Coffees And Sneezes
If our sports reporter Annie McGuire lived in America she would not have been injured today. Instead I rounded a corner at Pacific Quay to find her nursing a hand which was swathed in bandages and was nestling on a bag of ice cubes. Apparently she had scalded herself with hot coffee. In America that coffee would have been contained in a paper cup emblazoned with a suitable warning, such as: THIS COFFEE IS HOT, STUPID, SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT LITIGATION IF YOU SPILL IT ON YOURSELF.
This was my first day back in Glasgow since the Christmas holidays and every second person I encountered was coughing and spluttering. Many were not even at their desks at all, but were hiding under duvets at home. At times, the staff restaurant was almost deserted, save for hapless sports reporters queuing up to buy piping hot beverages for use as props in a juggling act.
I'm tempted to blame our open-plan environment for the rapid spread of germs. Back at our old building on everyone was isolated within small offices. Bugs could not jump easily from person to person, but then, neither could ideas. In those days if you wanted to infect a colleague with a bit of bubonic plague you had to e-mail it to them.
It gets worse: there are vistors arriving from the outside world with new forms of sickness which defy diagnosis. This afternoon, for example, I shared the lift with a journalist who told me that he was officially signed off sick from work but that he had struggled out of bed to keep his appointment with me.
"What exactly is wrong with you?" I asked, pressing myself into the wall of the lift in the way Batman & Robin used to when there was a risk of the floor opening.
"I'm not sure, " said the journalist, "but the doctors think it's a rare virus that's only contagious in confined spaces."
Now that's just sick.
