Take That! Little Germ Factories!

Ha ha! I've vanquished the cold!

Working with kids means you get sick more often than working-with-adults people do. It is a well-known fact that children, while sometimes misleadingly adorable and precious, are simple little petri dishes of communicable diseases. And the little grubbers are persistently taught to share things with others.

Sneeze, hurk, cough, snort.

Kill me now.

It only took two weeks, three packets of nodo-ame (throat drops; i.e. candy!), and four boxes of expensive tissues to get the mucus to turn from yellow to transparent. It's still flowing like a faucet, but we may attribute this to perpetual allergies, not actual plague.

Others of my acquaintance have been less favored by fortune.

My neighbor, the next-door Kiwi, was stricken with Norovirus and was consequently banned from the school and office premises, days after its disappearance. Apparently very young children can sometimes die from the dreadful pooping and puking scourge. In retrospect, he concedes it might just as easily have been food poisoning brought on by his wife's incorrectly cooked tofu. Either way, it's five days of vacation shot to piss.

Not me! I'm turning Japanese and I insist on attending work while I struggle with infectious diseases. As testimony to how awful I felt on Monday, I wore a semi-permeable cloth mask over my mouth and nose while attending Junior High classes. While masks make Westerners think of terrorists (in Tokyo, I'm sure this train of thought carries some weight), here in Japan, wearing a mask symbolizes your selfless act of putting the group above yourself.

In the west, when you're sick, you call the office and say, I'm working from home. No need to check up on me, I'll be at the golfing range - I mean, in bed all day. Cough, cough.

In Japan, staying home literally means your work will not be done. If it's possible to work from home, I've never heard of anybody doing it. And the simple fact is, nobody can do your job.

Let me repeat that: NOBODY can do your job for you.

You see, business in Japan is so compartmentalized that office workers' responsibilities rarely overlap. This not only means that when the volunteer who oversees Sports Club step out for a ciggy, the secretary has to take a message because no one else can answer questions about the next day's practice schedule. If the volunteer is absent all day, vital questions like the "basketball or table tennis conundrum" might never be addressed. Imagine being absent all week. Your desk is now full of post-it notes with politely urgent reminders to call back every Obaachan in the neighborhood who didn't read the monthly newsletter. (I helped put 2,000 of those @&%^!! things together. Read them, minna-san!)

My boss was in the hospital for almost three months recovering from shoulder surgery. When he came back to work, he spent most of his time sitting at his desk working out the budget, like he does every year at this time. Except this year he was twelve weeks behind. Because nobody could even get information together in his absence.

It's a little ridiculous.

In some cases, it's obvious.

I'm the only person in the Junior High who speaks English, so even though they don't use me very often, I simply can't be absent. What would they do without the CD player?

So I wore a mask.

And happily (albeit groggily) shared my native-speaker knowledge and my foreign-acquired sickness with my students.

Happy to return the favor!