So Your Coronavirus Test Gave You a Lobotomy

Sarah Schuetze
4 min readMar 18, 2020
Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Dear Coronavirus Drive-Thru Test User:

We appreciate the concern you showed for your health and the health of our community when you used the Drive-Thru Coronavirus Testing Service. We’re proud to have been able to offer a rapid response to the growing health scare with our testing, and we’re grateful to the Interstate Toll Services for letting us take over the toll booths on I-94, I-95, and I-76. We’re currently in talks to also move into parking booths at major theme parks across the country. The parks will be shut down, of course, but we believe just seeing the closed parks from a car during the test will inspire well-being.

As you know, the coronavirus test required the manual insertion of a swab deep into the nasal cavity in close proximity to the brain. We learned early on that this detail was best left undisclosed until the swab was already inserted and nearing brain matter. The last thing we wanted was to discourage people from getting tested with details of the nature of the test. Usually when someone uttered, “Hey, how far are you going with that thing?” was when they were informed of the target. We’ve had 100% success rate of reaching that target. But that was not always easy, as you may have noted.

The usual challenges of getting close enough in a toll lane to take a ticket or enter a ticket or hand the…

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Sarah Schuetze

I write to support my raccoons. This is not a metaphor. [English professor and wildlife rehabber].