Distance makes the heart grow fonder

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2020 (2300 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I hate to brag, but I have never had a problem encouraging people to stay two metres away from me.

I was blessed with a natural social-distancing gene in the sense that I am roughly six-four, weigh over 300 pounds, and whenever I attempt to put a smile on my face it looks like I’m grimacing with severe intestinal cramps.

So, what with Manitoba and the rest of the world relaxing restrictions meant to curb the spread of coronavirus, I am pretty comfortable wandering around in public places.

The bad news, however, is that not everyone in the world is as lucky as I am in the social-distancing department. In the rush to discover the “new normal” or the “next normal,” it seems a lot of folks are forgetting they are supposed to remain at least two metres apart.

The good news is that a growing number of businesses and organizations, as they slowly reopen from pandemic lockdowns, are dreaming up ingenious methods for helping forgetful people remember that now is not the time to get up close and personal.

Some of the methods I am referring to are of the kind that cause even hardened journalists such as myself to get all misty-eyed.

I am thinking here of the indescribably cute kindergarten kids at Winnipeg’s Constable Edward Finney School who start their mornings by slipping into handmade butterfly wings. “They help me fly,” six-year-old Paolo Perez told reporters last week.

Along with flight, the floppy wings also help the pint-sized pupils gauge how to keep their distance from each other — if your wing tips are touching, you’d better back off.

It seems a lot of the social-distancing creations being unveiled around the world also involve making a serious pandemic fashion statement.

In Germany, for instance, fast food giant Burger King decided to let customers have it their way — by handing out social-distancing crowns, gigantic versions of the sombrero-style cardboard crowns they normally dish out at their restaurants.

Imagine wearing a patio umbrella on your head and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what these crowns look like. “We wanted to reinforce the rules of high safety and hygiene standards that the BK restaurants are following,” a Burger King representative told the financial website Business Insider. “The do-it-yourself social-distance crown was a fun and playful way to remind our guests to practise social distancing while they are enjoying food in the restaurants.”

Not to be outdone in the silly headgear department, another German eatery — Cafe & Konditorei Rothe in the town of Schwerin — reinforced social distancing on its first day back in business by having patrons put on hats with pool noodles attached to the top.

In online videos, customers can be seen chattering away with colourful pool noodles dangling from their melons. Do you know what they said? No? Well, neither do I because they were speaking German.

If sporting a really stupid hat is not your style, you’re in luck, because a Romanian cobbler has come up with another fashionable way to maintain the proper physical distance — size 75 shoes with a toe that has been elongated to the point where it would make circus clowns green with envy.

“If two people wearing these shoes were facing each other, there would be almost one-and-a-half meters (nearly five feet) between them,” shoemaker Grigore Lup boasted to the Reuters news agency.

The ridiculously oversized shoes, which cost $115 a pair, allow wearers to go toe-to-toe and still remain absolutely safe, unless, of course, they trip over one another, which seems like a distinct possibility.

More than any business, restaurants have been forced to think outside the box in terms of encouraging customers to get together without getting too close for comfort.

In Ocean City, Md., for instance, diners have been able to bounce back into eating out amid the pandemic thanks to an invention that is essentially an inflatable inner tube on wheels.

Fish Tales, a restaurant in the beach town, has just rolled out about a dozen “bumper tables,” which are round wheeled tables surrounded by inflatable tubes that let people eat, drink, socialize and remain two metres apart. “If you come in to get a pound of shrimp and a beer, you can stand in one of these and walk around and look at things and talk to people,” owner Shawn Harman told NBC.

If you can watch the video of customers rolling around and bumping into each other in these inner tubes without wetting yourself, you are made of sterner stuff than this columnist.

Inflatable tubes, however, are not nearly as full of hot air as the social-distancing device offered at a South Carolina restaurant — blow-up dolls meant to pump up business while customers are a safe distance apart.

According to news reports, Open Hearth restaurant in Greenville County ordered 10 non-creepy blow-up dolls from Amazon and seated them at tables next to real customers.

“Instead of using scary, yellow tape or roping off the empty tables, I thought, ‘We’re going to make this restaurant look full,’ “ owner Paula Starr Melehes told CNN. “They are very humorous, and they have nice faces.”

Of course, nothing says social distancing like a scary robot dog, which is what Singapore is using to remind residents to stay away from each other at a local park.

Singapore made headlines by deploying Spot, Boston Dynamics’ famous four-legged robodog, to patrol a park and broadcast pre-recorded messages about the importance of maintaining physical distance.

Not that we have anything against robots, but we’d recommend you try the cute butterfly wings first. If that doesn’t work, just hang out with me, because, when it comes to social distancing, I’m a natural.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca