I Think My Co-Worker Is An Anti-Masker And Anti-Vaxxer (Well, They Go Hand-In-Hand ...)

So I met the guy who I will be working with through today and tomorrow.  Older gentleman.  Wonder how I have never met him before working this gig.

He has the gift of gab.  Boy, does he ever.  Sometimes that schmoozing helps, such as when talking to the elderly Target cashier who scanned the fifty items we had to buy.  Other times I can tell the person he starts to sweet-talk ain't having it.  I can see myself shutting down around him if I don't want to match his energy.

He knows a lot of things about this gig.  Well ... so do I, and how I approach it and how he approaches it are quite different.  I am a beta personality, so I just let him tell me what to do, even though I might have been doing this for longer than he has.  His alpha male assuredness can be good, but otherwise it is bossy, if not domineering.

Worst of all, I'm afraid, is that I believe he is not vaccinated.  How do I come to this conclusion?  Well, for one thing, he is not a fan of wearing a mask, which is optional on this gig; less than half mask up, including me.  In our Target run he talked about all the vitamins he takes in order to stay active at his age.  I do not doubt that those supplements have helped him.  But many anti-vaxxers (and thus anti-maskers -- they are one and the same) say they don't need the immunization because they take Vitamin D and stuff like that.  Who are they kidding?

But worst of all is him saying that he and his family have already gone to the State Fair once and will do so twice more before it's all over Labor Day.  It was bad enough that he pushed back when I raised my concerns about going.  He believed that the Delta variant meant that anybody who gets infected will immediately come down with symptoms, so if you wake up the next morning without coughing up a lung and running a fever, you don't have the coronavirus.  That can't be true -- can it?

More than that, however, is the pause I have taken, again, over my vacillation over going to the Minnesota State Fair and then my decision to go.  I decided I would go for, well, superficial and sentimental reasons.  But after hearing this co-worker declare that he was safe from COVID-19 because of vitamins and he feels great now and whatnot, that makes me think that I shouldn't go to the Fair.  Well, I probably still will go, but I don't like that the stereotypes of anti-maskers/vaxxers in my head were validated when my co-worker parroted misinformation he probably got from Facebook.

Let's see what curveballs from him await me today!