The Guy is convinced he’s getting sick again.
“I would take Nyquil,” he said as I groveled under the bed, looking for my glasses, “but then I wouldn’t be helpful to you.”
I excavated myself from layers of dust and popped my head over the bed’s edge to stare at him. “Helpful with what?” I demanded.
“With Hobbes in case he woke up during the night.”
I stared harder. “You’re — not usually helpful during the night anyway,” I said.
“True,” he said.
“I mean, with the rare exception when you are–”
“True,” he said again, and brightened.
“Okay then,” I said.
He took some Nyquil.
***
We are experiencing a lull at work — I love that word. Lull. It sounds so … lully (and this is totally unrelated, but there was actually a composer named Lully. Except his name was pronounced “Loo-lee,” which isn’t soothing at all) — which means I have a lot of downtime. I actually have a full roster of projects on my plate, all of them big, with the prospect of adding another major one to that slate in the near future. The thing is, all of them are just past kick-off and smack dab in the middle of design or requirements gathering.
For the uninitiated out there, requirements gathering is the part where the hapless product manager runs around and finds out what the software “could” do. This is eventually sieved through common sense, the constraints of available time, money, and resources, market demand and feedback, etc., and turned into a design: i.e. what the software “should” do.
Eventually, engineering and QA turn around and inform the product manager what the software “will” do, and then there’s a big fight and the project manager, who is sort of in the position of the UN negotiator assigned to the Palestine-Israel conflict and responsible for giving bad news to everybody she works with, loses a lot of hair and starts stress eating whenever her phone rings — but as I say, that’s later on down the line.
Right now we’re in the quiet, beginning part of all of my projects, where the product managers are happily and optimistically collecting a basket full of hopes and dreams, and as I say, this means a lull for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time online, reading articles that are all totally work-related, yes, even the one about Jeremy Piven getting mercury poisoning from eating too much sushi.
“Dumb,” I said to one of the engineers, who was hanging out in the QA corner of the building. “I mean, who eats sushi that often?”
The engineer looked guilty.
“Every meal,” I said. “I mean, seriously?”
“I eat a lot of sushi,” he said, and then wondered, “Can you get mercury from fish?”
“Yes,” said three voices at once. Most of QA was involved in the conversation now.
“Even salmon?”
“Especially salmon,” I said. I have no idea if this is true. “More from farm-raised than wild,” I added. I know this is true. I read it in on the internet, so it must be.
“Oh,” the engineer said, and started to look a little concerned. “What are the symptoms?”
This particular engineer is one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known, but he is the very antithesis of the typical scrawny, long-limbed, awkward engineer. In short, he is a bodybuilder. Most hard-core bouncers would hesitate before taking him on. He is the picture of health and is possessed of a sharp, creative mind. Unfortunately, he is possessed of one fatal flaw.
He actually listens to me.
“Hair loss,” I guessed vaguely.
The engineer happens to have a shaved head. He ran a considering hand over his scalp.
“Fatigue,” I tacked on, because that seemed like a safe bet. “Muscular and nerve problems, disorientation, dizziness, nausea, mental imbalance–” I figured at least some of those had to be on target.
He blinked at me. “You know what,” he said, “I’ve started to feel kind of sick lately. I was thinking I was coming down with something, you know? But maybe I have mercury poisoning.”
“Maybe,” I said helpfully, because giving people options is part of my job. Option 1: you could be coming down with a cold or the flu. Option 2: you could be suffering from an unusual environmental poison that will cause severe brain damage if left untreated. “This is why pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat too much fish.”
He looked bewildered. “Oh, really?”
“Really,” said one of the QA engineers. “Only one serving of fish a week, isn’t it?”
“A month, I think,” I said.
“So-and-so told me I was pregnant,” he said. “Would it make a difference?”
“If you’re pregnant, then mercury poisoning is probably pretty low on your list of concerns,” I said.
“Sushi, huh?”
“You might want to get checked out,” I said kindly, and headed back to my cube.
Sowing doom and gloom among my coworkers: that is what I do best. That is what I am meant to do. One has to keep one’s skills honed, even when one is in a lull. To do otherwise would be unprofessional.
***
The Guy finished scrolling through my entry and peered up at me. “Am I sort of like your tiger?” he asked.
“My what?”
“Your Hobbes. Your imaginary tiger. Am I the imaginary tiger in this relationship?”
I thought about it for a second. “You kind of are.”
He grinned proudly and rolled over to go to sleep.