I fall back asleep for a bit and wake up around 10am. Texts from my sister and my wife telling me they have been sent home too (of course they went to work)

WIFEY: Baby they sent me home! No one came to work! And no one was on the tube on the way back. It’s very strange.

I turn on CBS News. The chyron is remarkable:

BREAKING NEWS: NATIONWIDE SPONTANEOUS SICK-OUT UNDERWAY: INITIAL REPORTS THAT 80-90% OF WORKFORCE DID NOT REPORT FOR WORK

I check SkyNews:

MASSIVE SICK-OUT ACROSS UK: NO REPORTS OF ORGANIZED GENERAL STRIKE, APPEARS TO BE SPONTANEOUS. 

General strike? I didn’t even think of that. Maybe my leftist radical comrades finally got their shit together. I check Jacobin’s Twitter account:

This is not a general strike, as everyone keeps asking us. Our networks have not been planning a direct action like this. If anything, this appears to be a spontaneous “strike” but we debate the use of that term in this instance.

Three minutes later, my friend Salona (my Quaker witch friend I befriended at divinity school) texts me to say:

I knew this was going to happen.

I text her back: Really? Why? What is happening?

I don’t get an immediate response. Five minutes later, the entire Meta suite of apps, the great succubus on our attention and energy and love, goes down. It wouldn’t come back on ever again.

I step out on my front porch. The silence is rich and obvious, like I was in those days in NYC right after the pandemic started. All you could hear were sirens and the birds again! But this one is different. It felt like like a big inhaled breath. I live on a fairly busy street in D.C, yet no cars drive by for the five minutes I’m there. No helicopters. No buses. No people. Even Cheech didn’t show up to work next door at the corner market.