“It’s been a difficult year for all of us,” I said to the Tennessee National Guard sergeant. “I’m not going to say what my political views are,” I continued, “but regardless of the blame, it’s been a hard year for all Americans.” We dallied there, he and I, waiting for the fifteen minutes that the vaccine makers recommend the newly-vaccinated be monitored in case of life-threatening side effects. He told me he was from Maryville, and had never heard of Sneedville, either, until he’d been assigned to work there by the Guard. “At first, it was a lot of nose swabs. I did a lot of those swabs, and also more recently the shots. We were doing mostly swabs, but now it’s mostly shots.” He explained he enjoyed doing the work of testing and vaccination, which his training as an Army medic qualified him to do. However, he reported that since he had the authoritative demeanor and training of a law enforcement officer, that being his full-time civilian job, he was most frequently assigned to direct automobile traffic.
There was not an extraordinary amount of traffic to direct this particular Tuesday in the overflow parking lot of Hancock County Middle/High School. The Sergeant was spending most of his time dispatching newly-vaccinated drivers like me towards spaces into spaces in which to park while we waited for possible dire side effects. Given the volume of patients, providing this direction didn’t seem to occupy all of his time. “I think we have maybe a hundred or two hundred on a good day come here? We could have a lot more if people from far away were smart like you and thought a little outside the box.”
I don’t like to talk to police officers, on duty or not. I habitually think of them as people who have a license to beat my ass just for fun and for no reason. However, I was so relieved to have obtained the vaccine that I would have gleefully spoken to Derek Chauvin himself. In this difficult year, I’d developed an inestimably deep pessimism about the likelihood of a successful resolution of the COVID crisis. Up to the last few days, when my friends would give cheerful prognoses for when we might gather again to dance, dine, socialize, and hug, I would sarcastically toast “Yup! I look forward to it! Here’s to 2023!” After so much recent political and social upheaval, I fully expected total bureaucratic collapse more than anything similar to an effective vaccine roll-out.
I didn’t think I’d ever be vaccinated
I deemed the possibility that vaccination could be anything other than an absolute shit show to be incredibly small. First, though the Federal government under the Trump administration did spend a great amount of effort and money to fund the development of the vaccine, as of January 2021, there was no unified Federal plan on how these vaccines were going to be distributed. This hands-off approach reflected the Trump administration’s misguided belief that the Federal government should not use its power and resources to coordinate a centralized national response to the pandemic.
Secondly, I suspected that opposition to the vaccine would be fomented by malicious actors for their own short-term gain. The significant number of people in the US who have been opposed to public health recommendations, be those recommendations the more recent ones about masks or longstanding advice about vaccines other than for COVID, would mount a public pressure campaign against vaccination. I imagined a small-but-vocal cast of politicians would amplify any such campaign’s message in hopes of solidifying their own chances of reelection. I predicted that our milquetoast governor, previously known for his efforts in heating, ventilation, air conditioning, building maintenance, and responding ineffectually to COVID, would direct his health department and National Guard to do exactly nothing at all. I believed that some of the malignant cancers we have elected to positions of political leadership would use the all-too-common divisions amongst us to turn the vaccine into a controversy that would funds their reelection efforts.
I imagined scapegoating against certain groups, like city dwellers, nonchristians, and undocumented immigrants. I predicted intractable infighting between state and local officials. Moreover, I worried that media outlets and opponents would turn modest flaws discovered in the vaccine’s efficacy or safety into a tsunami of doubt. The public’s confidence in the vaccine would diminish, and the same self-absorbed politicians would work harder to remove all support. In sum, I imagined that toxic politicians would pander to the anti-science activist fringe by mounting a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt against vaccination.
More recently, when people I knew did start to get vaccinated, I still believed it would be months or years until I was able to be vaccinated myself. I watched with a certain perverse smugness as events in December and January seemed to confirm my suspicion that most of us would not be helped any time soon. I mourned the February death of my elderly aunt Marilyn in a nursing home; she contracted the virus mere days before a vaccination would have saved her life. I heard stories from other elderly and high risk friends about their extensive efforts to receive the life-saving injection, which were frequently futile. I anticipated living masked and socially distant for the indefinite future. I made my plans on the assumption that there would be no end in sight to the COVID crisis in my country.
What I had to do to get vaccinated: The Trial
I moved to Knoxville at the end of February. Previously, I had lived in Nashville. In January, the Nashville Metro Health Department announced they would hold a vaccination lottery for people who did not meet stringent eligibility qualifications then otherwise in force. They said that they would randomly select unqualified vaccine patients from a list once a day to receive the perishable vaccines left over after vaccinating eligible patients. That list would consist of the names of all the people who wrote a specific email that day. After I wrote that email address for ten consecutive business days without any response, I gave up on the Nashville COVID lottery.
