It’s cold season, so I really shouldn’t be surprised that my Saturday night out at Stetson’s resulted in me sick as a dog.

Of course, I don’t know that I wasn’t already sick, and that I wasn’t “Patient Zero”* who infected the vast majority of PB and Tuna with the illness that sunk most of those in attendance. If there’s any consolation to being sick, however, it’s that the douchy preppy kids who were being remarkably inappropriate are also probably sick.

It started late Sunday night with a scratchy throat, and by the time I was in my early afternoon meeting that Monday at work, I began feeling light headed. I tried to call out for the Bookstore, but others already had, and my feelings of duty trumped my feelings of blech-blarg-boo. I left early, went to bed early (where I promptly discovered that one of the cats had thrown up in bed, so I discarded the sheets and slept on the bare mattress), and promptly my scratchy throat went to full bore “extreme agony to swallow” that kept me up until 2am, by which point I’d had so much theraflu I was able to swallow without pain, and went to sleep.

Just to wake up three and a half hours later to go to work, even though I felt awful. But I was a trooper, and I went in anyway. For two reasons:

1. I’d stayed up late Sunday baking pumpkin pies to take into work. I baked them Sunday to take in on Tuesday because one of my coworkers, a big Phillies’ fan, was up in Philadelphia through Monday, and had begged for pumpkin pies on his return. I’m a nice guy like that.

2. I used the bulk of my available PTO (paid time off) for my vacation a few weeks ago. I don’t need a large block of time for quite some time, but I do need a day Thanksgiving week, a day or two for Christmas week, and a day or two for New Year’s week. And since PTO accrues at the rate of 4.61 hours a pay period, I kind of need to hoard it, yanno?

Yeah, well, good plan, but it failed around noon when my lack of sleep and illness both double-teamed me. I was on the phone trying to get in touch with a business contact in the United Kingdom. One moment, I was talking with a pleasant enough Scottish woman, musing on her appropriate use of British slang, when suddenly, I realized my head was lying against the receiver, my glasses were askew, the phone was making a dial tone, and I’d been pretty damn sound asleep.

I managed to crank my eyes open and gave it another try, but I fell asleep again. Fortunately, I have an isolated and large cube, so I slunk down in my chair, propped my feet up on the other chair in my cube, leaned back, and tried to take a power nap. That lasted until my team leader shook me awake and asked if I was okay. Nope! Nada! Zilch.

And just like that I committed to heading home. And I did. I napped on the bus, and I napped on the Metro, I woke up long enough to jump off at Van Ness and stocked up on orange juice and throat drops, then bused home. I walked in the door, put the groceries away, and slept until about 5pm. It was weird waking up because it felt like Wednesday.

Odd.

I spent the rest of the evening recovering, drinking copious amounts of TheraFlu, commiserating with other drunk bloggers on Twitter, and doing research for my upcoming post “Die Hard: An All American Christmas Movie.” First time I’ve seen that film in probably close to a decade, but yippie-cayee, motherfucker! never goes out of style.

Fortunately, I’ve got a fairly strong immune system. Nothing more than a cold, I kept telling myself, right up until — literally, just now, I read @lustyreader’s latest Tweet: “ITS OFFICIAL hubby has the swine flu, just came back from the doctor @pbandtunakilledmyhubby.”

Wait, so did I just survive Swine Flu?

Anyway.

My alarm goes off this morning, I get out of bed, get dressed, go to work. My appetite is back pretty much full strength, so I talk a few other office peeps into ordering out, and we dial into our favorite Chinese delivery place. Quoted a price and a delivery time, gather the money together and give it to the attractive Eastern European woman who sits closest to the front door.

And just a few minutes before the food is supposed to arrive …

… the fire alarm goes off.

And as we’re walking out of the office, two things:

1. Is that the smell of burned popcorn?

2. Why does this seem familiar?

The reason it seems familiar is this: a month after I first started working here, say April 2008, one of my new coworkers burned toast, set off the fire alarm, and we were only allowed back into the building after the fire department entered our suite, removed the offending toaster, took it outside, and doused the fucking thing with a spray of water. Then they confiscated it.

And in fact, that smell of burned popcorn?

Yeah, one of my coworkers. A new guy, he actually started the week I was out.

He burned microwavable popcorn, and it set off the fire alarm.

Just when we were supposed to get our lunch.

Fortunately, wandering around outside with every employee from all six floors of our building (with the exception of the douchebags on the 2nd floor who are so important that they refuse to leave their offices, but that’s okay, because some day this building really will catch on fire and we’ll all be standing outside safe as we watch them burn to crispies. Fuckers), I found the Chinese guy, and paid him, and shortly there after, we all got to go back into the building, and now I might just’ve recovered from Swine Flu.

Awesome.

*I mean, I might’ve been: folks been sick at both jobs, you know?