Covid Causes Crashes

One of the biggest effects of our current pandemic is the amount of people who's lives were moved online. Many companies have their employees working outside of the office and have reduced or stopped travelling. In order to still be able to function, they are relying on video-calling services, such as Zoom. This reliance is also very heavy in schools, specifically colleges, and as summer comes to a close, the amount of people using Zoom is skyrocketing. On Monday, August 24, 2020, so many schools were trying to use Zoom that the site experienced an outage. 

Partial Zoom Outage Is Fixed After School Disruptions

Some school districts and colleges also had outages on Canvas, an online learning platform.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/business/zoom-down.html

My first class on this Monday happened to be a Zoom, and I sat in silence with over one-hundred other students as we all started at our screens, confused on where our professor was. Eventually, one of the class's teaching assistants spoke up saying that our professor could not join the Zoom and that class for the day was cancelled. I did not think much of it until a little later when I got on my phone and saw that my twin and some of my other friends attending different schools experienced the same thing. With some help from Google, I discovered that the website was actually crashing, and people all over could not have meetings.

The only other class I had that day was in-person, so I thought I did not need need to worry about technological issues. Wrong. Other online sites were facing similar outages, which I discovered when I attempted to do homework and Canvas was down. Canvas is a learning-management system, and it contains folders for all of my classes. With the site crashed, I was unable to work on any of my schoolwork for a couple hours. Covid has lead me to experience things I never even thought would occur, such as a professor not being able to join his own class, but I guess it is something that me and millions of others are working through one day at a time.

About the Author

Hello! My name is Isabel Baker, and I am currently eighteen years old. I have lived in Mason, Ohio my whole life, which is a city about thirty minutes outside of Cincinnati. I have an older sister who currently attends a local community college and a twin sister who is swimming for Xavier University. 

Family Picture

I am currently a first-year at the University of Kentucky studying to become a physician's assistant, and my major is titled Health, Society, and Populations. Healthcare is not very prominent in my heritage; in fact, I cannot think of a single one of my relatives who was or is in the medical field. Both of my parents are accountants, and the rest of my family are math-oriented like them. That, however, was not the right path for me. I want to be able to help people first-hand in situations like the Covid outbreak. 

Covid's Impact of my Life

My experience with Covid has been rather boring, which I am definitely not complaining about. The biggest change in my life was that school became completely virtual. I very much thrive on socialization and learning new material through hands-on classes, so this was a big change for me. The end of my senior year was lost, but I realized that not having events like prom was what we needed to do to keep everyone safe. It was definitely an adjustment going from always being busy to doing nothing everyday. Some days I would take a walk with my mom and dog just to get out of the house. My dad still had to attend work in-person everyday, so most of my quarantine time felt like just an extended summer. It enabled me to spend more time with my family, but that came at a cost. 

A selfie from a family game night; an event that hadn't occurred in years prior to Covid.

My sisters and I are all  employed by the local amusement park, Kings Island, but the water park, the part of the park where we work, did not open. This left us all without an income to put towards our college funds. I was also supposed to work for a local kids camp that focuses on kids with medical issues, but it did not open either. Covid has also not been very close to me. My twin, Anna, is currently on day twelve of her fourteen day quarantine because one of the other swimmers tested positive. Anna tested negative, but I think this is the closest Covid has come to my family.

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