First you go to a provincial website and enter when you got your second dose. Then you click some kind of consent. Then another page, with health card (including a lengthy code on the back of the card) and birth date information. Then a page with options, all of which are booked in the seconds after you try to click on it. Unless you get lucky. (Is skill involved?) Then you book as quickly as possible, whatever you find. Then you log back on, possibly reentering the information, maybe not, no rhyme or reason. It won’t work. It will show a variety of things that are unavailable, including times after the one you already booked. Eventually you give up (are unable to stay anywhere near a computer due to small children) and try again the next day.
Wait no, first you try every single website-having pharmacy and confirm that, like yesterday and the day before, nothing. Not the little neighborhood ones or the chains. Yes you are on the waitlists.
You go in person in the cold to a “pop-up” that has 150 doses for like thousands of lined up people and you are not one of those people so you get a cappuccino and a $5 but worth it cinnamon bun. What would have happened if you had reached the front, with a baby in a stroller, since technically I don’t think you can bring anyone to an appointment? Who knows.
You return to the provincial website and after playing Tetris or whatever this feels like (Snood?) for a while, you get January 11, but you can do better! Maybe they added appointments? You get one a few days earlier. You try for better than that. Nothing. But the new one is good. Or is it? It’s less not-good.
Your inbox is a neverending chain of booked and auto-cancelled appointments from the Ministry of Health.
You use a baby-nap to click more. Nothing.
You calculate the likelihood you will have caught the first post-break daycare cold-that’s-actually-Omicron before that day. Scientifically feels like a 1809305% chance of this happening. But the trip to the mass vaccination site will be a day out.
Apparently even boostered you need to go out in a hazmat suit, but you will still get it, but it might be a cold, or it might be the plague, and at any rate you are still in the bubble of a life that does not extend beyond your pretty but repetitive neighborhood, with stuff (but what is stuff) only on one side of the street.
well I guess that gives me some consolation if you're having that much trouble in Toronto. Living rurally it's been almost impossible to find boosters - and more impossible to ever actually get tested. Public health in Ontario has not be performing well.