Howard Hughes Redux

I know I am not spozed to post about work lest I get dooced. But this is not really a work post per se. It is more of a cubicle-land post that could take place at any giant faceless corporation where people are cruelly crowded together like chickens in a PETA-unapproved cage.

I don't know what has happened in the past few days, but suddenly my little section of cube world has become a germy hell. All around me people are sick, coughing, hacking, sneezing. It sounds like a bad day on a tuberculosis ward.

I am trapped here in my little 6 by 6 foot box, furrowing my brow and glaring in the general direction of the sickies, though I can't see them beyond the 5 foot 8 inch cube walls towering over me.

I love the girl who sits in the next cube, Rachel, but we are opposites in many ways. She is a young thing while I am in advanced stage of decrepitude. She still believes in romantic love and family - I believe in a nice quiet room of my own which I shall share with 64 cats. She thinks the outdoors are scary and dangerous, but it is so-called civilization that scares me. She can sit blithely in our workplace and say "I guess I just tune the coughing out."

I can kill snakes and ford rivers. I can face down angry marauding pit bulls. But being cooped up in here all day with the coughers brings out the hypochondriac Howard Hughes in me. Rachel plainly thinks I am insane. She may just be right.

For instance, I can imagine the toxic, viral air swirling around and settling in green waves just at shoulder level where I can most effectively breathe in the infective agents. Infective agents that will no doubt make me sick on the weekend, which is something that ALWAYS pisses me off (if I am going to be sick, I want to skip work to do it at least, dammit.)

I have my Clorox wipes out. I am trying to breathe as little as possible. I am about five minutes from wearing shoeboxes on my feet.

Pray for me. And in the mean time, I will be over there smacking some sick cubicle dweller upside the head with my red stapler for coming in to work instead of staying home on the couch with wadded up kleenex and with Oprah and Regis where they belong.

Linkateria is full of fabulous fun, as always.