Page 78 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
Despite my considerable affinity for chapeaux, I drew the line at wearing one to work. Such a rule may seem perfectly reasonable to attorneys who work in traditional firm environments. But when the attorney observing that rule works in a tech company where “casual” dress is the norm (and by casual I mean a workplace in which flip flops are perfectly acceptable office attire) it’s a curious line to draw. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that.
One moment I was reveling in my son’s Leap Day Bar Mitzvah and a recuperative trip to Arizona with my FDCC friends, and the next I was grappling, personally and professionally, with a pandemic that upended the world. We had collectively gone to sleep one evening only to wake in a parallel, dystopic universe where things were simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. Reflecting on those early days, I vividly remember what I did. I was a leader in a cross-functional core response team for my global technology company, which serves customers in multiple countries and in every U.S. state through a combination of in-home services, forward stocking locations, logistics centers, call centers, retail stores, and traditional offices.
We worked as a team to keep our business up and running when everything around us was shutting down—creating protocols to handle positive cases in our sites and in the field; defining a framework to enable quick analysis of the rapid fire closure orders that would otherwise prevent our teams from keeping our customers connected in a time when they were physically cut off from the world; and facilitating a shift to remote work for as much of our 20,000 employee workforce as possible in a matter of days. Our mission—to continue serving our customers while keeping our team members and our customers safe and healthy—challenged our ability to innovate, collaborate, and execute across a complex ecosystem. All that we accomplished was a testament to excellence in execution, commitment to collaboration, and clarity of purpose.
I cannot think about what we achieved without also summoning the emotions that swirled through those early days. Fear, anxiety, uncertainty, feeling overwhelmed by the speed and gravity of it all, and the exhaustion—exacerbated by my own illness. There was little sleep. Zoom calls were back to back and punctuated by an endless onslaught of Teams chats, emails, texts, and phone calls, each one seeking guidance, needing an answer, looking for direction, or pressing for insight into a future none of us had imagined possible that was changing by the minute. I didn’t have time to set up a proper office. The kitchen became my remote war room—television on in the background so that I could track developments, phone attached to me, and a giant gaming monitor donated by my older son after watching me toggle between the multiple windows on my laptop.
In those days, I wore too many hats to count—legal counsel, business advisor, communications specialist, process engineer, project manager, leader, teammate, mom, wife, friend, daughter—the list goes on. As effective in-house counsel must,
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