Influenza: a user’s guide

I got whacked by a badass virus last week, and I think it was honest-to-goodness influenza. My symptoms pretty much matched those on this list:

• Sudden onset: I got whacked a week ago Sunday night (after, oddly enough, just getting over a cold)
• Fever for 3-4 days. Yep – 101 without meds, 100 with
• Headache: yep, sometimes
• General aches and pains: check
• Fatigue, weakness: it’s been ten days now, and I still need to nap occasionally
• Extreme exhaustion: not too bad, but I slept way more than usual
• Stuffy nose: yep
• Chest discomfort: I was wheezing a lot for two days
• Hacking cough: oh yeah (I still have a bit of this every now and then)

Usually, when I catch a bug, I try to tough it out without taking too many drugs. Not this time, boyo. After a couple of days, I assembled the Influenza Survival Kit, whose contents I shall describe to you now.

Acetaminophen: Reliably dropped my fever from 101 to just above 100. That drop of one degree made all the difference in the world – it allowed me to be functional for the four days I was feverish. It got to the point where I could tell exactly how long the drug was effective for (six hours).

By the way: if you have to shower when you have a fever, lay out all your clothes beforehand. That allows you to minimize the time you spend shivering while you put on your change of clothes.

And remember to take your fever-reduction medication just before bedtime. That way, you don’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling like shit.

Cough medicine: the nurse from Telehealth Ontario recommended I buy something with DM in its product name. I did. My coughing didn’t keep me awake at night, so I guess it’s mission accomplished.

Fluids: they’re not kidding when they say “drink plenty of fluids”. I put away a litre and a half of water and a litre of orange juice every day without effort.

Lip balm: when I had had a fever for three days, my lips became dried out and cracked. It finally occurred to me to buy lip balm. O, dear reader, it was like heaven on earth.

Cough drops: The nurse recommended these too. They kept my throat from becoming dry.

Mindless computer game to distract me: I downloaded bzflag from the net and installed it. In this game, you are a tank. You kill other tanks, and try to avoid being killed yourself. I was really bad at this, but it kept my mind off my flu symptoms, and probably saved me a few dozen coughs at least.

I think that’s it. Oh, and apologies to everybody who invited me to anything the week before Christmas: I had to bail out on everything, as I was a disease vector. (I am grateful that the bug hit me the week after my contract ended: I probably would have had to stagger to work no matter how sick I was, as being sick would have cost me money that I can’t afford to give up right now.)

Free rice

A while back, somebody pointed me at Free Rice, which is a website created by the people who created The Hunger Site. The idea is this: every time you guess the correct meaning of a word, the Free Rice site donates 20 grains of rice through the United Nations. This allows you to simultaneously achieve two worthwhile goals: feed the hungry, and waste productive time at work.

And, totally unrelated to the above: Joe Posnanski is rapidly becoming my favourite Internet baseball writer.

Shoutout to the TTC

I don’t know what the TTC’s reputation for reliability is these days, but I thought I’d provide a data point.

For 45 consecutive rush-hour mornings, ending last Friday, I took the subway from Broadview to Yonge and then switched to the northbound train to Eglinton. In all that time, I was only late for work once, despite always arriving on the platform at the last possible minute. And, even then, I was only late because an earlier delay had created a huge crowd at Broadview, and I had to wait seven trains before I could find one I could squeeze onto. This seems like a pretty good rate of reliability to me.

Apologies to my four or possibly five readers (if you count GUSTAV) – I haven’t really wanted to write much here lately. I’m currently doing my new thing, which is playing around with Photoshop words and pictures collages. I’ll probably post here every now and again, but it’ll mostly be links to weird stuff I find on the net.

Manuals, manuals, manuals

My current writing contract is about to expire, which means I’m being contacted by recruiters again. And already I have a couple of stories.

There was the recruiter who asked me whether I had any “experience writing manuals”. I said, yes, what I do for a living is write manuals, user guides, and similar documents of all kinds. He then wondered whether I could revise my resume to include the word “manuals” more often, since that is what the job description called for. When I told a friend about this, she suggested I change my name to “David Manuals Till” to make a better impression.

Then, last week, I was contacted by a recruiter who asked me to fill out a questionnaire. This form included the following questions:

Are you ambitious? Briefly describe your ambitions.
Are you an above average performer? Provide some pertinent information.
Do you care to safeguard your lifestyle? How?
Have you maximized your earning capacity? How would you improve earnings?

These questions were unintentionally hilarious, but they also made me feel kind of sad and thoughtful. The people who contacted me and who designed this questionnaire were clearly not native English speakers. And I suspect, given their emphasis on ambition and earnings, that they may very well have been born in extreme poverty, and probably have struggled to get where they are now. I feel lucky to have been raised in a comparatively sheltered environment.

(By the way, I didn’t fill out the questionnaire.)

18 seconds

I got a book out from the library today, and someone had left the bottom half of a torn sheet of paper in the book. I guess this person was using it as a bookmark.

The sheet of paper had writing on it. On the front, the note said:

Short term human memory is 18 seconds.
Never Complain
Never Explain

On the back, there was this (the part in parentheses was in the margin):

You look (like you were) rode hard & put away wet.

By the way, in case you don’t know: Found collects this sort of thing.

One more reason to keep going

Found this today, thanks to MetaFilter: somewhere in Sweden, they are building the world’s largest moose.

“From its antlers, more than 500 metres above sea level, visitors will be able to enjoy the spectacular view over the valleys below.”