Flu Season
If you are like a certain unnamed male parent of mine, you cannot stand the sight of a needle. That makes this a very difficult time of the year for you, because once again you have to decide which is more fun:
A) Having the flu for a week at some time in the future.
B) Getting a flu shot now.
Let us just say he's never had a flu shot, and he always gets the flu. This should probably tell us something, but I don't want to know what. Because then I might have to get a shot.
My relatives are not the only ones who get the flu, although that would probably be poetic justice for all the times they made me go to school when I felt sick. Not that I was the only one who went to school sick, which leads me to a theory of mine.
The conventional wisdom is that the flu is passed on from person to person by such contact as an infected person sneezing on you. Since no one seems to bother covering his nose and mouth when sneezing anymore, this sounds possible. My mother by the way, contends that penicillin is to blame for poor hygiene. If you catch a communicable disease nowadays, chances are good that penicillin will cure it. Therefore, you can feel free to sneeze on all your friends, because you don't have to worry that they will die. You can all take penicillin together. In fact, in some school cafeterias, children share tetracycline the way they used to split cookies.
The schools are hotbeds of flu, and every year there are at least two or three flu epidemics per school. Despite this fact, some students still manage a perfect attendance record, which means they come to school every single day, including weekends and holidays. This is not because they are healthy and never sick. They may have a raging fever and spend the day deliriously yelling for the gnomes to leave them alone, but they are there.
This is my theory: The flu initially affects perfect attendance people only. They, for their part, dutifully come to school, and keep coming until they have given it to every single other person. Students, teachers, janitors- no one is safe from the perfect attendance people. Later in life, they become the "dedicated employees," who will do the same thing to their co-workers.
I am not the only one who knows this. Go to the final assembly at any school, when the awards are handed out for highest grades, sports achievement, and attendance record. When the people with perfect attendance are called to receive their award, the hall grows silent. Everyone - teachers, students, parents, even lower-life forms like gym teachers - glower at them. It is the same kind of look you might have seen in the Old West before someone shouts, "Let's string 'em up!"
Therefore, my proposal is this: Round up the perfect attendance people - you know who they are - and bludgeon them. No, that's not sufficiently harsh. Force them to take flu shots. That will put an end to these flu epidemics. If not, it'd still be a lot of fun.
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