Lesson of the day: don't update your site while running a 100+ fever. You'll only screw it up.

March 20, 2005

I've learned some very important lessons this week, and I want to share them with you. First of all, when a coworker comes into the office just long enough to hand you the on-call pager, gasps, "I'm going home - I'm sick!" and then staggers around to several other cubes before finally departing...well, you'd best break out the disinfectant, because that conscientious coworker has just spread millions of germs around. And most of them are on the pager, which he was carrying in his sweaty, germ-laden hands.

Second of all, there is no way to properly disinfect a pager, especially one that has a full (if tiny) keyboard of its own. So it probably doesn't matter that I didn't exactly spray it with anti-bacterial mist or anything.

Third: you will feel perfectly fine for three days after the hand-off of the infected office equipment. And on the third day, as you are congratulating yourself on your superior immune system, you will feel a tickle in the back of your throat...a tickle that won't go away, no matter how much water you drink or how much you try to tell yourself that you "don't get sick." You will still not believe that you are about to be very, very sick, and so you will do something stupid. Something like, say, agree to babysit the Girl Child and the Boy Child for a few hours.

Yes, in the course of learning this lesson, I managed to infect my godkids with whatever I've got. And I probably also infected their parents, and I definitely infected Bobby.

Which leads me to the fourth and final lesson: when the medicine comes in a box that warns "May cause drowsiness", what it really means is, "IT WILL KNOCK YOU OUT!" I staggered home on Friday, two hours early, and took some flu medicine that I thought would make me "drowsy" enough to make it seem pleasant to curl up in the middle of the bed with the TV remote in my hand, so I could watch several hours of brainless TV. Well, I know I got in bed...and I must've had the remote...but I don't really remember a thing after that until Sunday morning. All I have left are fragments of conversations, and I'm not sure that all of those really happened. I know that Mom called me, and Ria called, and Jason called a couple of times...but surely I dreamed the conversation where I was explaining why Wal-Mart is the perfect place to wait out a zombie outbreak?

(Oh, please, let me have just dreamed that I was explaining that!)

So those were my Very Important Lessons for the week. Be glad that I can share them with you without sharing any of the actual germs that started all of this.

Now I just have to figure out who I would've been talking to about zombies while I was running a high fever...