workingfortheman.com

It's been a long time since I've had to work in an internet sweatshop, but for five weeks this winter I was faced with the smelly, sweaty squalor one finds only when you shove a bunch of flash programmers and designers into a small open-air space. We all sat quietly in two rows, back to back, with about eight feet separating us widthwise, and a foot separating us lengthwise. On any day this is not an ideal scenario (and perhaps some day I will write a manifesto about sweatshops in corporate America, but I've got a feeling there are some folks in third world countries who are probably first in line in the complaint department), but when the person sitting next to you is sick, it adds a new level of suckiness to the situation.

So the guy sitting next to me my first week there? Sick as a dog. And he sat there for three days, coughing, sneezing, breathing, germing, and also apologizing about being in an office and possibly getting everyone sick, but he really needed the money, there was no way he couldn't come in. And by the end of the third day, everyone in the room was coughing and sneezing, and everytime he heard another cough you would hear him mutter, "Sorry," under his breath, because he knew it was him, he knew it was his dirty, dirty sick germs that were slowly destryoing us all.

Except for me, the girl in the most direct line of fire. I was holding steady. Not me. I'm the tough girl. Sorry for everyone else, sure. But I was going to beat this thing.

And then after the fourth day, a few hours after I left the sick zone, I coughed once, than twice, than one more time, and there was a catch in my throat, which turned to a swell. And then I started yawning like crazy. And then a raging fever tore through my body like a flash flood in some dry Midwestern state.

And damn if I didn't have tonsils like golf balls the next morning.

Here's the cruel twist - I had to go to work the next day, and the day after that. I had important internal presentations, then revisions, then big client presentations, then revisions, and the real truth was, I needed the money too. Like, I had to go, I had no choice. I couldn't get anyone else sicker than they already were though, and I took heart in that.

But let me apologize now to the people who were next to me on the subway...

Jami Attenberg lives in Brooklyn, NY. You can find more of her work at whatever-whenever.net.

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