He got a free trip to Hawaii for nearly killing our department.
One week after Gary Thorne dragged his mucus-dripping self through our office like a human biohazard, half the team was sick, deadlines were in free fall, and I was curled up on my couch with a fever and a laptop, trying to save the biggest account our company had ever pitched.
The man didn’t just ignore every common sense protocol — he weaponized his illness as some twisted badge of honor, then vanished the moment the damage was done, leaving the rest of us to clean up the wreckage.
By the time I rebuilt his half-baked data and presented the client pitch while coughing through a Zoom call, I was too sick to even be angry.
But when the boss announced Gary’s reward — an all-expenses-paid vacation for his “dedication” — I saw red.
And that was the moment I decided: Gary wasn’t walking away from this lie untouched. Not with me still standing.
The Gathering Storm Clouds: That Awful Overture
The first cough echoed through the Monday morning quiet of Sterling Marketing like a gunshot in a library. It wasn’t just any cough. It was a deep, wet, phlegmy explosion, the kind that makes you instinctively check if you’ve been spattered.
I knew that cough. Gary Thorne.
He shuffled past my cubicle, a man whose martyr complex had its own frequent flyer miles. He wasn’t wearing a mask. Of course, he wasn’t.
Masks were for the weak, the undedicated. Gary was a trooper.
“Morning, Laura,” he rasped, his voice sounding like gravel gargled with mucus. He paused by my desk, leaning in conspiratorially, as if sharing a vital secret instead of a cloud of potential pathogens.
“Big week, huh? Henderson account. All hands on deck.”
His breath, warm and vaguely medicinal, washed over me. I subtly leaned back, my hand hovering near the hand sanitizer I kept religiously stocked.
“Morning, Gary,” I managed, trying to keep my tone neutral. “Feeling okay?”
A ridiculous question, given the auditory evidence.
He waved a dismissive hand, nearly knocking over my framed photo of Tom and Michael at the lake last summer. “Just a tickle. Nothing a real worker can’t handle.”
“Gotta push through, right? This Henderson deal is make-or-break for us. Mr. Henderson himself said it’s our Q4 game-changer.”
He was already moving towards his own den of contagion, leaving behind an invisible miasma of… well, Gary. I watched him go, a knot tightening in my stomach. The Henderson account.
It was massive, the biggest client pitch our department had handled in years. I was lead project manager on it. The pressure was already immense without adding a biological crisis to the mix.
My computer screen glowed with the project timeline, a complex web of dependencies and deadlines. It was tight, aggressive, but doable if everyone pulled their weight and, crucially, stayed healthy. A big if, apparently.
I took a long sip of my rapidly cooling coffee. The first cough was the overture. I had a sinking feeling the full symphony of sickness was about to begin, and I had a front-row seat whether I wanted one or not.
The air already felt thicker.
“Just A Little Something I Picked Up”
By mid-morning, Gary was a one-man germ orchestra. His cubicle, unfortunately situated just across the aisle and one down from mine, became Ground Zero. Every few minutes, another hacking eruption would shatter the illusion of productive calm.
Sneezes followed, wet and uncontained. He’d punctuate these with loud nose-blows that sounded like a walrus in distress.
During a brief lull, Susan from Accounting poked her head over her cubicle wall, her eyes wide. She mouthed, “Is he serious?”
I just shrugged, a gesture meant to convey ‘what can you do?’ mixed with ‘I know, it’s awful.’
Later, I saw him at the communal coffee machine, looking even worse. His face was pale, except for two feverish spots high on his cheeks. His eyes were bloodshot.
He was, naturally, maskless, refilling his “World’s Okayest Employee” mug.
“You know, Gary,” I said, keeping my distance as I waited for the microwave to heat my lunch – a sad salad I was already losing my appetite for. “There’s really no shame in taking a sick day. We can cover for a bit.”
It was a lie, mostly. Covering for anyone on the Henderson project right now would be a nightmare, but his presence was an active threat.
He turned, a theatrical sigh escaping his chapped lips. “Laura, some of us understand commitment. Deadlines don’t care if you’ve got the sniffles.”
“This is just a little something I picked up. Probably from my kid’s school. You know how it is.”
I didn’t, actually. My Michael was ten, and if he was even remotely as sick as Gary currently appeared, he’d be home, quarantined with Netflix and chicken soup. He certainly wouldn’t be sent to inflict his germs on his classmates.
“Right,” I said, my voice flatter than I intended. “But if it’s something contagious, you could take out half the team. Especially with the Henderson pressure.”
He actually scoffed. “Oh, please. It’s a cold.”
