8:00 A.M. Orient yourself to the idea of waking up with the preliminary goal of sussing out whether what you’re feeling is normal alarm-clock-induced grogginess or actual illness.
8:15 A.M. Table the issue by hitting Snooze.
8:30 A.M. Synthesize the available data points: you’re achy all over, you can’t breathe out of your right nostril, it hurts to swallow, and your head weighs about ten thousand pounds. Reach consensus that you are, in fact, sick enough to stay home. Snooze again in celebration of your decision.
8:45 A.M. Draft an e-mail to your supervisors letting them know that you won’t be coming in. Debate merits of phrasing it as “taking a sick day” versus “working from home today.” If you write “working from home,” you won’t have to use a vacation day. But will everyone know that “working from home” actually means sleeping? Maybe you can do that thing where you just wake up every hour to send an e-mail so they think you’ve been at your computer the whole time.
9:00 A.M. Send e-mail. Next order of business: enjoying some guilt-free, luxurious, healing sleep.
9:01 A.M. Agenda updated to reflect new data: you can’t sleep.
9:02 A.M. Relocate from your bed to the couch. This will take about twenty minutes longer than it usually does, because you are so sick that every tiny action feels like a herculean task.
9:15 A.M. Perform the same e-mail and social-media checks you do every morning at work. But today you’re doing them in pajamas!
10:00 A.M. Take this opportunity to touch base with all the TV shows you don’t have time to watch when you’re healthy. Each show will require no more than ten minutes, because that’s how long you’re currently capable of paying attention to anything.
11:30 A.M. Consult minutes from previous days off and weekends to determine whether it’s always this hard for you to relax. If you’re using a whole vacation day for this, shouldn’t you be having a better time? Aren’t you capable of just existing in a state of physical discomfort without obsessing over how miserable you feel?
12:00 P.M. Lunch break. Seamless some soup and try to look extra sick when it arrives, so the delivery person doesn’t think you’re just lazy.
12:15 P.M. Acknowledge that you’re weirdly lonely right now and that you miss everyone at the office.
12:20 P.M. Break out into several small discussion groups on Gchat to remedy this issue. Overwhelming trend: everyone is insufficiently compassionate about your possibly fatal illness. You no longer miss them. Jerks.
12:30 P.M. Teleconference in your mom for sympathy. When she demands that you list your symptoms, tell her it doesn’t matter; it’s probably a virus. After she hangs up, wait ten minutes while she calls your nearest relative who’s a doctor, repeats your symptoms, then calls you back to tell you that it’s probably a virus.
1:00 P.M. Devote the next four hours to fitfully drifting in and out of sleep.
5:00 P.M. Conclude napping portion of the day by waking suddenly from a fever dream, newly certain that the discomfort of being sick is your punishment for some crime you don’t remember committing, possibly in a past life. Also, it’s dark out now.
5:10 P.M. Reassess your state of health. Resolved: you still feel like shit.
5:20 P.M. Spend twenty minutes looking for a thermometer. How do you not have a thermometer? You have several specific memories of buying thermometers.
5:40 P.M. Settle for feeling your forehead with your hand. It seems warm, but maybe that’s just because your hand is cold. Conduct due diligence by randomly feeling a bunch of different surfaces in your apartment to try to compare them with your forehead.
6:00 P.M. Break for cold leftover soup.
6:40 P.M. Reflect on how annoying it is that you never think to buy tissues until you’re so sick that you can’t go out to buy tissues.
6:45 P.M. After achieving unsatisfactory results from wiping your nose on your pajama sleeve, limp to the bathroom and get the roll of toilet paper.
6:50 P.M. Now your nose is red and chafed from wiping it with toilet paper.
7:00 P.M. Develop a three-pronged, forward-looking action strategy of (a) swallowing whatever expired cold medicine you find in the bathroom cabinets, (b) circling back to reëvaluate your health tomorrow morning, and (c) resolving to go to work no matter how terrible you feel, because you honestly can’t face another whole day this boring and existentially miserable.
7:30 P.M. Hold internal vote: Is it late enough to go to sleep yet?
7:31 P.M. Reach unanimous decision: Yes. ♦
