14: Vilmarie Disdier

Cashier, CITGO Gas Station

Vilmarie Disdier has worked for 11 years at the same Citgo gas station as a cashier. She likes her job and takes great pride in building a rapport with her regulars and making sure that she takes care of every customer according to their needs. But the pandemic greatly impacted how she operates at work. Though the hours at the station were briefly cut down at the beginning of lockdown, they quickly went back to normal, about 36 to 40 hours a week for Vilmarie, and she was at work through the entirety of the pandemic. One of the biggest changes to her workday was the sudden need to invest a lot more time in sanitation measures. Every half hour she needed to wipe down and disinfect every surface with which people might come in contact. But this was a change she was happy to make in order to protect her customers. Making sure that everyone was safe was Vilmarie’s main concern. It was a challenge sometimes, to ensure that both customers and employees understood the risks and how best to mitigate them. Doing her best to make people safer was difficult, and then making sure that people felt safe was another, separate, challenge. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, Vilmarie was worried about getting COVID and even more terrified of bringing it home to her three children. At the end of every workday, the first thing she would do upon arriving home was shower and wash her clothes. She had a lot of reason to be concerned. Around Christmas time, her brother and then both her parents became infected with COVID. Her brother was the first to contract it, picking it up while he was at work. Then, not knowing that he was carrying the virus, he passed it on to their parents during a small family gathering. Vilmarie’s father was asymptomatic, but her mother became very sick. Fortunately, though, she made a full recovery. 

This whole experience has made Vilmarie realize that people need to take care of themselves much more than they do right now. People need to make sure that they themselves are safe, healthy, and happy so that they in turn can look out for other people. More than anything, she hopes that we will be able to put this whole experience in the past someday and do everything we can to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.