I hate being sick.

Nothing really punctuates the day besides feeling as if you’re an animated corpse.

The past few weeks have been rather tough...

If it hasn’t been one thing its been another, really. I managed to swing some work (which unfortunately looks as if it’ll be winding down this week) and through it all I’ve been fighting every step of the way to manage to not miss a day and today I was simply left without much of a choice.

That’s one of the things they don’t talk about in offices, and in the workplace in general these days, the way people feel obligated to be at work no matter what and how there is very little margin for error and people don’t have the ability to take sick time like they used to without it reflecting poorly upon them.

Unfortunately about the only thing this succeeds in doing is spreading various maladies among the whole office.

Recently, in several of the places I’ve worked at, there is this growing tendency towards what is referred to as the ‘open office,’ an office without walls or cubicles where everyone is put atop one and other all in the name of fostering a more collaborative environment.

Personally, I think of it as a load of malarky. It’s just another way to dehumanize the workplace, to put people more in line with factory farmed livestock penned together in as small a space as is possible if only to keep better tabs on people. It doesn’t work well for me because generally the projects and work I do are more of a solitary effort and if I do need input from someone I’m working with, I have no problem in shooting them an email or picking up a phone or simply walking over to where they sit and speaking to them.

But a side effect of this whole open office thing is that it’s much easier to spread germs among coworkers, simply put if someone sneezes and there isn’t a physical barrier between them and the other person well... I leave it to you to draw the appropriate conclusion.

So, I’ve been working and first a few weeks ago they ripped up all the carpet in the office. And the new carpet looks nice but the thing I don’t think people realized at the time was that previously (within the last nine months) there had been a bedbug problem. And it sure seemed as if right after they did that the next few days afterward I started discovering all kinds of marks all over my body.

The upshot was I had to bomb the house just to be sure the little buggers hadn’t hitched a ride home with me (and this is a problem I’ve never had before so I’m drawing a cause and effect line here).

A week or so after that I started having really bad pain in my stomach.

Now, the thing about getting to a certain age and feeling pain is this, most days you are going to feel something. I’m not 20 anymore and truthfully a lot of the time I feel pretty damn good (except for some of my damaged parts like my legs which still feel the effects of the scooter accident from two years past and the ruptured muscle from last year). Pain is funny though because you come to realize most pain will eventually go away if it’s not serious and you do something to address it.

In this case I had my suspicions about the cause and even though the pain at one point got severe enough I though I’d be seeing the interior of a hospital really soon, I managed to be spot on with what I though it was and corrected the problem on my own.

Concurrently, I’d been having a scratchy throat, severe sinus headache. This was after another coworker said they had to take a day off because they had a sinus infection and then it turned out both myself and the guy across from me were experiencing the same thing (again wondrous how these things can spread, isn’t it). So I walked around all of last week dealing with both the stomach thing (which gradually got better towards the end of the week) and feeling that low level shitty feeling of having a scratchy throat and being not quite sick but definitely off which blossomed into a full blown something as whatever it was took up residence in my chest.

Got a nice sore throat and a dry rasping cough out of the whole deal along with a good underlying achiness accompanied by a low grade fever. I just had to take the day off and loathe though I was to lose the day it was the best thing I could do because even though I don’t feel great I feel better than I did this morning.

But how many people can’t afford to take a day off? (I know on a level I can’t) And does that contradict with this whole diatribe I keep hearing during the run up to the election. Think I’m full of it? Read this article, and do some research on your own and you may come away surprised.