Let's see how long it takes my mom to call

I'm sick.

I saw it coming.

Last week, our secretary came in late on Tuesday, sounding awful, and was out the rest of the week, being sick.

She was back in the office on Monday.  Still sounded bad, but promising she's on antibiotics and therefore not contagious.

Our boss, who is off on vacation, called on Monday.  I needed to speak with our boss.  (It was fairly important.  It was a question that might give me an extra month to do some work.)

Here's the key:  he didn't call on the office line (from which he could easily be forwarded from the secretary's phone to my phone).  He called -- for whatever bizarre reason -- on our secretary's cell phone.  After she talked to him for ten minutes or so, she handed me her cell phone.

And I actually pondered it for a second or two.  I thought, I could just say, "Don't worry about it," and just ask him when he came back to the office later this week, thereby avoiding the germ-coated phone.  But we really needed to take care of this, so I took the phone and talked to him, and, yes, postponed the matter for a month.

Got back to my desk and proceeded to more-or-less wash my face with anti-bacterial hand gel, but that stuff's got limits.

Yesterday morning, woke up feeling fine.  Driving to work, I started feeling a little off.  (I actually googled this.  In my experience, the very first sign that I'm getting sick is a heightened sense of smell.  The internet refuses to back me up on it, saying, in fact, that some people get a reduction in their sense of smell when they get sick, but what does the internet know?)  So, heightened sense of smell, followed by general malaise.  I packed up a bunch of work (always hard to know (a) exactly how long one will be sick and (b) how productive one will be during this time), and drove home, stopping to pick up a quart and a half of chicken soup on the way.

Which, if you insert about 24 hours of sniffling, drinking tea, and generally feeling sorry for myself, brings us to today.