Soundtrack in my head: Broadcast, “Come On Let’s Go”
Yesterday, I crossed a line I never thought I would cross. I bought a bottle of hand sanitizer.
The reality is that I seem to be more susceptible to colds than I used to be. I was feeling quite ill at work yesterday, though I felt significantly better today. This time last week, I was also feeling more under the weather than usual. And I also had colds in late August and early September. All of them were minor, none were serious enough to keep me from work, though there were a few times I would have liked to go home early.
It would be easy to attribute my newfound susceptibility and my embrace of hand sanitizer to my lifestyle changes over the past few years. Six years ago I was living by myself and working as the sole employee of a small not-for-profit organization in an office by myself. I got a cold less than once a year, but it’s a wonder that normal social graces didn’t entirely disappear. Since then, however, my life has swung to the opposite end of the pendulum, in that I now live in a co-op house with twelve other people and I work in a cubicle maze where there are 100-200 people on my floor.
Oddly enough, though, I didn’t start getting colds more often until this year, despite living in my co-op house for 4 1/2 years and working at my current job for 3 1/2 years. Perhaps it might be attributable to a bout of pneumonia I had last Christmas that developed from an unexpectedly severe allergic reaction. Perhaps there are other reasons.
I’m trying not to be a germaphobe. I don’t want to look at every doorknob and hand rail with suspicion. I don’t want to touch everything with a tissue and run away every time someone near me clears his/her throat. But I guess I can’t be too laissez-faire about it either. Nevertheless, if you see me holding up a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer and looking at you through it like they do on the commercials, I give you permission to throw a glass of cold water at me. Just don’t drink from the glass, first…
There’s this guy I work with who really wants his perfect attendance awards and so he comes to work no matter what he’s being afflicted with. He visited Latvia one weekend and he brought back what the entire floor now calls "the Latvian flu." We ALL got it. Irritating.