Quarantine that virus! Educate that boss!! Spread this message!!!

There is a viral infection going round the UK (and the rest of the world too, courtesy of the airlines) which does a sore throat, bad cough, pain in front of head, muscle aches and makes you feel bad. It seems to last an unusually long time. Three weeks is common.

It is caused by a Virus. That's V_I_R_U_S, a tiny little bit of RNA with a protein coat that sneers at antibiotics, even the new ones that cost $200 a shot ($4000 for a full course thank you very much k-ching, next!). Not a bloody great lolloping hairy bacterium with a cell wall that we can disrupt with twopenny antibiotics. A teeny weeny microdot nothing of a virus that your lymphocytes will kill off in a few days IF you rest up and make sure they have enough Vit C and Zinc to eat. That's it - have a rest. If you are ill, stay home. Don't go to work, don't go on the bus, on the train, on the tube or on the aeroplane. Especially not the aeroplane. Do not go to the party - you won't enjoy it. Just say home and get under the duvet. If you are a man you may find it helps if you make a little whimpering noise every 10-15 minutes.

Why rest? Well, put it like this - why go to work when you feel like a used condom?
OK, OK, you try to go to work because your boss expects you to.

But this is because your boss is, in this regard anyway effing mad, stupid, dumb, ingnorant, dense and obtuse. Illiterate. Uneducated, uninstructed, unlearned, unlettered unschooled untaught and untutored. Thick.

S/he also is not qualified in medicine. If s/he phones and asks why you stay home ask them straight back, "Are you a doctor? No? Are you a microbiologist then? No? Now do you want all your office off sick in a week or do you just want to do without me for a couple of days? Which would you prefer? Eh? EH?" Then cough into the receiver of the phone until s/he goes away.

Listen: if you go to work when sick,

1) you will make mistakes. The decimal point will go in the wrong place and your boss could lose millions.
2) you will be ill for longer, possibly for months or years.
3) you will spread it to the people you meet on the bus train lift and in the office - or the whole buiilding if it is air conditioned.

So If you are ill, stay home. Do not even go to the doctor. Just stay home. If you need a certificate just phone up for one. Why would the doctor want you in his waiting room and his surgery snuffling and coughing all over him just so he can give you a suffer ticket?

If the Health Minister and the director of the CBI stood up on telly shoulder to shoulder and said "IF YOU ARE ILL, STAY HOME" the NHS would be billions of pounds better off each year, and the economy would be tens of billions of pounds better off per annum.

But they won't, because they are bosses. (see above).

If all this seems a little brusque it is only because I care.

Please feel free to click the little envelope down there at bottom right and pass this intelligence on to your friends.

How much better to pass on useful knowledge than to pass on a virus.