Cough… Cough… I Feel a Slight Touch of Blue Flu Coming On

Six years on the job, and not one sick day. I am yet to miss a game because of illness. That is not to say I haven’t been sick. I have input basketball games with sweat dripping from my feverish face, aches up and down my body, sinuses set to explode and the kind of sore throat about which they make commercials with really bad actors. And there I was, not caring about the outcome, so long as it was over and I could go to my warm bed, and hopefully get better in six hours of sleep before the 9:00 a.m. meeting.

If I had left at 6:00 p.m. on a day that most would have taken off, no one would have been available to cover the rebounds, assists and blocked shots of the post-finals week non-conference showdown entertaining the tens of ones of fans on hand. The box score wouldn’t have gone on the web, the visiting SID would have been left in an awkward position without a game file or box score, and the papers without a press release to copy and paste into their pages.

The email would have piled up complaining about the misery of an athletic department that can’t post a score the same night as the game in a world in which almost everyone it seems is providing stats live. A new flurry would follow when the stats were not to the liking of fans and coaches on hand who had a better view than me as I tried to pick rebounds and the like from a video in which I couldn’t read the numbers on about three-quarters of the involved jerseys.

Oh, and while I was watching the video the next day, still more emails questioning my competence, intelligence, dedication, would roll in. Yeah, the annoying and insulting repercussions of not being in attendance would have provided a bigger headache than the one afflicting me during the game.

It doesn’t make me a hero. No, it doesn’t even make me special. All of us within the ranks do it, have done it, and will likely continue to do it. If anything, it just makes me an asshole. It makes all of us assholes. If you can’t figure out why without my further elaboration, you are a dumb-ass asshole.

I n this life, I have friends away from sports. On rare occasions, I actually get to see them. I call that fleeting period of my life summer. One of those summer nights, I sat out on my deck with a beat cop and a beer. He, along with several other members of his district, and several more from other districts around this East Coast megalopolis city had all contracted the same illness. Its side effects include a day of golf, fishing, lawn work and time spent with the family. It is brought on by being overworked and underpaid in a thankless but necessary job.

It seems that their inboxes do not fill with complaints when they are stricken with the illness known as blue flu, but when it strikes in the summer, which is sort of “season crossover time” in the world of police, the complaints from the city’s denizens become numerous, overwhelming supervisors, and eroding public confidence in the po-po’s leadership. That heat rolls the shit back uphill, if only for a few days, and somehow parties representing either side meet and work out grievances. Sometimes the flu hits pilots of airlines, and even nurses have been known to contract a similar illness.

So I am left wondering, what would happen if I became violently ill one day, and the SID I had shaken hands with earlier in the week had contracted the illness from me, and he had shaken the hands of two other SIDs that week, who had shaken two or three more hands, and the symptoms all coincidentially manifested themselves on the same Saturday?

What would Sunday’s newspapers look like when there was a Saturday on which no one was healthy enough to send out scores? What would web sites look like if no one was healthy enough post scores? Would people notice the starting lineups not announced, the programs not set out, and the lack of live stats?

What would be the reaction of parents and athletes who were replied to with the simple truth that I and all of my colleagues mysteriously fell ill on the same day, and our supervisors never had the foresight to recognize they have no redundancy in place for a technocratic position? Would they email AD’s? Would they email presidents?

Several of my colleagues and I have had the discussion about the work that would pile up in between, but as a firm believer in postmodern theory, I say if we treat it like a non-day, that is precisely what it becomes. The scores never get posted. The stats never get factored in. The kids who we don’t want to see get screwed get screwed a bit, but once in awhile, when you are being regularly screwed without the decency of dinner first, you have to look out for number one. The truth is, while we don’t want to see them screwed, mommy and daddy, and mommy and daddy’s checkbooks want to see that far less than we do.

God knows they aren’t afraid to pick up a phone or click an email link to get what they want.