoted 48 million cases earlier that if we don't get as many people as possible to adhere to the advice that's given, we're all going to be in much rougher shape going forward.
Stuart Scamehorn 19:19
Yeah, absolutely. And kind of earlier on in that you mentioned, some some stuff about how we've got a couple of new variants popping up. Obviously, the Delta variant has been on kind of a big one that everyone's heard about, and then the the Omicron variant more recently popping up in South, South Africa. Are you worried at all about whether or not you guys will have to close your casinos and hotels again, or are you worried about potentially, these these new variants kind of becoming another big outbreak similar to how COVID was initially?
David Scamehorn 20:10
Sure, yeah, no. And we talked about that, both here within the business, but also for our personal plans and kind of things that we're planning, you know, as a family. Well, and I think just today now, there's, they detected a case in the US of the newest variant, and so yeah, it's definitely here, it's coming. Just trying to get a sense for how much more serious it is than the Delta variant and things like that will rely on the health professionals to give us some guidance there. The one thing that that I do feel, I think, is an organization speaking about my job, that we've been through the one shutdown, we understand what it takes to shut down and reopen successfully. And so from it's not that fear of the unknown, or Oh, my goodness, we've never done something like this before. We don't have that we talked about all well, if this spreads, and we get guidance from the CDC, that that we need to shut down, we'll shut down. And we know how to do that and navigate through it, it's not what anybody wants to do. But if it comes to that, we will absolutely take those measures to keep everybody as safe as possible. So, yes, there's some concern about it. But it's one of those things, again, it's acknowledging that you can only control what you can control and that's being prepared and informed, I think, for the situation.
Stuart Scamehorn 21:37
And I think that's a, that's a very good way to, to kind of put, that's a that's a really good way of phrasing kind of a good mindset to have, during this whole thing on. In kind of touching on that you, you talked a lot about different concerns, in stuff relating to the pandemic, what, what has concerned you the most, kind of through this entire thing?
David Scamehorn 22:09
Oh, yeah, that's a little bit of a far reaching question I you know, mostly it's keeping people that I'm close to safe. So you and your brother, as college students, you get exposed to a lot of stuff, I mean, that's a constant source of concern. My parents are both almost 80 years old. So certainly not a demographic that, that you would ever want to be exposed to the virus. Fortunately, they have adopted a very strong approach to it. But you know, the virus is relentless in some of these situations. And so in terms of things that I worry about, certainly, keeping loved ones safe is at the top of the list, not as concerned necessarily about a job, you know, very confident that that will sort itself out, and that Oneida Nation will will do the right thing by their employees. And so it's not, you know, I'm not going to be asked to do something that's dangerous, for example. And that's a good thing for me to be able to say, that's not necessarily true, I think, for everybody. And so I guess I would have concern, in general, for people that have public facing jobs, who may feel compelled to have to work even though it may not be safe. And so health care workers, for example, teachers, all of those people, law enforcement, fire departments, you know, that that's definitely a concern. And then you think about the vaccination opportunities that we have here in this country compared to what they might have in other countries. And I guess they have a lot of concern worldwide, you know, what this is going to end up doing, you know, to people who don't have the opportunity to get vaccinated and be able to take some of the preventative measures that, that we sort of, we're not only accustomed to having that as an option here, we're, you know, as a society, we've got certain people who've decided not to do that, which is difficult to justify, I think, in terms of trying to keep everybody safe and unhealthy.
Stuart Scamehorn 24:26
Yeah, absolutely. And you, you did kind of tiptoe on on this next question a little bit about your kind of questioning kind of what the future kind of holds for, kind of on the more global scale but kind of bring that back towards the community and everything. How do you think this pandemic has kind of transformed, just kind of going forward, how you're gonna interact with your family, your friends, and just kind of the community in general? Yeah, that makes, that does make a lot of sense. And then, you mentioned it, I kind of in that, in answering that question. And you've mentioned it a couple other times, I'm, you've mentioned remote work, quite a quite a bunch, and kind of, we're probably looking at trending more towards that in the future. And obviously, when you were in quarantine, when you were in the process of moving out to New York, you had to do some of your work remotely. What was that like, kind of having to start a new job, but also having to balance working remotely, with kind of learning everybody's names and kind of getting used to this new environment?
