Yes, it's that wonderful time of the year again. Flu season in full swing.
As if fading daylight, allergies, midterms, and the start of the holiday retail season weren't enough...
Before you know it not only will you be deathly ill but it will hit you mid-season and you'll be knee-deep in TV reruns too.
It amazes me, the way we set up our urban environment to encourage rapid propagation of sickness. I worked in phone support, once upon a time in the not too distant past. Three hundred of us, switching stations daily, with no less than 2 other people using your station in a day. No open windows, no air circulation, squeezed in next to each other in little 5x5 foot cubicles.
To get to this bacterial breeding haven, you have to ride on the public transit system. As usual, the drivers are setting up for strike negotiations, which means fewer buses, and that means riding around in plague-infested sardine cans.
School's not much better, what with the overfilled classrooms. We're pretty much elbow to elbow here, and the only convenient thing is that when someone to my right sneezes on me I can reach to my left for a tissue and someone from behind me passes me the antibacterial handwash.
Yes, let's kill 99.99% of those germs so that those 0.001% that survive learn to like eating antibacterial handwash and come back for us later when we're trying to learn while covered in phlegm.
And speaking of phlegm-coverage: Daycare.
Daycare isn't about teaching children, it's a government subsidized virus mutation facility under direct control of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Why test out biological weapons on the enemy when you can just jot down notes while a pack of croupy preschoolers belt out the lyrics to "You Are My Sunshine" while spraying each other with spit more effectively than a riot cop with a hose cannon?
What hits me in the irony bone is that we greet each other with handshakes, and your hand is basically the filthiest external part of your body.
Every time you say "hello", you're inviting someone to share their own special hand-tailored version of yuck with you. You've no one to blame but yourself.
Historically speaking, you'd show your empty hand to someone to indicate to them that you weren't holding a weapon or some other stabbity thing and didn't mean them any harm. This worked fine until mankind developed clothing. I mean, naked hand-waving was fine and all as far as peacfeul intentions go, but that was a Golden Age thing and couldn't last forever.
Handshakes started happening around the time early man developed the long sleeve. Handshakes strike me as more of a basic primitive security shake-down rather than any display of amicability. You know, just in case something gets dislodged from inside your tunic and a polearm or morningstar falls onto the ground (hey, talk about embarrassing...)
Of course now that it's flu season, here we are displaying our peaceful intentions by transferring our arsenal of microscopic minions over to each person whose hand we shake. And it's mutual too, so the bacteria get to have a veritable family reunion. Forget daggers, every handclasp is an act of WAR!
It's enough to get you thinking that maybe the obsessive-compulsives are onto something with all that hand-washing.
Excuse me, I think I need to find somewhere very isolated and scrub myself down now...
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