Is everyone back to work or never stopped?
 

Read in another thread car parts are in short supply, and prices seem low for pontiac car sales. got me wondering how much this group has been effected.
I did sell and buy a vintage pontiac this pandemic and would say the good stuff always sells, and brings what it is worth. i think they both were valued fairly, i think i got a great car, but it certainly was not cheap.
This last 4 months i have done a lot of wheeling and dealing parts, and golf carts, there are deals to be had for sure. i have flipped more this year than ever before. I attribute it mostly to timing, alot of time spent in the sale sections, and the forethought to have the cash available, and quickly respond to deals when they arise.
My younger buddy has made a fortune this summer doing the zero turn and generator shuffle. He is very talented and has bought, fixed and resold 30 plus different machine this summer. being the summer season, is almost over, he is just about ready to move to snow blowers and already has a decent inventory of refurbished equipment.
I think alot of the $600 weekly stipends got gobbled up in car parts and home improvement activities for sure. You cant go into home depot and not see people spending like it someone gave them free money.
Back to the original question, i have never stopped working, but did take a modest pay cut. my work has gotten slower, and some of the hourly guys and engineering/sales force have been on furlough or work share but I haven't missed any paid time.
Biggest difference for me has been zero racing and no car shows and swap meets. I miss both.
My friend is a fireman, so he has actually been working more than normal too, some government subsidies in the town he works for has the department working all the time. That is a different job obviously.
My wifes' company has felt a sting, but they deal mostly with state contracts. The state definatley is cutting back on spending, so that remains to be seen how much we feel that. It could be big impact.
My son works in the food business and he was out of work for a few months, now he is back to normal or busier as alot of people have delayed their return to the work force.
Have alot of people that frequent this board, that are not retired, been out of work or is the type of people that make up an antique car club, insulated from the unemployment, by the diverse types of work it takes to support out hobbies?

I retired from the 40 hour grind in early 2018. But I have worked a part time job 2 - 3 days a week until the Covid lock down eliminated my position. I didn't need the money, but I enjoyed the job.

My position has been reinstated as of next Monday, so going back to work 2 days a week.

My wife is still working, but Covid changed her world dramatically. It hasn't affected her income at all, but her job has her travel around North America. She had been working on site in Yuma, AZ about 66% of the time. When the world changed in March, she has been working from home instead of traveling. She's still working on the Yuma project, just over the phone, zoom, and on her laptop. The 2 time zone difference makes for a longer day for her and it's more difficult working remotely. Her company's travel ban has been extended until the end of the year at this time.

At the same time I was furloughed and my wife's travel suspended, our grandson reported for active duty in the Marine Corps. His life (and our's) changed due to Covid also. He graduated from boot camp in San Diego in June and we were going to go out and watch him graduate. Covid canceled that. He was supposed to have 10 days leave after that and come home. Covid canceled that and he went directly to Marine Combat training at Camp Pendleton. He graduated from that in July. He's been sitting in Pendleton since July waiting to go to Pensacola for his next training gig. Normally, he'd have been allowed to take some leave during this dead time. Covid canceled that. He's currently waiting for a military flight to take him to Pensacola. Normally for a cross country relocation the military would have you take a commercial flight. Covid canceled that.

Poor kid has been restricted to a limited portion of MCRT San Diego and Camp Pendleton since he reported in mid March. When he gets to Pensacola, to the best of his knowledge, he will still be restricted to base. Unless anything changes, his first exposure to off base life could take until Thanksgiving or Christmas.

I was extremely frustrated with the limitations placed on me with the lockdown. But these young troops make my problems very small.

Never stopped. Work for utilities now, for the city. Later on today, we have to deal with a hurricane.

I work with the DoD. I had about 2 weeks of telework when my GF was sick and tests were hard to come by. Other than that I have been in. The base on the whole is about 80% telework still, planned into next spring. It creates some contention. Techs like me have been asked to come in everyday while engineers, logisticians, and supervisors are working from home.

I certainly dont want to play the victim, because I know lots of people have it much worse this year, but there are definitely some sour feelings when my alarm clock goes off. I know a lot of my co workers are just going to be walking to their home computer while I am driving to work. First world problems.

Champ please thank him for his service! that is some big bumps in a young mans world.
Punch good luck down there, it looks like it s goin t o be a **** show, be safe.
Rocktimus total parrallel, we have been very lucky, hopefully it will continue like that. I was envious of the $600 and the stimulus checks, but fortunate enough not to need them.

Never stopped working, but I've been working from home since March - which has been great since my commute is 1 hr. each way. My company recently informed us that the work-from-home mandate will stay in effect until the end of the year, barring unforeseen developments. No complaints here.

