Crumbs. For the first time in a very long time I've got a stupendous cold. One of the sort that starts off with an actual dripping nose. Bizarre. But it brings to mind two stories relating to such an affliction, one from my own past, and one from long ago in my father's.
The very first contract programming job that I got was in 1973, and because it was to do with Air Traffic Control I had to have security clearance. During the week that this took, the firm stuck me in a temporary office off the actually site. At first this seemed like a good deal, as the office was in the Stoke Poges Country Club, but the uplifting feelings inspired driving through the beautiful grounds towards the lovely frontage were soon dispelled when I entered through a side door and found that I was to be incarcerated in a section of converted windowless basement corridor with only a rather uncommunicative bloke who gave me a pile of astonishingly boring manuals to read.
To make things much worse, I had hardly got settled in when I was suddenly felled by a colossal cold. This being the first week of a very well paid new job, I couldn't take a day off, so I just had to get on with it. My companion, who could have been no happier with his lot than me was one of those people who would lapse into staring blankly when his mind drifted. Usually this would mean he was staring at me, or rather through me. The room was far too warm, and so I sat there reading boring paperwork, fighting sleep and mopping up my dripping nose. Sadly in the end I just dropped off to sleep. I woke up to find my companion staring in a kind of horror at the middle of my chest, and found that, unserviced, my nose had dripped copiously onto my tie, which had a large damp patch right across the middle.
If possible, my father's story was more disgusting. In his junior school, the headmaster was responsible for dishing out the school dinner. The problem was that he always had a chronic drip on the end of his nose, which inevitably would fall into one meal at least. How the children watched to try not to receive the meal with this benison. An associated story was that the same master had a cat which would sit on his shoulder during the dispensing of food, and on one occasion it fell off into the large tureen of stew meant to feed the whole school. The master extracted the catpicked up the tureen and carried it back into the kitchen, where luckily there was a completely identical tureen full of stew ready to replace it.
The very first contract programming job that I got was in 1973, and because it was to do with Air Traffic Control I had to have security clearance. During the week that this took, the firm stuck me in a temporary office off the actually site. At first this seemed like a good deal, as the office was in the Stoke Poges Country Club, but the uplifting feelings inspired driving through the beautiful grounds towards the lovely frontage were soon dispelled when I entered through a side door and found that I was to be incarcerated in a section of converted windowless basement corridor with only a rather uncommunicative bloke who gave me a pile of astonishingly boring manuals to read.
To make things much worse, I had hardly got settled in when I was suddenly felled by a colossal cold. This being the first week of a very well paid new job, I couldn't take a day off, so I just had to get on with it. My companion, who could have been no happier with his lot than me was one of those people who would lapse into staring blankly when his mind drifted. Usually this would mean he was staring at me, or rather through me. The room was far too warm, and so I sat there reading boring paperwork, fighting sleep and mopping up my dripping nose. Sadly in the end I just dropped off to sleep. I woke up to find my companion staring in a kind of horror at the middle of my chest, and found that, unserviced, my nose had dripped copiously onto my tie, which had a large damp patch right across the middle.
If possible, my father's story was more disgusting. In his junior school, the headmaster was responsible for dishing out the school dinner. The problem was that he always had a chronic drip on the end of his nose, which inevitably would fall into one meal at least. How the children watched to try not to receive the meal with this benison. An associated story was that the same master had a cat which would sit on his shoulder during the dispensing of food, and on one occasion it fell off into the large tureen of stew meant to feed the whole school. The master extracted the catpicked up the tureen and carried it back into the kitchen, where luckily there was a completely identical tureen full of stew ready to replace it.
