Sickos

In response to B's recent post on her pet peeve about sickies going out and infecting the innocent, I, too, have noticed that this seems to happen a lot more these days, with people bringing their kids out even though they are sick or very recently were sick. As in, "Oh, poor Timmy woke up spewing vomit this morning, but by lunch we were all going stir crazy being inside, so here we are! Happy birthday!" The other place I notice it big time is at work. When I came down with a head cold just days before my wedding last March after not one but two coworkers (one of them a fellow manager who usually complains about people coming in sick) showed up at the office with hacking coughs and sneezing, I was beyond pissed. When I issued an offhand complaint about it to my boss later, he said "If everyone stayed home when they were sick, we'd never get any work done!" Uhm....and we do get work done when the nastiness is spread through our tiny office like a stink bomb and two days later twice as many people are honking their noses, coughing up their own toenails, and infecting their friends and family at home so they then have to eventually call in sick to care for their own children? (Keep in mind that this is the same brainiac who said this to me recently. I also caught the barfing/diarrhea flu from him last year when he came to work with it insisting it was a reaction to his vitamins. Uh huh.) So this is one of my biggest pet peeves, too. Of course, I also understand the temptation to go out or have someone over when I'm sick. I know I've even done it before. The fact of the matter is it sucks to be sick, it sucks to be alone in your misery, it sucks to be lonely and bored in bed or on the sofa when all your friends are out at an event. So it's easy to justify to yourself that you're no longer contagious because your phlegm is now more "dandelion gold" than "spring green" or that the fever you thought you had an hour ago was really just a freak early-onset menopausal event. But then you do go out and suddenly everyone you know is sick with it and instead of being comforted in your misery, you're even more alone in your suffering because everyone's too busy refilling their humidifiers, barking like dying seals, and blogging about you being an epicenter of germiness or a nasty Outbreak monkey to pay you any mind. So is it worth it? No. But we still love that sick little monkey. Ever so much.