Masking — Blog — Healy Chen

Am I the asshole?

It’s weird these days going inside shops. The mask mandate is gone practically everywhere in the Bay Area. Therefore, often times I choose to not wear one when I go the mall or the grocery store. Not because I am anti-mask or anything. Where I work - San Francisco State University - there still an indoor mask mandate, so I wear one at least 40 hours every single week. You can see why I try not to wear them outside of work.

The problem is: mask wearing causes my face to break out in acne (yes, still getting acne at age 34). During the weekend when I don’t wear one constantly, my face is noticeably less inflamed. So if I can avoid it, I don’t mask up.

Which makes for an awkward situation, because usually I would be the only one not wearing a mask. So I end up looking like one of those crazy anti-maskers who only got vaccinated to keep my job, and most likely voted for Donald Trump. It’s good to see people around here are still masking up indoors, but the bottom line is it’s no longer mandatory. Some days I simply don’t feel like wearing it. Sorry.

At least no one has hassled me for it thus far. And I do feel bad when I have to interact with a store clerk who is masked up. Massive apologies for spewing my droplets onto you so carelessly.

What I never understood is the mask mandate for indoor dinning. As far as I am concerned, that is pure theatre. What difference does it make against an airborne illness to only wear the mask when I’m walking to and from the restaurant table? Are we suddenly in some protected bubble once we’re all seated? Of course, rules are rules: I abide by the mandates just as most everybody else do. However, nowadays I don’t bother with masks when I go to a restaurant. It makes zero sense.

Mask on unlock

The latest iOS 15.4 release brings a super welcomed feature: the ability to unlock Face ID with masks on. Ever since this pandemic became a thing, it has been a real pain in the butt to unlock our iPhones whilst masked up. Sure, lucky Apple Watch owners have been able to unlock their iPhones with it for some time. But I obviously don’t have one. Smug friends with Android phones simply use their fingerprints to unlock, a feature Apple abandoned a few years ago in favor of Face ID.

Not ever expecting the world to mask up entirely for over two years and counting.

Anyways, finally I can unlock my iPhone with my mask on while I’m on campus. No more waiting for the phone to reject the face scan, then punching in the backup PIN numbers. How does it work? It seems the camera is scanning more closely the areas around the eyes. I did have to do a full Face ID rescan in order to activate this new mask-on feature. It’s still rather sensitive: it doesn’t work with sunglasses. If I wear my hat low or my mask higher on the face, the phone rejects the scan.

I bet if I were to get punched in the eye, it wouldn’t work either. Not that I’m aching to test that hypothesis. I’m sure Face ID with masks on will only continue to improve.

But it may be too little, too late. The Bay Area no longer have an indoor mask mandate. There’s still one at San Francisco State University - where I work - but that’s likely to go away in April as well. Pretty soon I won’t have wear a mask daily for eight hours. It’s not that I mind wearing a mask (us Asians have had a masking culture long before the advent of COVID), but long-term usage makes my face break out in pimples. Given the option to not wear one at work, I would definitely choose to do that.