As I write this, it is the ninth of March. Last week, I heard that I would meet expanded eligibility requirements to receive the shot. I still assumed that registering for vaccination would be about as effective at actually being inoculated as fucking is for maintaining virginity. The State of Tennessee had announced that beginning on the eighth of this month, most counties would include people in priority group 1(c) among those who could be vaccinated. I learned that since I have a body mass index of greater than 30, I would be a part of this priority group. I was glad that someone had finally recognized my singular crowning lifetime achievement, which is being a fat motherfucker, but was still smug in my belief that the bureaucratic hurdles to actually getting shot up with deviant mRNA made any attempt towards that end futile. I asked the Facebook friend who passed along the announcement about the eligibility of group 1(c) if it was really worth my time to try to get an appointment. She wasn’t sure.
Imagine my surprise yesterday when I was able to schedule a vaccination appointment for today. It took me four tries to use the State of Tennessee’s COVID vaccine registration site. I had to invent three completely new email addresses to overcome the system’s limitations. I had to take an appointment in Sneedville, a full ninety minutes away from my home in Knoxville. But I now have received my first vaccination, have instructions on how to schedule the second round, and am carefully watching my surroundings to see if pigs fly.
Shortly after the announcement about the eligibility of members of group 1(c), I had registered at the Knox County Health Department’s site. After filling out a screening questionnaire and contact information form, the website thanked me for my information, informed me that I was a part of group 1(c), and told me I would be added to a waiting list. I didn’t receive any confirmation. Even now I assume nothing will come of having registered. I felt like I was throwing my information and time into a black hole that was about as likely to return results as a scratch off lotto ticket.
After this unsatisfactory attempt, I visited the State of Tennessee’s registration website at https://vaccinate.tn.gov/.
In my first attempt at using this thoroughly imperfect website, it ran me through a screening questionnaire similar to that of Knox County. I answered in the negative a number of prompts about whether I worked in healthcare, worked with the “recently deceased” in a funeral home or mortuary, or was medically fragile. There were boxes to select if I worked in a school or an airport. On the last of five pages of screening questions, I correctly selected from a list of thirteen qualifying serious health conditions the box that indicated I have a BMI of greater than 30, the condition that makes me a member of eligibility class 1(c). The next page required me to select “yes/no” radio buttons for seven possible contraindications against receiving the vaccine. After this page, I was prompted to enter various bits of personal information that included my name, address, phone number, email address, gender identity, racial group membership, and whether I see myself as Hispanic or not.
After I pressed submit, the application presented my answers and asked me to attest that the information was accurate. It did not ask me to attest under penalty of perjury. Another site somewhere else might have just asked me merely to confirm that my submission appeared correct to me, but this site required attestation. I gave the website true information, but I do not believe there would be legal penalties had I not done so.
Once I attested to the accuracy of my information, the site informed me that I met the current criteria for receiving the vaccine. On this page, entitled “Covid Vaccine – Location Map,” It showed a tool that I could use to display a map of all possible vaccination sites within a radius measured in miles of an address of my choosing. It returned 64 such sites within one hundred miles of Knoxville, starting with Clinton in nearby Anderson County and going all the way to Gainesboro in Jackson County. Knox County was not in the list; I speculate this omission was due to the fact that it, along with several other metropolitan areas in the state, are managing their own affairs independently.
Clicking a button labeled “Book Appointment” under the Anderson County listing took me to a new page. This page included a widget I could use to pick a date range for an appointment. The dates 3/8/2021 through 3/18/2021 were selected by default. The text to the right instructed me to pick another date range if no appointments were available, under which appeared the words “There are no slots available.” I then used the widget to select a starting date for my search as early as the 8th of March and as late as the 8th of April. After I pressed “Apply” in the widget, a pop up chided me with the command to “Please select a time range of 2 weeks or less.” I then selected 3/8/2021 through 3/22/2021, which produced the same message that “There are no slots available.”
I gave up and closed the browser window. I know now I should have just hit the back button. There was no “select another site,” or, even more helpful, “There are no appointments in the next two weeks at your selected site. Click here to see a list of sites where there are appointments.” I needed to make dinner. I told myself I’d come back to the process later.
