GUEST COLUMN | Alexandra Paskhaver
You spend all year planning the perfect time to get sick, and it sneaks up on you just the same.
There are plenty of convenient dates, like the day of a workout, the hour before a long shopping trip or the minute before you’re due to give an important presentation at work.
If I threw up over my boss, I wouldn’t just skip the presentation. I’d skip the rest of my career.
But it never happens that way. You never get that kind of good fortune, unless you’re the president of the United States and sitting next to the Japanese prime minister.
At the bare minimum, I’d love to fall ill on a Monday or Friday. It’d mean getting a long weekend.
The least useful days to get sick are Wednesdays. And last week, that was the day I woke up with a sore throat and sniffles. I’ve never been lucky with these things.
But it wasn’t a bad cold. I could still go out and do something fun. And my local park had just opened a zip line.
I called my boss. “I need the day off,” I said. I played up my sore throat. To make sure she got the point, I even sneezed into the phone.
My boss wasn’t convinced. She said I didn’t sound sick.
The zip line was growing increasingly awesome in my imagination. I asked if I could at least be let out of all my meetings.
My boss pointed out that I didn’t have any meetings on my schedule, so there was no reason for me not to show up to work. She wondered if I had any better excuses.
“Listen,” I said, shaking a box of peppercorns near the phone (I didn’t have a pill bottle handy, but that wouldn’t keep me from trying), “Do you hear how much medicine my doctor gave me? Working right now would be really tough.”
“Work is always tough,” she snapped. “I haven’t felt great for the last 35 years.”
There was no answer to that better than dropping my phone into a mug of tea, so that’s exactly what I did.
With the call ended and my phone out of commission, I was free to go. I laced up my sneakers, poured another mug of tea into a thermos and headed out.
The zip line was about two miles past the starting point of the park. Within those two miles, I rolled my ankle, got rained on, got bitten by 57 million mosquitos and was attacked by a bear.
OK, nix the bear. But if I didn’t write that, you wouldn’t have believed the other things. The journey was hard enough that I almost decided to go back to work.
But I ignored my better judgment. I limped to the zip line. There was no one else waiting for a ride. I seized the assistant by his neon-yellow jacket.
“Sir,” I said. “I have slogged two miles through cold, rain and biting insects. I have even managed to fend off my boss by pretending to be seriously ill. I deserve a ride on this zip line.”
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m only here because my superiors didn’t let me take a day off. I’m not feeling good enough to let anyone have a ride today. And if you don’t quit shaking me, you’re going to need new shoes.”
What was there to do? I gave him my tea thermos. We commiserated for a while. The zip line, unused, swayed in the wind above us.
I told you, I’ve never been lucky with these things.
Copyright 2024 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer.