My son is a sophomore EE major at Texas A&M. He is taking all his classes online this semester and living at home. Hopefully back to campus this spring. My daughter is a high school junior and on a hybrid schedule - twice a week at school and 3 days at home.

My side Ebay business selling car parts has been going like gangbusters for the duration. It's too bad the swap meets were cancelled this year, I badly need an inventory refresh.

I got fired right before 'ronas. Finally picked up another job in June and have been working remotely from home full time. Gives me plenty of time to get stuff done and prepare for moving, it's been on hold for 2 months now.

They don't anticipate us coming back in to the office more than a day or two until next year, and even then you must have a good reason to come in - like a project that requires in-person work.

I work at a defense facility, building tank transmissions. Never stopped.

Was off for 7 weeks, from march 17th till june, back to work and it's been busier than normal. Work for Auto Dealer, sales is picking up as well.
Toyota is where I work and we have a crap load of recalls out and everybody wants them done while they are off work. booking 2 weeks out.

I'm mostly retired as of earlier this spring but my company has stayed pretty busy. They're planning on opening up the office on a limited basis starting next week, but encourage people to continue working from home as much as possible.

That's something I've been thinking about...I'm an EE as well, and when I was in school we had plenty of lab classes. Those can't be done remotely, so I wonder if they'll delay them or make them up later somehow.

Never stopped, parts manager at Honda Dealership.

HVAC never stopped. Wife works at a school cluster ****!

Most labs have been focusing on programming and not actually building hardware, so that's something to consider...

Good point - back in my day we were still soldering wires and hooking up individual transistors and resistors. :)

I never stopped. I work for a power cable manufacturer and our business really picked up when this hit. Our corporate office in NJ had to send whoever they could to work from home. Otherwise, we are totally normal. We hired some full time employees to do nothing but sanitize surfaces.

My wife works for a medical tube supplier and she had to work from home since most of her engineering function is interfacing with sales. Their business really dropped off, but their manufacturing plants are still running with similar protocols to mine.

My job is now engineer from 8-5, home school 3 kids from 5:30-9. School is totally virtual and is a mess. They are supposed to go to a hybrid model when/if covid cases drop below a certain threshold.

Never stopped and busier than before.

We make plastic laboratory items, i.e. the stuff they are using to analysis the virus.

extruded plastic lab items? I work for an extruder manufacturer, we have been steadily getting new orders, just had a big lull from april to july in sales

Injection molding - culture tubes, mailing tubes, centrifuge tubes, pipette tips, racks, pcr, etc.

We closed down for a few weeks. I worked (bills paid and payroll written) about 2 days a week and somebody else came in once a day to take care of any wholesale orders and answer the phone/return missed calls. Even though the jewelry industry as a whole closed, there were a few folks out there trying. A few days after we started opening back up, my brother decided he'd caught the Covid and we shut down again until he got the negative results back. Since then the wholesale side of our jewelry business has been on fire. Our July was the best we've had in over 20 years.

No real change except we have to wear masks at work. If anything I'm working more hours than before and we have been setting sales records.

I've been working one day a week for the last three weeks. I live in a tourist town ... absolutely devastated by this. Hotels empty, restaurants and bars at 30% capacity, no concerts, no conventions. Probably 40% of the service industry workforce still out of work. About 10% of the businesses have closed for good. And in this state they will probably keep this things effectively shut down for another four months.

Not a big deal for me financially, but it is for a lot of others in this town. Tons of people under 30 in the service industry that haven't worked since March.

I never stopped. I work in the glass industry, and tempering to be specific. But we are SWAMPED! The more windows the protesters break, the more money we make.

I never stopped working.
I am grateful to be unaffected, and count my blessings.

Because of my commute (the office I work from is in a small town about half an hour drive south of my city) I was previously set up to be able to work from for bad snow days ect.

After March 16th, I shifted to working from home full time;
It was an adjustment, but I/we worked out some of the bugs that were there previously, and now I have a virtual network to transfer files, and actually put work on the server and print paperwork in the office for the shop to build.

I quite like being able to work from home;
I enjoy hearing my kids throughout the day, only on occasion do they get on my nerves;
I enjoy being able to have lunch with my family;
My eldest will be entering kindergarten next month, and my youngest is three.

Unlike some I have no issue buckling down, and not getting distracted (in spite of appearances; eg: me posting this).
I hear that for some the tv being close by is a big distraction, and I can proudly say that I have never once turned on the tv (for myself) during the work day.

I'd say that quite honestly I am actually getting more work done from home than at the office.

Been pretty lucky also, am semi-retired. I worked for and am currently working for a company that designs and manufactures automatic test equipment for the semiconductor industry. Specifically, I'm involved in the redesign of our assemblies that have parts that go obsolete; our products have a long lifetime in the industry. Obsolescence is continuing.........