When I did come back, I started the process afresh. I answered the various pages of questions about profession, medical fragility, and so forth, again indicating that I am a qualified fatass. I entered my personal information in the form. I then pressed submit, only to be confronted with a message that “We have already received your COVID-19 vaccine application.” I was a bit surprised as I wasn’t expecting them to save any of my information if I didn’t actually make an appointment. This felt a little like the scratch-off ticket approach of Knox County.
But like Richard Nixon, I’ve never been a quitter. I happen to have access to multiple email addresses through the hosting service for my blog. I figured that this was the most likely primary key that they were using to identify applicants. I used the tools from my hosting service to create a new email address, though I suppose I could have just made another gmail account. Just to be absolutely sure that I would get through without a problem, I also created a new phone number through google voice in case the application was also keyed to phone number. Additionally, I used my day-to-day name, “Dan,” instead of my longer legal name. Adding this information, I was able to submit the information and thereby arrive at the search for sites by distance, “Covid Vaccine – Location Map,” page.
By now I had learned that Anderson county did not have any appointments in the next two weeks, and that, furthermore, there was no way to find out if they had any beyond that time. I pulled up a map of Tennessee counties from Google results, and picked Campbell county from the list of sites by distance because it looked suitably remote from densely-populated areas. Sure enough, as of that time, there were appointments available for Wednesday the 10th of March. I pressed the button to select an appointment. Immediately, I was confronted with an error message that said “Unauthorized Access.”
Someone smarter than I am would have already learned to use the back button, as mentioned before. Instead, I went back to my hosting provider, created yet another email address, and jumped through the hoops to use this email address. I didn’t create another phone number. The fact that I was able to register again without a new phone number confirmed my suspicion that the only key would be the email address.
This time, however, I forgot to check the box among all the various many boxes to indicate that my BMI was greater than 30. As a result, I was shown a message that I was registered and would be notified when people who aren’t fatasses become eligible. Concurrently, I received a confirmation email that said I was not yet eligible, but would be notified when eligibility requirements were lessened. Remembering my earlier errors, I tried to hit the back button to correct my omission, but I was not allowed to do so.
This brought me to round four. I made another email. I went through more carefully this time, being sure to pick “BMI>30” as an option. I confirmed that no other information but my email address mattered at all because I used the exact same information as the first attempt, including my legal name, except for the third new email I’d created that evening. Having succeeded thus far in my fourth attempt, I then picked a site from the search for appointments by distance, ““Covid Vaccine – Location Map,” screen. When that county didn’t have any slots, I tried using the back button this time. To my surprise, this did return me to the sites by distance screen. Ultimately, I went into and out of the listings of a number of sites, all of which had no slots, until I got to Hancock County and Sneedville.
When I found that the site in Sneedville had an appointment the next day, Tuesday the 9th, from 1PM until 1:30PM, I nearly shit my pants from joy. I didn’t really believe it, even after I selected the appointment and an email confirmation with an embedded confirmation QR code arrived at the email I had specified. The site was listed as Hancock County Middle/High School, with no other particular notes as to where in the school it might be. I mapped a route to Hancock County Middle/High School. I resolved that on the next day, I would drive the ninety minutes to get there. I thought there was a pretty good chance I was being punked. I thought there was a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to find the site. I half-doubted that anyone running a site in Hancock County was communicating with the State of Tennessee about what to put on a half-ass website.
The basic error with the State of Tennessee’s website is that it creates a user account or record for each person who attempts to get an appointment, but doesn’t give that person access to modify or view that record if there is a problem. Once a person has registered, and answered screening questions, there is not a way for the user to correct any of those answers except to create a new record. Once an email is used, it is a primary key. In case of an error, the user associated with a registered email must use a new email or give up.
A less serious flaw occurs in the site selection screen. If users are only able to sign up for appointments in the next two weeks, the “Covid Vaccine – Location Map” page should only display those sites that have slots in the next two weeks. Failing that, a user who clicks on a site and is given the message that there are “no slots available” should be given a navigation option to go back to the list of possible sites. While I am not an expert on the subject of designing websites, I feel certain that the State of Tennessee is most certainly excluding people from vaccination through employing such poor user interface design.
Vaccination registration: a literacy test to be able to live
The COVID vaccine bureaucracy is like an unintentional recreation of the literacy tests that counties once used in order that only some people might be able to vote. Only this time, instead of voting rights, the literacy test is, potentially, about whether one might qualify to continue amongst the quick here above the soil. I doubt the situation emerges out of any specific malice towards anyone, but the difficulty of jumping through these hoops privileges people like me who are not otherwise lacking for privilege in any way.
