What happens when a top executive at a $6 billion public company can't stop tweeting

LEVI'S LOSES THE THREAD

- Claire Suddath

In March 2020, Jennifer Sey found herself trapped at home with a husband, four children, a dining room table converted into a makeshift office, and no idea how the Covid-19 pandemic would unfold or when it would end. So she started posting on social media. A lot.

Sey lived in San Francisco, one of the first cities in the U.S. to issue a shelter-in-place order. Her eldest son from a previous marriage returned from the University of California at Berkeley, which had closed its campus. His brother, then a high school junior, was marooned at home, too. Sey's husband, Daniel Kotzin, an attorney-turned-stay-at-home dad, took care of their two youngest, then 5 and 3. "We were trying to manage, all of us in an apartment," Sey recalled. "It just felt completely absurd."

Sey attempted to maintain some semblance of normalcy. She dressed for work every morning, putting on shoes even though she was no longer going into the office. Although their 3,000-square-foot, two-story, four-bedroom condominium was bigger than most in San Francisco, it didn't have a backyard. Kotzin kept taking his kids to shuttered playgrounds. They'd play until the cops came and kicked them out.

"I realized Facebook was unproductive rather quickly. But I couldn't help myself. I needed to talk it through"

Aside from Kotzin's low-grade civil disobedience, he and Sey endured the early weeks of the pandemic more or less the same as everybody else. They followed the news obsessively and were particularly heartened by a survey of 105 Covid patients in Italy which fou that, at the time, the median age of death from the virus was 81. No one under 18 in Italy had died I yet either, which seemed like good news, too. So why, Sey wondered, were schools and playgrounds closed? They should reopen immediately, she thought. She vented her frustrations on Facebook.