Been working from home mostly, as the new designs arrive, they need to be tested, so I'll be spending more time in the lab.

george

There is going to be a reckoning come out of this with regards to working from home. A positive one in my opinion. Business after this are going to have a hard time explaining to certain employees why they need to be in the office 5 days a week. Even myself, I am a technician, but turning wrenches isnt all I do. I do tech writing, a have some team members under me so I do reviews and whatnot. On days when we are light on actual production work, there is no reason I couldnt be petting my dog at home while I work on the computer.

Construction subcontractor - never stopped although several of our big jobs were down for 10-12 weeks. Of course when they came back subs were expected to somehow make up the lost time so we did our best. Work flow getting stable again but now supply issues are the new abnormal.
Our oldest and her husband are both teachers with a toddler, 3 kids in various grades and a college freshman. They've been off since March and are now heading into unknown territory.
I consider us all fortunate - no real hardship or illness - so will send prayers for those that have.

Never stopped, but on a 10% layoff.
That does not mean much when you are salary except the actual salary.
Some days working from home, some days in office.

I am in outside (traveling) sales and while they did not lay us off we were home for about 4 months. Still can’t travel to some states.

We did have to shut down our foundry for two weeks due to construction being on hold in major markets (NYC, Boston, TX, SF, LA, etc) . Overall I have been very lucky

never stopped

Never stopped - I get 40-hours and more sometimes each week. Tractor trailer driver at a trailer shop. Our shop work, parts, and sales have fallen way off and we send our mechanics home when there isn't enough work. I don't think many have seen a full 40-hour paycheck since this thing took hold. So instead of laying a few off at a time and rotating the layoff so the mechanics could collect $600 a week plus unemployment, our company makes them suffer with less than a 40-hour work-week check which is not much because we don't pay high dollars and these guys have wives & children.

Three people in the shop got the virus at different times to include me, but it only lasted 2 days and I was over it and worked the entire time wearing a mask to protect others - no one caught it. One guy had it for 3 days and worked through it, our 70 year old salesman got it along with his wife and he was over it in a couple days, 5 people claimed to be exposed to others who had it and took the 14 day quarantine - but we pay workman's comp to cover time lost, so not sure if they were exposed or not. We take forehead temperature readings each day and if you don't hit 99.9 degrees, they won't send you home.

I refuse to wear a mask if I can get away with it. The only place I do is the bank because they have a security guard who will walk up to you and put the box with the masks in it right in your face and tell you to put one on. Otherwise, I tell them I have a "medical condition." The truck stop I fuel up at has a sign to cover their butts for people like me, "The Management Assumes If You Do Not Wear A Mask That It Is Because Of Medical Conditions. I think every store, restaurant, bar, & business should have one of those signs and open the doors and get people back to work.

"Why do people wear facemask in their cars when they are the only one's in it?

Champ tell your son from a former soldier thank him for embracing the suck. That travel ban stuff must be overzealous policy by The Corps because my partners brother who is stationed in Guam just flew Space A to Charleston and we picked him up and he stayed 15 days and then his brother flew Space A back with him and stayed another 10 days. They are both E-7 and not whale **** anymore but they shouldn’t be punishing junior enlisted like that while SNCO’s traverse the globe.

Never stopped...

HVAC... we stopped installs for 6 weeks. Service kept rolling. I came back a week before the installers to get work set up. The owners family were nice enough to give us 3 weeks pay, before they came out with $600 thing. Turns out all they had to do was wait but no one knew what relief, if any, anybody would get. I sell Carrier equipment and now it is tough getting equipment but we made due and we are busier than ever and had record months here. If I was able to get equipment and we had enough labor to get sold systems installed I would be the wolf of wall street this year but I still have a job. I got a couple of buddies with small businesses, one closed and the other is struggling. Both restaurant/deli type places.

I'm a design engineer, and the entire engineering staff was told to work from home in early April. I'm probably working more hours, but I don't have the 1.5 hour daily commute and an hour lunch. Other than being furloughed for two weeks without pay, I haven't missed a day.

My wife worked at Home Depot, and I asked her to take a leave of absence in early March. She hasn't worked a day since then.

I was planning to retire this summer, and focus on down-sizing my collection of old Pontiacs and parts. My stuff is mostly stored 2.5 hours away, so all of that has been on hold. I don't go out anywhere unless absolutely necessary.

I had big plans for my retirement. I was going to downsize the collection, find a place in the NC mountains with a big garage, sell my rental house, then sell my current home. I have looked at only two homes since the Covid crisis hit, and neither were in the mountains. As long as I can work from home, I'll probably keep working until a vaccine comes around or they tell me to start coming back into the office.

