Like flies

Working in pods is great. You get to have a chat with your co-workers, and get to know each other.

If you need a hand with something, there's a captive pool of trainers and mentors awaiting you.

If you break open a cake of chocolate, you can guarantee that you won't be the only one to eat it, and you find out what other human beings do on the weekend that you can never be bothered to do yourself.

Unfortunately there's a downside to this particular brand of companionship. It comes in the form of viruses that use the closeness of our office relationship to spread their viral families and buy cheap real estate while we're looking the other way.

There's actually another downside which is if you're an introvert it's very hard to get your alone time to recharge your batteries when in such close proximity, but that will keep for another day.

On Monday there was a person in our pod who started to feel unwell. On Tuesday the same person was far sicker, but misery loves company so they dragged themselves into work to breathe their horrible, virus laden breath into the previously uncontaminated air that their pod buddies were also breathing.

On Wednesday, the ill person didn't show. Everyone else did, but one had to leave early because they, too, had fallen ill.

On Thursday the same two staff were away, and another two staff members were starting to feel a bit off-colour.

This would've been an interesting study in the social life of disease, except I was one of those two staff members.

Not happy. Not interested. Except in grumbling. Man flu sometimes crosses the gender boundaries, you know.

Today was Friday and what would usually be the best day of the working week was instead full of coughing, spluttering and headaches. Pounding, pounding headaches.

It was also full of sugar. Sweet, sweet sugar. Diet's out the window again. Those odd wee virus bodies moving through my bloodstream, not to mention my mucus stream, have powerful cravings that laugh in the face of my willpower.