David Scamehorn 25:13
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, since I think we're still kind of in the middle of it to a certain extent, you know, what, what doe, everybody talks about all When do we get back to normal? And I think it's not really getting back to what normal was like. Yeah, in February of 2020, it's whatever the new norm normality is going to be. And I, and I do think it has forever shifted some of the norms around things like I talked about remote work is an interesting one, which really restructures some of our communities, so you see an exodus of people from your huge urban centers, to more rural settings. Which, yeah, I think that's a permanent shift in some of the economic drivers for people working in these really dense sort of higher cost areas. So that is going to be, I think, interesting to watch over the next 10 years or so as people sort of shift around. And then the other, the other big trend that's out there is just sort of the employment situation and the number of jobs that are available. And sort of, you know, a lot of people reevaluating what's important to them in their life. And I do think the, the pandemic has been responsible for that, you know, you had a big period of shutdown, where some people weren't working. And so they were at home, doing a lot of sort of introspective types of activities, hobbies, interacting with other people, loved ones, and so forth, and decided, hey, I don't want to give certain portions of this up, to commute into a city center for a job, you know, more traditional type of thing. And so and you've got some broader demographic trends at work. Just the huge number of baby boomers were all nearing retirement. That are some of these shifts may have occurred over time anyway. But I think the pandemic has just accelerated all of that. And sort of allowed people you know, it's been a catalyst, I guess, to really see some of that change come through. Yeah, that is an it has been an interesting process. And so my role. First of all, the job that I took was really to establish a new capability in hiring a new team. So we had to interview people. And in some cases, we interviewed and hired people without actually having a face to face interview. That's very different. I've worked in a number of industries and companies over the years, including most recently, where my boss was in Belgium, and I was in Minneapolis. And so our communication, there was a limited window daily to communicate. So it's very, from my standpoint, I was pretty comfortable with the idea that I didn't need to be face to face with everybody that's involved in the work. But the nature of analytics is highly collaborative. And so there, we've taken steps to kind of try to offset the fact that now we have people who aren't physically in New York working on the team, which has been great because we've been able to add people to the team with some scarce skill sets. But what we've done, the one thing that we've done that's worked really well is we have a daily touch base meeting. And the once a week we review projects with that we have a little bit longer time, but otherwise it's it's scheduled just for 15 minutes on the other four days of the week. Everybody gets on, and we just say hey, you know, what are people thinking about? Any burning questions? What happened in the business or any, you know, all topics are open. It's really to try to replace a little bit of the hallway conversation. you would have in a more traditional environment. And I think it's been very helpful and valuable. I don't know that it completely replaces some of the things where two people might be talking about a project and a third person happens to walk by and hears it and jumps in and helps you lose those types of interactions with remote structure. And so definitely there are trade offs. But I think it's just a reality. And you have to figure out how to make it work, as opposed to saying, Oh, no, we're going to go back to 100% in the office, traditional schedule kind of thing. And like I said, I, there's been pressures in that direction, for a number of years growing in this COVID situation is really just accelerated that.
Stuart Scamehorn 30:54
Yeah, and you just kind of building off of that, do you think that companies in general, or I guess, Oneida Nations Enterprise specifically will won't really ever go back to a fully in person workplace? I know, you had talked a bit about how there were some pushes before COVID, to kind of go more online. But do you think you'll ever kind of go back to that, that normal of, that sort of traditional workplace?
David Scamehorn 31:32
No, I don't, both for us here and in general, I don't think so. I mean, every job is different. And so some jobs, certainly, if you're guest facing and are in on our properties, and things like that, you can't do that remotely. So depending on the role, and the types of things that you need to do to get the work done, you know, some jobs support a remote model, and some don't. But in general, I just don't see, I think it's an increasing expectation from people who work in in certain fields that they would be able to at least have a flexible schedule. So be able to work occasionally, remotely, maybe in person some of the time, or fully remote from a remote location. So the ability look at Silicon Valley with the extreme high cost of living, and a lot of people choosing to live elsewhere and remote in to those jobs. I don't see that going away, anytime soon. But at the same time, all of this is, you know, collectively as a, as a society, I guess we're figuring this out as we go. And so who knows, five years from now, maybe the technology will be such with transportation breakthroughs, maybe that we can get together a lot easier. Yeah, I don't know. But I think for now, or for the foreseeable future, I think some combination of remote and in place, employment is definitely going to be there.
Stuart Scamehorn 33:00
Yeah, and then just building off that even more in kind of a bit more, more broadly. Do you think there's any other things that just kind of generally, as a society used to be the, the big normal thing, that kind of as a result of COVID, you think is just gonna kind of disappear?
David Scamehorn 33:31
Well, I think everybody is watching, we reintroduce concerts and big sporting events where people are in person and shoulder to shoulder and without masks cheering, and all that. And it seems like people really miss that experience. And so I think to the extent that, you know, the status of the virus supports people congregating like that I think those types of things will definitely come back. But I don't know that you will necessarily see, you know, return to maybe some of the types of travel that that people used to do, particularly for business, I think may or may not, you know, fully return, there just isn't the need for the 20,000 person software conference for software tool, just to pick on on one instance, you can do a lot of that. Those software companies were very adept at presenting their material and getting their stuff out via electronic means during the pandemic. And so people may think twice about, you know, just the risks associated with that are the cost even associated with doing something like that going forward. So there may be some shifts in those types of industries. Travel in general I think it's gonna take a long time before we kind of figure out what the new normal looks like, around international. You know, vacation travel around business travel, particularly international business travel, just from not even necessarily due to risk, I think is assuming that at some point, the COVID risk becomes minimal, it's really going to be more from a time and cost perspective. People will make different decisions going forward than maybe what they made previously, both in their personal lives and professionally.
