Saturday, January 14, 2006

today's topic is : feeling ill



There is nothing like watching Man Utd get beaten to make you feel a teensy bit better.

However, at the risk of sounding like a stereotypical male, I woke up this morning feeling ill. Not ill enough to not function, not ill enough to revel in the horror of my symptoms and actually enjoy the endless rounds of chicken soup and hallucinatory dreaming, but ill enough to be mildly frustrated that I don't feel better. Ill enough to complain just a little bit.

I blame aeroplanes and people who travel. Time was that your parents made sure that you you were exposed to illnesses and germs when you were a baby so you could develop immunity to all the nasty diseases that were floating around your local area. But these days it doesn't work. There is no such thing as a local area. Everybody travels around the world all the time and, as time goes on, people travel further and more often. Longer times spent on planes means more opportunities for germs to be circulated in the air conditioning. Hanging around in airports means more chance to be exposed to germs from all over the world. Which are then spread all around where I am working or shopping or whatever.

In my job - education - it is even worse than for normal people. In the past parents used to look after their poor pustulating, phlegm swamped brats when they were ill. Now everyone has to spend 22 hours a day in the office and they send their ill kids to school to get rid of them. I spend my time in roomfuls of sputtering, fevered, nasally dribbling brats and it only takes one of them to have 'adventurous' parents who went to Korea or Paraguay on a highly educational adventure holiday to infect us all with obscure diseases that our immune systems have never seen before.

Parents: Face it, your kids are not interested in Temples and are almost fatally bored by anything other than GTA. crystal meth, or flourescent crystal meth driven cartoons. Take them camping or send them to the park. Oh, and by the way, your child's fetid snot is not cute. It's not just a little sniffle. It's a tropical bloody disease that is destined to spoil MY weekend.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1464100.htm -turns out I was wrong about the planes








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