“People are too soft these days. Back in my day at MacroCorp, you came in unless you were literally on a stretcher. Builds character.”
He took a noisy slurp of his coffee, wincing slightly as it went down. “Besides, Mr. Henderson is counting on me for my input on the creative. Can’t let him down.”
His “input on the creative” usually involved him suggesting slightly different shades of blue for PowerPoint backgrounds. The man was delusional about his indispensability, and dangerously cavalier about everyone else’s health. My microwave dinged.
Salvation.
Brews, Blues, and Bad Attitudes
The breakroom felt smaller with Gary in it, not just physically, but emotionally. His martyrdom seemed to suck the air out of the place. I grabbed my salad, acutely aware of him watching me.
“You really think I should go home?” he asked, his tone daring me to say yes. It was a test.
He wanted to be told he was too valuable, too essential to leave.
I decided to meet the challenge, but not in the way he hoped. “Honestly, Gary? Yes. I think you should.”
“For your own sake, so you can actually get better, and for everyone else’s. We’re all under the gun with Henderson. The last thing we need is an office-wide flu.”
I kept my voice calm, reasonable. Like I was explaining why the sky was blue to a particularly stubborn toddler.
He bristled. His pallid skin seemed to flush a little.
“See, that’s the difference between some of us and others, Laura. Some of us see a challenge and we rise to it. We don’t run for the hills at the first sign of a cough.”
“This company needs dedication, especially now. Mr. Henderson values dedication.” He tapped his chest.
“Work ethic. That’s what gets big projects like Henderson landed.”
The unspoken accusation hung in the air: You don’t have it. You’re suggesting I leave, therefore you’re weak. It was infuriating.
My work ethic had me at my desk by 7:30 AM most days and frequently working late to ensure every detail of projects like Henderson was nailed down. I just didn’t believe in performative suffering.
“My work ethic includes not wanting to infect my colleagues, Gary,” I said, my voice a little tighter now. “It’s about team well-being ensuring we can deliver, not just one person grandstanding while everyone else gets sick.”
He just shook his head, a smug little smile playing on his lips. “Agree to disagree, I guess. Some of us are built tougher.”
He coughed again, a rattling sound that seemed to shake his thin frame, directly into his hand, which he then used to open the breakroom door. I watched him walk out, a trail of invisible viral breadcrumbs in his wake.
I stood there for a moment, my salad forgotten. The sheer, unadulterated selfishness of it was breathtaking. He wasn’t just sick; he was proud of being sick and present.
He was weaponizing his illness as a badge of honor. And the Henderson account, our critical project, was squarely in his line of fire. I suddenly felt a desperate need to douse my hands, my desk, my entire life, in industrial-strength disinfectant.
The First Domino
Back at my desk, the air seemed to crackle with unspoken anxieties. Every sniffle from a nearby cubicle, every throat clear, made me jump. I found myself tracking Gary’s movements, his coughs acting as a morbid form of sonar.
He was making his rounds, “collaborating,” as he’d call it, leaning over shoulders, pointing at screens, sharing his unique brand of airborne generosity.
I was deep into reviewing the media buy spreadsheet for the Henderson pitch, my brow furrowed in concentration, when a new sound pierced the usual office hum. It wasn’t Gary. It was a sneeze – a loud, Achoo!-Hoo-Hoo! kind of sneeze, the kind that can’t be easily stifled.
I looked up. Two cubes down, in the direction Gary had last patrolled, sat Amelia from Graphic Design. Her head was in her hands.
She sneezed again, a smaller, more defeated sound this time.
My blood ran cold. Amelia was a rock. Never sick.
Always cheerful. And her cubicle was directly in the fallout zone of Gary’s earlier “consultation” about font choices for the Henderson presentation.
She looked up, caught my eye, and gave a weak, apologetic smile. “Wow,” she said, her voice already thick. “Where did that come from?”
I knew where. We all knew where. It was unspoken, but the knowledge hung heavy in the air, as tangible as the scent of stale coffee and fear.
Gary, oblivious or perhaps choosing to be, continued to tap loudly on his keyboard, occasionally punctuated by his signature cough.
The first domino had fallen.
I stared at the Henderson project plan on my screen, a complex Gantt chart of tasks and milestones. Each colored bar represented a critical step, a piece of the puzzle that needed to be perfect. Now, overlaid on that meticulously planned structure, I could almost see a new, invisible layer.
It was a rapidly spreading stain of illness, threatening to swamp the entire thing.
My stress levels, already high, ratcheted up another notch. This wasn’t just about avoiding a cold anymore. This was about saving a multi-million dollar account from being derailed by one man’s pathological need to be seen as a hero.