Stuart Scamehorn 35:45
I yeah, I, I agree, I think that, I think everything you said there was, was pretty, pretty spot on. I guess, kind of taking a little bit of a of a turn, you did mention transportation, in everything, kind of in that a little in your answer to that question. And so kind of tying into transportation very, very loosely is obviously, those are those are impacted, I think, especially public transportation would be impacted by local governments and everything. And so do you think that, I guess, do you, what was kind of your, your experience with the, the local government, when you were moving out to New York with how you, when I'm kind of, I'm kind of mumbling over my words, but you had mentioned earlier that when you were flying out there, you had to fill out a, a little, the little form that was done like Oh, you're coming from a state that is high risk, then you have to, you have to quarantine? Or, kind of what was your general, kind of experience more with that. And I know, you'd also kind of mentioned that some people just kind of disregarded that, and that they had planned Oh, yeah, we're gonna go have a steak dinner after landing, did that frustrate you when you were hearing stuff like that?
David Scamehorn 37:33
Yeah. Absolutely, you're frustrated by that. Because, first of all, you know, that's the wrong thing for them to do from a health standpoint, but then why why do I have to go sit in an apartment for two weeks, while they're out? You know, browsing around? Didn't seem, you know, equitable. Definitely. And, you know, the local government responses have been, you know, it varies, obviously, in some, the county, in sort of more local village and town government, governmental units have all been trying to figure out in charter path through the whole virus thing as best they can. Our Town government out here in New York, for example, has done a lot of Zoom meetings and tried to make things accessible for people. But at the same time, it's a big shift in the way people were accustomed to receiving information. And so there was some frustration in the community that maybe things were pushed through, you know, through during this COVID time period, that if they had been brought up during a more normal sort of sequence of communications that would have just received more scrutiny and input. But going forward, then, you know, how do you sort of keep the good aspects of the new things that we've tried, as well as bring back the critical elements of what we couldn't do for a while because of COVID. And that's the challenge, kind of across the board. And I guess the biggest challenge both at the local and state and federal level really is just, you know, equity in terms of, you know, our quality, I guess, rather, in terms of how people are treated and in the response to whatever the rules or regulations are, that are put out being we all need to adhere to the advice and there needs to be because people don't always respond the way they should there needs to be some sort of mechanism to enforce. So that that's a challenge.
Stuart Scamehorn 39:36
Yeah, for sure. And kind of, I don't want to take up, obviously too much of your time. And so I do have one kind of last combo question that is tying way back to the start of the conversation. You had mentioned that kind of around where you, you moved, there's a lot of good hiking trails, and everything like that. And I would presume that means that you've been hiking on on a lot of them. So I guess, have you picked up any kind of, kinda new hobbies or anything as a result of COVID? And then also kind of tying into that, how do you, how do you think COVID has really impacted people's health?
David Scamehorn 40:35
Now, let me start with, I mean, I think everybody's, everybody's been had an impact or personal journey around how do you stay healthy and in shape, and everything during COVID is really challenging. You know, you can't go to the gym, you can't do some of the things maybe you were accustomed to doing. In my case, I was, you know, spending a lot of time driving back and forth, and everything kind of got muddled up that way. So you get out of whatever your routines were, and you're in your serve regimens around, being healthy. And so that is a challenge that people have addressed in different ways. You saw huge booms, sort of in the home, health equipment industry, certainly being able to get outside, you know, and participate in hiking or whatever the those activities are, has been an important way to both stay safe and get some exercise. So I think from that standpoint, you know, it's been a while, it's certainly an ongoing challenge, I think, both for me personally, and for most people, just how do you make certain that you're taking care of yourself in a situation where you're trying to adjust in a lot of other different ways, which creates a lot of stress, and I guess, the bigger or another significant area of impact is just on mental health for people, I mean, you get this constant sort of stress, that overlays everything around, you know, people that I know, people or my family or people could be exposed to this at any time, and there's, you don't really have a lot of control over it. And so that I think has just given everybody a layer an extra layer of stress in their lives, which doesn't know, which probably translates into unhealthy behaviors and, you know, additional things that they need to deal with.
Stuart Scamehorn 42:31
Well, that I, I, that was a very great answer. And I think that this is kind of a good place to, to kind of end it off, I think we've been going for about 45 minutes, kind of 40 45 minutes there. I don't want to push you for too long about your answers. You've answered a lot of really good questions that I've had for you. So I would just, I would like to thank you for participating in this, this oral history.
David Scamehorn 43:15
Great. Well, thank you, Stuart, for inviting me to participate. It's been fun. It's always good to kind of step back from the day to day and think about things like this. So hopefully this will be useful for people and very much appreciate the opportunity.