Please go home if you're sick.

Please go home. You aren’t productive. You’re hardly breathing. And whatever dead air you manage to wheeze out smells like those Mucinex phlegm-monsters are running a meth lab in your throat. No one can get any work done because of your coughing. Seriously, there’s enough snot leaking from your orifices to be some sort of Double Dare set piece. Like, any second some suburban kids are going to run over to your head and search for a flag up in your sinuses. We’re shooting Airborne intravenously while all you’ve done today is suck up Ricolas the way food industry employees suck up DUIs. Maybe in your fever dream you’re working, but in the real world you’re just sitting motionless at your desk with more crumpled kleenexes around your computer than a teen who just found out that Pornhub exists.

Please go home. You are disgusting. The sore skin under your nose is raw enough to glow in the dark. The corners of your mouth are crusted over with cough residue. No one here acknowledges you because no one wants to hear Tom Waits on his death bed. We try to act like you don't exist, but ultimately we know it’s hopeless. You’ve already coated every surface within your mucous splatter zone. Now we’re just trapped helplessly in your cloud of infection. You’re Columbus and we’re the Native Americans. You’re the Germans in WWI and we’re inhaling your mustard gas. You’re a crop duster and we’re all frantic Cary Grants. You’re a Dutch Oven and we’re neck deep in an endless flu fart. You’ve doomed us all.

Please go home. You aren’t resilient, you’re an asshole. There are sick days for a reason and it’s so you don’t have to be a constant reminder that each and every one of us will one day die. We’re not even trying to work anymore. Our only focus is survival. We’ve shut down our computers and focused on consuming a few million times the suggested daily intake of vitamin C. We’re showing signs of Acute OJ Poisoning, Reverse Scurvy. We piss full Flintstones vitamin tablets and we pray to our new Orange God.This is all because of you.

Please go home. We have loved ones, pets, rent to pay. Please use whatever energy you’ve gotten from choking down chicken broth and head home or take a shortcut to the morgue. You don’t need to die here. Seriously. Even cats find dark corners. We won’t blame you. We won’t miss you. Unless we need a real life example of what that green gas in The Rock does to a human body, you aren’t really offering much to the workplace.

– Ian "Salmon Season" Golding (@iggolding)