My office (like most places, I'm sure) has this macho attitude about working through illness. You know "Did you see Bob? He coughed up a lung , but he still came in here and gave the Smith presentation. What a team player!"
I'm on a campaign to stop this. It's time to make Bob a pariah, not a hero. When he comes in to do the Smith presentation, that bastard sheds his virus all over the freaking office, and 14 more people end up sick.
So, Bob...keep your germy ass at home. We can carry on without you. Not only are you contagious, you look and sound disgusting.
I am not a hero. I stay at home when I'm sick, not out of concern for others, but because I know from experience that I'm not that important. Some winters ago, right before the holidays, I came down with a stomach thing. It hit one night when I was on my way home from work...literally. Ever puke at 70 mph in the middle lane of a highway? (It was like a "no atheists in foxholes" thing...I was just praying I wouldn't lose control of the car.) I was sick all night...in retrospect, I belonged in an emergency room. But at 7 am I dragged myself back to the office, exhausted and dehydrated, because I had a project that I just had to finish. Oh yes, I had promised it to another department, my assistant was already on Christmas vacation, and I knew they needed this report. They'd told me so.
So like I said, I hauled my pathetic sick self in (infecting no one, since there was no one in the day before Christmas to infect.) And I finished the report and sent it. And I called the guy I sent it to to make sure he had no questions, because I needed to go home and die. And when I got his voicemail, I found out he'd decided to take the day off.
Lesson learned.
Now I just need to teach Bob.
Posted by Nic at November 8, 2004 01:30 PM