How Covid became the best excuse for absolutely everything

The whole Covid thing has turned out to be a good excuse for sins of omission, writes Phil Brown

The whole Covid thing has turned out to be a good excuse for sins of omission.

Like bad service – sorry, Covid. Not having enough staff – sorry, Covid. Not answering the phone – sorry, Covid. Now there’s also flu to blame.

It makes me think of my favourite show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the Ayatollah of Iran announces a fatwa (death sentence) on Larry David. Larry sees it as an opportunity to get out of social engagements. Someone asks him to dinner – sorry, fatwa. To a party – sorry, fatwa. For assistance – sorry, fatwa.

And so it goes. I have used the excuse myself but I’m beginning to tire of Covid being invoked. Like when you ring up the bank or someone and there’s a message saying they are busy and waiting times are longer due to Covid and that you should just go away unless it’s urgent. I consider everything urgent so I ignore that and wait on the line and they answer quite promptly because they are not that busy and it’s just a load of bull.

Phil Brown is sick of Covid being used as an excuse.

I went to buy some white goods a while back and had to wait forever for service and when finally I got some attention the guy apologised and said they were short-staffed, due to Covid. It looked like they had enough staff to me and I said so and suggested Covid was just an excuse. He didn’t like that, I can assure you. Some businesses will keep on using the Covid thing to explain away their slackness or to get you to hang up and go to their website and stop bothering them. But I want to bother them and I like bothering them and often I have questions that can’t be answered by a website, questions that require a conversation and some human interaction. You remember that?

But nobody wants you to phone them anymore. I mean have you noticed how most restaurants don’t answer their phones nowadays? I was ringing around recently to book a table for dinner and wanted to ask about seating and got very frustrated. In the end we went to the rather excellent Gerard’s Bistro on James Street because, well, the food is excellent and, even better, they answered the damn phone when I called!