Oct 30, 2008 - 04:30 AM
By Neil Crone
Fall is here and the microbes are upon us. Whereas only scant weeks ago I was gently awakened by the gay chirrup of the chickadee, the haughty bark of the blue jay and the mellifluous warble of the robin red breast, I am now jarred from rest by the cacophonous hack of the phlegm-chested teenager and the red-nosed spouse. It's that time of the year. Our children bounce off to school, happy, healthy and tanned from a summer spent outdoors and return home carrying more germs than an African monkey. I'd sooner kiss a Komodo dragon.
And what else should we expect? We take them out of the fresh air and suddenly coop them up inside a sealed school for six hours a day where they trade bacteria like hockey cards. Have you been inside a school lately? When it's full of kids? It's like wading through a petri dish. If you stand in one place too long you can actually feel stuff growing on you. And then, come the second or third week into October when the mercury starts to drop, they spark up the radiators. Heat, moisture and hormones. The perfect storm. A pubescent andromeda strain. I don't know how teachers do it.
They should be issued haz-mat suits for the first two weeks.
A big part of the problem is that many parents, some for legitimate reasons, others because they're dopes, don't keep their kids home when they're sick. I taught high school for a few years and I remember seeing children dragging themselves into my classroom who looked like they'd spent the night below decks on the Amistad. Kids who could barely pick up their pens, who should've been on an I.V. Kids who made the Donner party look positively robust.
But this is not just a parent/child issue. This is a cultural thing too. Adults do it constantly. How many times have you had some clod show up at the office dripping his Ebola over everything he touches? For some perverse reason we call these people "brave" and "devoted" instead of the more accurate "idiot." Stay home!
The world, believe it or not, will continue to spin without you.
Filing your report or holding your meeting a day or two late will not throw the universe into immediate and irreversible paralysis. And the thing that drives me and every other self-employed individual out there nutty, is that most people with regular jobs get a little thing called "sick leave," a remarkable concept where employers actually pay you to stay home and not infect the rest of the company. I don't have that luxury. What's more, I make a good deal of my living with my voice. If that goes because some Typhoid Murray has decided to make it to a dinner party even though "I'm really coming down with something," then I'm pooched. I can take all the sick days I want . . . but nobody's sending me a paycheque.
In the old days this really wasn't an issue. We didn't have anti-biotics and penicillin. If people didn't look after themselves, if they didn't listen to their bodies and rest and eat healthy foods . . . they died. And believe me if somebody showed up to the barn-raising with a runny nose or a hacking cough, they and the horse they rode in on were promptly sent packing. So forewarned is forearmed. If you show up at my doorstep with the sniffles don't blame me if I get all Amish on your butt.
Durham resident Neil Crone, actor-comic-writer, saves some of his best lines for his columns.
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