In the end, I was able to succeed in making an appointment because I am well educated, technologically-literate, and have an abundance of free time. Without being persistent, having a good Internet connection, being at leisure to drive for three hours round trip, or understanding certain tricks about email addresses and phone numbers, I would have been just as out of luck as when I was playing the daily COVID vaccine lottery back in Nashville.
How I got to Sneedville
I awoke this morning and did some business related to some rental properties I own. I think I was writing to the CPA who is doing my taxes when I noticed it was eleven thirty. I needed to leave at that very moment to arrive on time for the one o’clock to one thirty slot for which I’d signed up. It took me fifteen minutes to find the clothes I would wear. I was beside myself with consternation when it took another fifteen minutes to find my car keys and wallet, being as how they were in only the last place I looked instead of the first ten.
Still believing the availability of an vaccine appointment for me might all be a sham or a joke at my expense, I proceeded anyway towards Hancock County. I envisioned the workers at the site turning me down for not arriving on time. “This vaccine is only for people who really do want it badly enough. If you was one of them,” quoth the workers I conjured in my head, “you would have been here on time!” I looked at the directions on my phone that said I’d arrive after 1:30. For more than a moment, I considered giving up. Instead, I drove the rural roads to Sneedville as if I were in a NASCAR race where the vaccine would be given instead of prize money. I passed people at sixty or seventy miles per hour on two lane roads, put both my hands firm atop the wheel, accelerated into curves, and pictured just what I might say if the cops saw me. I reckoned that if I arrived even at the end of my 1:30PM appointment, the people there might have mercy on me, a sinner.
Starting out from home, my maps showed I’d get there at 1:35. As I kept putting the pedal to the floor, that predicted time slowly became earlier. I considered all the people who had died, all the sacrifice I had made personally on account of COVID, and how I might have now given away liberation from all that just because I couldn’t find my wallet and keys. I drove a bit faster. There were slow vehicles in front of me, and I kept going through quaint little towns with ridiculously low speed limits. I ultimately beat the expected arrival time all the way down to 1:22, but then missed a turn onto River Road near Sneedville, with the effect it was exactly 1:30 when I pulled into the Hancock County Middle/High School lot and tried to park as close to what looked like the front door as I could.
I had thought that the school might be empty due to COVID, as some are these days. I thought health officials would have chosen such a facility just because of its emptiness. I walked to the first door that seemed like it might be a front door. It was locked. I walked to my right. I wondered for the upteenth time since I got a putative appointment if I was actually being punked. Through the glass in the next door I came to, which was also locked, I could see institutional furniture and the outline of human legs on the floor. I hoped maybe if I could gesture to people waiting for their vaccine inside, they’d let me in. When ducked down a little bit to take a look, I recognized that I was distracting some high schoolers from their math class.
I observed that between the door I’d thought was the front door and the door where I distracted the students from their calculations there was a large handwritten sign that said “OFFICE.” Below this word were some haphazardly drawn arrows pointing to my left, which is to say clockwise relative to the layout of the building. So I walked in that direction, and turned the corner. I passed what looked like middle schoolers on the playground.
I saw a sign that said School Based Health Center. I assumed that I must have arrived in the right location. The door was propped open and I stood in it, looking to see if there was someone responsible I could talk to. A girl whom I guessed to be about thirteen sat in a bank of chairs, staring gloomily at the floor. A young man stood further inside. He appeared to be taking a vision test, addressing an unseen person with his recitation of “E F T O Z LP ED uh I can’t really read that part uh..” The adult female voice of the unseen person responded to the young man with “that’s okay, that’s great!”
In a bit of desperation, it being after my appointment time, I addressed the seated girl, saying “Excuse me, miss? Do you know where the office is?” She pointed vaguely in the direction from whence I came, reoriented her body away from my position at the door, and slouched.
I walked back to the bank of doors near the parking that I had originally tried to open. Now someone was exiting through these same doors. I crossed behind him to enter. I asked the first person I saw where the school office was. That young man pointed to my left, where I saw the familiar-from-my-childhood scene of just such a room. I walked in and inquired with the receptionist, a plump middle-aged lady who looked like my stereotype of a school secretary.
“You’re looking for one of those COVID tests? We don’t do any of that here,” she objected. “That’s all in the overflow parking lot.” She said the same when I said it was a vaccine I was looking for. “All that testing? And swabbing?” she averred,”That’s all done in the overflow parking lot. You go out there and look in the overflow parking lot and there’s a bunch of tents and cones and the Sheriff’s got a whole bunch of people out there. You just drive over there and you can’t miss it!”
