1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
So today is my favorite day at work all year because it's flu shot day!!!!!
I'll leave the fact that the best day I have at work all year is a day on which I am injected with a weakened pathogen for the psychologists to grapple with. The truth is, I'm not even close to joking about this being my favorite day at work all year.
You see, before I started working at my current behemoth of a company, I worked for a very small research outfit in Doylestown, PA for three years. And you know how the real way Europeans were able to conquer so much of the world over time had nothing to do with superior warfare skills or any of that nonsense but rather was almost entirely due to the fact that Europeans had lived in cities for a long time already and carried the exotic smorgasbord of germs to foreign lands thereby decimating entire populations that had lived in blissful isolation without the need for the necessary antibodies and immune responses required to survive the germ-soaked European "visits"? Well, going from a small isolated company to a massive one with lots of people packed together in small areas kind of made me like those blissful ignorant natives - I was single and coming from an isolated environment, basically I checked all the boxes for "worst case scenario". The first year I worked here, I started about a month after flu shots were given and I have never had a year when I was as sick as I was that year. Suddenly all these people were coming into the office wearing invisible suits made of the finest germs they could pick up from their kids, germs they were happily spreading around the office. I may as well have been licking bedpans. I got everything that first year. I'm pretty sure I had smallpox for a couple days there in February. But the next year rolled around and I had developed a little bit of immunity having pretty much caught everything there was to catch already. And then those sweet, sweet words popped into my daily update inbox: "Flu Shot Day in October". I signed up, got my free shot, and never got the tiniest bit sick all season. I thought that might be a coincidence, but still got one each year thereafter, until around 2006 or so when a shortage limited the number of folks who could qualify. Being an (allegedly) healthy male in my 30's, I wasn't on the qualify list, so I couldn't get one. What I did get, though, was a brutal case of the flu. Coincidence? I think not. So ever since then, I look forward to Flu Shot Day like some people look forward to vacation or Xmas or the birth of a child or other less important trivialities. Long live Flu Shot Day!
I'll leave the fact that the best day I have at work all year is a day on which I am injected with a weakened pathogen for the psychologists to grapple with. The truth is, I'm not even close to joking about this being my favorite day at work all year.
You see, before I started working at my current behemoth of a company, I worked for a very small research outfit in Doylestown, PA for three years. And you know how the real way Europeans were able to conquer so much of the world over time had nothing to do with superior warfare skills or any of that nonsense but rather was almost entirely due to the fact that Europeans had lived in cities for a long time already and carried the exotic smorgasbord of germs to foreign lands thereby decimating entire populations that had lived in blissful isolation without the need for the necessary antibodies and immune responses required to survive the germ-soaked European "visits"? Well, going from a small isolated company to a massive one with lots of people packed together in small areas kind of made me like those blissful ignorant natives - I was single and coming from an isolated environment, basically I checked all the boxes for "worst case scenario". The first year I worked here, I started about a month after flu shots were given and I have never had a year when I was as sick as I was that year. Suddenly all these people were coming into the office wearing invisible suits made of the finest germs they could pick up from their kids, germs they were happily spreading around the office. I may as well have been licking bedpans. I got everything that first year. I'm pretty sure I had smallpox for a couple days there in February. But the next year rolled around and I had developed a little bit of immunity having pretty much caught everything there was to catch already. And then those sweet, sweet words popped into my daily update inbox: "Flu Shot Day in October". I signed up, got my free shot, and never got the tiniest bit sick all season. I thought that might be a coincidence, but still got one each year thereafter, until around 2006 or so when a shortage limited the number of folks who could qualify. Being an (allegedly) healthy male in my 30's, I wasn't on the qualify list, so I couldn't get one. What I did get, though, was a brutal case of the flu. Coincidence? I think not. So ever since then, I look forward to Flu Shot Day like some people look forward to vacation or Xmas or the birth of a child or other less important trivialities. Long live Flu Shot Day!
