I was reading about how 2020 ruined time for an author at The Verge. I agree. I find that March feels like an eternity ago, but so much of the hours and days between then and now have blended into a blur from that I can't easily discern individual elements. As I cleaned up my speaking CV for 2020, I find myself either unable to differentiate some events from others or feeling that others were years ago.

Time perception is a funny thing, and as the article notes, we can perceive it in different ways, especially under stress or difficulties. I've seen some funny posts, like Pandemic Standard Time, the 211th of March, etc. In fact, this is day 286 of March for me. Mar 11 was the day that most things in my life shut down, though I could see that coming.

It's gotten to be so crazy that I want to define a new data type, datetime3, which starts on that date and when I perform a datediff(day, 0, getdate()), I just get the number of days since my personal pandemic started. Maybe this could be a somber Easter Egg in SQL Server, a setting, like two digit year cutoff, that we each can set to remind us of the date when the world changed for us, and a new one began.

I do think that with medical technology leaping forward that we can find some semblance of our old world, where we get together and share knowledge, smiles, and laughs. However, I also think all of us, and our organizations, will be somewhat changed by the events of 2020.

I hope that begins in 2021.