I'm an electrician. A lot of my company's projects got suspended (only "essential" projects were allowed to continue) and a lot of people spent some time at home, collecting their full pay thanks to a PPP loan my company got. I wasn't so lucky, I was working on one of those essential projects so had the privilege of actually getting up and going to work each day... LOL.

We're back to being pretty busy now, lots of new work coming up and just about everyone is working though most of the office staff are working from home.

He's still in training - so I think that's the reason for not being allowed more liberty. A 14 day quarantine due to Covid exposure would require him to be recycled.

I think once he completes his underwater training at Pensacola and actually starts his aviation maintenance training at either Pensacola or Cherry Point (depends on which aircraft he is assigned to as flight crew) he will be able to get off base.

Why underwater training for aviation maintenance?

Well, airplanes or helicopters fly over water. If his bird goes down over water, he needs to know how to exit the craft to survive...

We have never stopped working. All 30+ people come in every day and work. Record performance numbers in June, and backed it up with July

Covid cases- 1. employee caught it from interaction with a client, and sat out 2 weeks.

On the classic car circle, we are getting ready to do our 25th rolling car show/drive. We meet at a predetermined location, hang for about 1/2 hour, drive for 1-2 hours (all back roads, and roads less traveled), have lunch at a restaurant (at first it was picnics, due to rules) , drive for ice cream, return home. The participation feedback indicates its much more fun than sitting at car show. Even in our most stringent shut down, the rules said you could leave your home to get food, however it never said you should go to the nearest place. As we can only go in 3 directions, and our westerly direction is into the sticks, it has been a bit challenging, but doable

I never stopped. Being a career Firefighter we’re deemed critical workforce so I’ve worked through the pandemic and a few major hurricanes which was an experience all together.

I've been remote since March 16. I, as others, feel very fortunate to have not stopped or been financially effected.

I am saving fuel costs plus the time to commute, 3 hours /day. Some of my colleagues are saving 225.00 / month in tolls plus fuel.

No change, I'm still retired. :)

:thumbup:


:)

I don't see how the economy can maintain current levels with so many people working from home. When I went into the office every day, I drove about 60 miles a day when you include going out for lunch. My car gets 25 mpg around town, so I was burning about 12 gallons per week. I would often go to my employer's local manufacturing facilities to look at something, adding another 40 miles a week. So by working from home, I save about $8 - 10 per day on food, or about $200 per month. I also save at least $100 in gasoline. When you factor in that my wife and I no longer go to restaurants on the weekends, that's about another $150 per month. Actual savings are less because we have to buy food to cook at home. I would estimate working from home has reduced our living costs by $300 a month.

I used to go to lunch with three other guys. One is a bachelor, so he probably uses Grub Hub. But the other guys have families and are minimizing outside contacts. Even if you reduce their expenses, that amounts to about $1000 a month for four guys.

When you consider all of the lost restaurant revenue and reduced repair costs due to less wear and tear on our cars, that's a lot of money that isn't making its way into the economy. I don't think this is permanent because I'm dying for a nice steak and Cactus Blossom from Texas Steakhouse and Saloon;. I'm really looking forward to that steak when this dies down. But it's going to hurt a lot of small business owners who are shut down or are seeing their revenue drop sharply. Over time, that will lead to forclosures and reposessions. This could get ugly by early next year.

At the supposed "height" of the pandemic a few months ago I closed my restoration shop for a week to see how the infection numbers would look. This was after discussions with my employees to get input from them. After that week we all felt we should go at it again. Everyone has been healthy until a new hire in his early 20's contracted it within a week of working here. He tested positive a week ago and is out on quarantine while the rest of us seem to be okay.
Customer inquiries are through the roof and I'm scheduling incoming work months out. Parts availability is a daily battle with too many hours spent online or on the phone each day.

We were given the choice to take a voluntary leave but I never stopped working. That being said we did take a cut in hours which no one knows how long that's going to last.

My wife and I never stopped.

She is a buyer for a large scale gluten free granola bakery.

I`m an auto tech.

People have to eat,and people need their cars fixed,so it all works out.

Not a fan of not being able to do anything though.We had a few fairs we would attend every year;now thats not happening.

My bud is having a track rental on the 11th,so hopefully the weather is clear,and we get to see some racing,and some friends we have`nt seen in a while.

this is an excellent point there will be so many small business that never are able to reopen.

Car money!

Back in May, before the MN governor finally allowed our restaurants to open, my wife and I drove 100 miles (one way) to Wisconsin so we could go out for beer and pizza.

We used to live in that town 15 years ago and knew the quality of the pizza.

It was worth the trip.

Our local Italian place is still take out only but the food is still awesome. I do feel sorry for the waiting staff though, they really need those tips.

Locomotive engineer , never stopped . Our automotive freight was down some when the plants were stamping ventilators but they are ramping up now .