Day Two

                    Six thirty AM. My cell phone rings and I try to figure out why, and then realize it’s the phone tree activating. I fumble around on the night table for the phone until it finds my fingers and I answer. It’s my boss, and he tells me to get the management team together and come in, the sales reps and ad designers and assistants can have the day off. Another meeting. Mandy and Rachel are still asleep, Rachel’s legs are on top of mine and I realize I can’t feel my feet. This is what it’s like sleeping with her…  all cute and cuddly as we drift off but sometime during the night, she morphs into a spasming, jerking puppet that’s completely incapable of being still. I slide my legs from under hers and try to flex my toes, feeling the pins and needles that mark the return of blood flow to everything below my knees. Rachel flops violently over and throws her legs over her mother.

                Downstairs, I turn on CNN. There’s a talking head on, some medical pundit discussing the flu and home remedies for those without health insurance. He says fever is reduced with Tylenol just as quickly at home as it is in the ER, and staying home is a less communicative method of weathering the disease. There have been some deaths, mostly elderly and people with chronic respiratory ailments. He also says that so far, the mortality rate is no different than the normal strains of flu we see each year. This is different than what I heard from Chris yesterday, but in this case different is much better.

                I shower, dress in jeans and a sport coat. There’s no newspaper n front of the garage and the cat stares at me through the storm door as if I cancelled the subscription for the sole purpose of denying her the chance to run down the toss. Today, the weather is beautiful; the rain from last night has left everything smelling musky and fresh. The trees are budding and it’s starting to get green again. I opt for music instead of news radio and pop Metallica into the CD player. There’s almost no traffic and I’m in the office in no time.

                The coffee machine is working. I’ve walked out of the house without cash. Son of a bitch.

                My managers filter in one by one, and we chat a little about the flu, revenue, the flu, online sales expectations, the flu, new call management software, and the flu. The building has a bit of a Christmas Eve feel to it, when the staff has gone home for the holiday and just a few of us are left to finalize a few things before heading off for eggnog.

                The COO comes in around nine, and we all gather in the north training room for our briefing. There are about thirty of us, a few from each department. My boss talks a little about the flu, and how we still have a business to run. Each division head, of which I’m one, is expected to share a battle plan for keeping the paper up and running.

News, obviously, goes first. The reporters will cover local issues relating to the flu; some will talk with doctors, some with the public on their reaction to the flu, some with the city officials, so on. We won’t be printing lifestyle sections for a few days. There will be no local sports coverage necessary, since the schools are closed. Sports reporters will assist with the flu stories and edit copy. The rest of the news staff will stay home.

The circulation director is a fat guy with a huge ass named Mike. He’s always disheveled and today is no exception. His crews will deliver to the city zones but he doesn’t have enough carriers to hit the outlying areas. Single copy delivery will be hit and miss, depending on what stores are open, who’s left to deliver, blah, blah, blah. I’m starting to zone out. The production director interrupts Mike and mentions that he needs an estimate of the delivery numbers so his crew knows how many newspapers to print. Mike pulls a calculator from the breast pocket of his white short sleeved oxford shirt, which he wears regardless of the season, punches a few keys and throws out the estimated distribution.

Since we’ve segued into production, Trevor takes over and tells the group he has a full crew for printing. The press guys are a pretty rough bunch anyway, so it’s not a big surprise they’re all available to work. I’m guessing Trevor told them they could bring beer into the plant while we’re in crisis mode. Long story short, the paper will get out. Inserts (flyers, or circulars for those outside the industry) are another story. The mail crew is mostly part timers who are tough to get to work on a good day, and none of them are answering their phones. The bulk of them worked at a Burger King or a lumber yard before this job, and they’re all pretty much low rent and unskilled, so they don’t give a shit about the company, they give a shit about the flu.

It’s my turn. The phone tree has done its job and we’ve made contact with all but a couple sales reps and one ad designer. We can be on the street if necessary, but my recommendation is to give it a day or two and see what businesses are open. The COO asks what impact on revenue this plan has, and my answer isn’t what he wants to hear.

“It’s not going to be good, we’re heading into the weekend and we’re not sure what sales will be like. My guess is that most of the accounts are closed and the ones who decide to stay open will want to ride this out”, I tell him. My plan is based loosely on what we did after 9/11, when no one wanted to spend money on anything but duct tape and American flags. 

My boss gets a little frustrated at my answer, but he’s not a bad guy and he understands a lot of this is well beyond my ability to control. “Sell whatever you can,” he tells me. “When this passes, we’ll still need to pay our associates and it’s up to you and your team to make the bacon.” I realize I’m hungry.

The meeting lasts about an hour. HR tells us to make sure we wash our hands, to send sick employees directly home and stresses how important it is to log all sick time for payroll purposes. The room clears and my managers and I sit for a few minutes, discussing whether or not we should have the reps call their clients from home, and we decide it’s not a bad idea. We’ll keep one of our classified reps here to work the phones, but I have a pretty strong feeling that no one will be calling in to run a garage sale ad for the next few days.