I don’t think she was wearing a mask. When I think of it now, I don’t believe the students were, either. That probably should have been my hint I was in the wrong place.
The episode in which I win the game
I walked back to my car. It was now 1:40. I figured I’d blown it. I drove around the parking lot until I did see the tents, and the cops. I drove up to the first cop in a group of three, who, unlike the personnel at the school, were masked. I rolled down my window to address him. “Hey, I’m here for a vaccination? I had a 1:00 to 1:30 appointment, but I’m late?” The man with the kevlar vest, shiny badge, and authority to beat the shit out of me dismissed my concerns, saying “Oh, yeah, whatever, yeah, we’re here until four, whatever. It doesn’t really matter.” And then he indicated the short line of cars, all lined up before a tent, I was to join. He told me I’d drive through the tent, get vaccinated, and then park for a period of time for observation. I meekly thanked him, and complimented him on his half-sleeve: “I like your skin art.”
I pulled behind three cars in one of two lanes that were receiving service. There were six vehicles in total in line, and about an equal number of staff there. A woman whose badge identified her as a health educator from the county health department asked me for my name, email, and phone number. She looked for me on a printout. “Sometimes, it doesn’t download all the information,” she apologetically declared.
I diplomatically offered that maybe she didn’t have my name because it had been just the night before that I’d signed up. She said, “Oh that could be it. It doesn’t really matter. We just want to know who is here.” She then flipped over the printed sheet to its back. On that side, she added my name and contact information to the list of several other other names and details she had written there in her loopy script with her cheap blue pen. She left me with an information packet about the vaccine and walked off.
A minute or so later, a National Guard soldier whose insignia showed him to be a specialist came to my window wielding a tablet computer. He asked my name, which I spelled phonetically: “K kilo A alpha P papa P papa U uniform S sierra.” I gave him my date of birth. I showed him the confirmation email that I had printed. He thanked me and scanned the QR code. He bade me to input my signature into the tablet using the stylus he handed me, which I did.
In about two more minutes, a woman came to my window. She said she would vaccinate me, and asked if I had any questions. I had so many, just as I do even now as I write this, but the only one I asked then was if I could use my phone, which I had mounted on my windshield in order to see its directions during my race to the site, to make a video recording of being vaccinated. “This is a rather momentous event for me,” I pronounced. She assented to the recording, and paused so I could adjust the angle just right.
It didn’t hurt more than a pinprick. It was a little sore when she inserted the needle. After she removed the needle, I could feel a bit of pressure at the injection site as if the injected liquid had inflated the flesh slightly beyond its usual bounds. I didn’t cry, neither from the needle stab, nor for joy, but I did feel elation.
I felt elation for outcomes that exceed my expectations. I felt elation that this shared difficulty might soon be done for all. And I felt elated to be healthy, alive, and more likely than before to stay that way for the time being.
The two cars ahead of me in the line towards the tent were still there after I was injected. I pulled out of the line and around towards the exit, intending to leave. But the National Guard sergeant flagged me down. He indicated to me a parking space, separated by exactly one parking space from the nearest other car, where I was to park, and reminded me that I was to wait. We talked leisurely about the things I have mentioned, and when it was two o’clock, I left. The entire process from my arrival to departure, including the ten minutes when I was a suspicious-looking man acting oddly on school grounds, took almost exactly thirty minutes.
Advice for others: how to save your own life
I advise you who are reading this to heed the National Guard sergeant’s advice: think outside the box. He didn’t get his three chevrons for being stupid. “Sneedville,” he enthused, “has a good diner, a nice food truck, and even a Mexican restaurant.” They are humble and good people in Sneedville. They won’t even call the cops on you if you look suspiciously out of place on school grounds. Get vaccinated. Visit glorious Sneedville, if you have to. It’s a pretty drive, even or especially if you must drive like you are in a race for your life.
Don’t take the TN Department of Health website too seriously, either. The good people in Sneedville did scan the QR code that was sent to me in the confirmation email, but no one asked me to prove I had a qualifying medical condition. Nor, for that matter, did they ask for any identification to prove that I was, in fact, the person identified by the QR code or email address. My entire input could have been a complete fabrication, and they still would have vaccinated me. After all that hassle I went through with the website, I could have drawn a QR code with a crayon, for that matter. Staff at the site indicated that, in all likelihood, given the amount of capacity they have, I could have just rolled up, told them that I was qualified, and they’d have given me my Fauci ouchie without further ado.
I reckon me and Dale Earnhardt should have a word with Kafka.
