All the time I have people come in to work wearing a mask, which is fine normally, good for them, but they are wearing them on their chin, chin diaper style. Not covering up anything. Or at best just their mouth, sometimes. Nobody is making these people wear a mask anymore, so why are they doing it at all if they are just going to do it wrong? Is it an attempt at a political statement? A lack of education? I end up baffled for a while every time I see one of these people.
I honestly don’t understand why wearing a mask seem such a big deal for a lot of people.
From where I live, people wear masks are pretty common, when they are sick, when they go to congested locations (trains, buses), when they just don’t feel like wearing make up. And this is **BEFORE **COVID.
Now people just returned to normal circumstances, which is they wear mask when they feel the need to instead of everywhere.
Its good. It makes you less likely to get influenza. It makes people more comfortable in meetings because their saliva can’t fly into your face. It makes facial recognition more difficult. Its good for privacy.
Everyone’s different. Personally when I wear a mask I can’t see since it fogs up my glasses within a few seconds, and therefore I can’t really function as a normal human being. My partner can’t breathe properly while wearing a mask - which is even worse.
If you compound that with the fact that you’re wearing a mask because you’re sick… then the mask makes an already unpleasant day 10x worse.
For us - if the choice is wear a mask or stay home, we’ll both just stay home (or at least away from public indoor spaces). We did that all of last week. Cost thousands of dollars since we had to take unpaid leave from work - but we’d rather do that than wear a mask.
I’ve met people who are fine with, and seem to understand the reason for wearing a mask… but then in practice it’s “it makes it harder to breathe”, “my glasses fog up”, “I don’t feel like they understand me without seeing my mouth”… well, covering your mouth while spitting speaking is a big part of the reason to wear a mask… but they’ll wear the mask all right outside, then come inside and move it down to their chin to speak 🤦
A mask does make it harder to breath. I have ashma and I can only use certain masks and they have to be pretty fresh. Absolutely they make glasses fog especially so if you do not have certain coatings. Well and a good mask which is hard to find. For me some 3M masks fit well enough and are also designed so they do not seem to cause fogging as much. As far as understanding. Some people are very visual and less auditory. My wife is. So yes some people understand language better seeing the face. Say nothing about lip readers.
This is all true from my experience to some extent though it feels overblown at times and may well be. None of this prevents me from using a mask when needed for example.
So many years after covid and you still don’t know how to wear it. I consider you to be irredeemably dumb.
I’m sure it’s a mix of things. Some of it’s probably a lack of understanding, and sometimes it’s a “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” situation. They might have their mask on and ready to go for situations where they might want to mask up or where somebody else might want them to mask up… Or… Whatever. Maybe even some people take it off to talk (which is frustrating) because they think it’s easier to communicate that way and worth the risk to themselves and others and they’ll pull it back up after because it still does limit exposure overall? I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t speculate too much. I guess I’ve been on the other side of this where a bunch of people were complaining about people wearing masks outside alone because it’s “stupid and pointless” and I’ve definitely done that when going between places because it was just easier to keep the thing on for me (especially since I try to have it fit really well).
I never understood the whole: “stupid and pointless anger” a lot of people had. I had a co-worker who would turn his head when we were driving, veing annoyed because someone dared to wear a mask while being alone in their car. Or he saw someone sitting alone in an office with a mask. Like, i don’t know dude, maybe their coworker is on the toilet or something. Also, non of your business. Imagine getting mad at people for wearing sunglasses when it got cloudy. TAKE THAT SHIT OFF, IT’S POINTLESS
It’s a bit odd… I guess people just want to feel justified in their own beliefs about the thing which manifests as anger. But I think there’s often perfectly reasonable justifications for these things too… Like, Uber and Lyft both required drivers to mask, so it’s perfectly reasonable for them to just keep the mask on between picking up passengers, and in that case it really wouldn’t be useless… Maybe somebody is picking somebody up or just dropped somebody off and feels more comfortable keeping the mask on in the meantime… Maybe it’s just easier to put the mask on at home and they don’t want to fiddle with it during the day… Or maybe it’s completely pointless, but it doesn’t harm anybody so who cares?
Honestly, I’ve just found the response to COVID (particularly in the USA) really depressing to the point where I just don’t want to be around people anymore. I guess just all of the selfishness and vitriol about the whole thing really took a toll on me.
Some of it’s probably a lack of understanding, and sometimes it’s a “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” situation.
This is exactly how I view it. Faith in humanity skyrocketed when I decided to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, and I mean I really want people to be better about masking when it matters too… But I think it’s best to not get too mad about the people who are trying and making some questionable tradeoffs of comfort / effectiveness or whatever. I don’t understand all of the weird things people do with masks, and it’d be nice if we could actually talk to people and say “hey, are you wearing a mask to protect yourself or others? I think this is making it a lot less effective!” and have people be receptive to that, because there probably are some people that just don’t think about it too much and don’t realize… But it’s difficult to have those conversations without it feeling confrontational, especially when the whole thing has become such a contentious issue.