The classified manager offers to stay to take calls herself. She doesn’t look very well, and she coughs once into the crook of her arm. I remember the news doctor instructing on the method of successfully containing the germs while coughing and I’m glad she’s not spreading any bugs. Then it hits me:  she coughed. I tell her to go home and suddenly I’m a little pissed that she’s here. I remember all the times she’s come in with a fever, snot pouring from her nose, hacking all over the fucking place. She says she’s fine, it’s just allergies, I tell her she needs to go home, and we debate the issue for a few minutes until I finally tell her she needs to get the fuck out of here until she’s healthy. She packs up her notebook and stomps out of the room.

In my boss’s office, we’re talking about the flu. He’s worried. My boss is also my friend, our wives and kids are friends, and he’s asking about Rachel. I tell him she’s fine, ask about his kids, who are also fine, and I say something stupid about how he’s got nothing to worry about. He tells me his wife had a fever when she woke up this morning. I nearly shit my pants, wondering if I’m in the process of being exposed to the new flu. I mumble something about checking on sales and back out of the room.

Some stores are open, but none are running ads this weekend, at least so far. I didn’t really expect any business. I think about how this is going to fuck up a pretty good quarter; we were on pace to make our revenue budget until the Big Sneeze. In my office, I flip on the TV and a Democratic congressman on CNN is talking about how earlier movement on health care reform would have stopped this from being such a major crisis, and how the Republicans want America to be sick. Click. Fox News is showing a Republican congressman and he’s talking about how the Democrats want to use the flu as another opportunity to unleash Big Government on the American people. I decide that there’s really no one in government any longer who actually speaks for me. So much for this Representative Republic we have.

I call home. No answer. I call Amanda’s cell. No answer there, either. I wonder why she even has one. It’s for sure not in case of emergencies. It’s only on when she’s in a drive thru. Pay at the first window, please. My boss passes my office on his way out. He won’t be in tomorrow. His wife is sick and he’s worried. So am I.

Another hour goes by. I can’t work, I’m useless. I tell the managers to finish up and go home, we’ll use the phone tree again tomorrow. The drive home is just as quick as the trip in. The garage door is open, and Rachel is playing in the front yard with the kid from across the street. They’re inseparable. Seeing her outside when she clearly should be inside really pisses me off, and I storm into the house hollering for Amanda. She’s sitting on the couch, chatting with her sister on Facebook. I’m fucking way pissed off now. I ask her why Rachel is outside, she tells me it’s really nice and she should enjoy the day. I tell her there’s a fucking plague and Rachel should be sequestered somewhere deep in the belly of the house, far away from any outside air. I’m over protective. Amanda, on the other hand, never worries about anything but money. To her this whole flu thing is now officially just a bunch of bullshit, her words, and we’re not going to lock Rachel up in a tower her whole life. I really want to lock her up in a tower, but that’s my own insecurity. I worry it will hurt when she gets her hair cut, for Christ’s sake. I really want Rachel inside, and I bitch about how the neighbors let their kids do anything they want. We shouldn’t have to lower our standards just because they don’t have any. It’s not working, I can’t ever win an argument with my wife and this is no different.

The news says the regular flu vaccine seems to work on the new flu, so those with seasonal shots should have some protection. I get the “I told you so” stare from Amanda. People who didn’t get shots should be able to get them at the free clinic, their primary care physician, or CVS and Walgreens. It took six months for the H1N1 blowup to get to this point. Maybe there’s nothing to get bent about after all.

I decide to try to relax. I settle in on the couch and open up my laptop. Facebook looks a lot like it did yesterday, people in London and Berlin and Tel Aviv posting about knowing someone who is related to someone who heard of someone who died from the flu. Someone’s doctor cousin says there’s nothing to worry about. Someone else’s sister was on a plane from San Francisco to L. A. and they were quarantined at the gate for seven hours. Some of the posts are really whacked out. A guy in Egypt says his mother died and they won’t let him see her body. A woman in Amsterdam says her son was sick and the doctors pronounced him dead, but today he’s fine, just really angry and uncontrollable, probably from the high fever. Another posting, uploaded from Twitter, says the Iranians are shooting people in their homes.

I remember how fast Twitter was able to move news out of Iran during the election uprising last year, so I log in and the hottest topics are of course the flu. I click on one titled Flu Deaths and it’s moving at the speed of light, with more than three hundred new posts each minute. I can’t keep up, so I just start reading the older messages. There’s a lot about coughing up blood, high fevers and horrible shit that doesn’t give me any news but sure gives me the creeps. Morgues are full. People are turned away from hospitals in Beijing. The bodies of the dead are being burned in Pakistan. In Israel, Palestinians are breaking down barriers all over Jerusalem and throwing corpses into Israeli streets.

Enough.

Rachel’s back inside and the Wii is on. She’s happy, Amanda is still I told you so-ing me and I’m making hamburgers on the Foreman Grill for dinner. Everything looks pretty normal on the surface. Maybe it’s no big deal. At night, we watch America’s Funniest Home Videos and laugh at old people falling off docks and young fathers getting hit in the stones by children with whiffleball bats. We all sleep together in our room again, and I do not turn on the TV.