He seemed determined to do so, even if he had to create the disaster himself.
The day was barely done, and the siege had already begun.
The Viral Tide: Empty Chairs and Anxious Air
Tuesday morning, Amelia’s chair was vacant. An email from her sat in my inbox, timestamped 6:15 AM: “Feeling awful. Woke up with a fever.”
“So sorry, but I won’t be in. Laura, I left the latest Henderson mock-ups on the shared drive in the ‘For Review’ folder.”
My heart sank a little further. Amelia was crucial for the visual elements of the Henderson presentation. Her absence was a blow.
Gary, however, was present and accounted for. He looked even more spectral than the day before. If anything, he seemed to view Amelia’s absence as a personal victory, a testament to his superior constitution.
“Shame about Amelia,” he croaked to Mark from Sales, who was unwise enough to stop by Gary’s cubicle. “Guess some folks just don’t have the stamina. Good thing some of us are still holding down the fort for Henderson, eh?”
He actually winked, then devolved into a coughing fit that made Mark visibly recoil and invent an urgent need to be elsewhere.
The office atmosphere was palpably different. The usual Tuesday buzz was muted, replaced by a nervous quiet. Every cough, every sneeze from anyone now drew furtive glances.
Hand sanitizer bottles appeared on more desks. The tissue box in the breakroom, usually full for a week, was half empty by 10 AM.
I tried to focus on the Henderson account, diving into Amelia’s mock-ups. They were good, as always, but needed a few tweaks she would normally handle in an hour. Now, it would fall to someone else, or more likely, to me.
This added another task to my already overflowing plate.
Mr. Henderson, our boss, a man whose moods could dictate the entire office climate, strode through mid-morning. He was all smiles and pep, clearly oblivious to the undercurrent of viral dread. “Team Henderson!” he boomed, clapping me on the shoulder a little too hard.
“Looking strong! Client meeting is set for next Monday. Let’s knock their socks off!”
He glanced at Amelia’s empty chair. “Amelia out today?”
“Yes, Mr. Henderson,” I said. “She’s not feeling well.”
“Hmm, unfortunate. Well, make sure her deliverables are covered. This pitch needs to be flawless, Laura.”
“Flawless.” He gave another hearty clap and moved on, leaving a wake of expensive cologne and heightened anxiety. Flawless.
Right. While a plague rat roamed free.
The Contagion Spreads
By Wednesday morning, the office looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie where the only survivors were really dedicated (or foolish) office workers. Mark from Sales was out. Two people from IT.
Susan from Accounting, who had looked so worried on Monday, sent a terse email: “Fever. Chills. Staying home.”
The empty chairs were like missing teeth in a once-bright smile. The remaining few of us exchanged grim looks. There was an unspoken camaraderie, the kind forged in shared adversity.
We were the survivors, for now.
Gary, miraculously or perhaps perversely, was still there. He looked like death on a cracker, his skin a pasty grey, his eyes sunk deep into their sockets. He moved slower, his coughs more ragged.
But he was there.
He even attempted a joke when he saw me looking his way. “Still standing, Laura! Someone’s gotta keep the lights on for Henderson, right?”
He tried a grin, which turned into a grimace, then a wet, hacking cough into his bare hand. He wiped it on his trousers.
I just stared at him, a cold fury mixing with a strange sort of pity. What was he trying to prove? And to whom?
Did he genuinely believe this display of self-destruction was impressive?
Later that morning, Mr. Henderson called an impromptu “Henderson Huddle.” It was in the small conference room with the few of us still standing: me, Gary, a very nervous-looking intern named Ben, and Priya. Priya was a quiet data analyst who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.
“Alright team,” Henderson began, pacing the small room. “Obviously, we’ve had a few… absences. Unfortunate timing.”
“But the Henderson account waits for no one. Laura, how are we looking on the main presentation deck? Gary, your competitive analysis section – is that finalized?”
Gary, propped against the wall as if standing unsupported was too much effort, actually managed to puff out his chest slightly. “Nearly there, Mr. Henderson. Just polishing.”
“Wouldn’t dream of letting a little bug slow me down when something this critical is on the line.” He punctuated this with a cough he tried to stifle, which only made it sound more alarming.
Henderson, to my utter disbelief, beamed at him. “That’s the spirit, Gary! Dedication!”
“Love to see it.” He then turned to me. “Laura, I trust you’re reallocating tasks from those who are out?”
“We can’t afford any slippage.”
“Yes, Mr. Henderson,” I said, my voice tight. “I’m integrating Amelia’s design work and coordinating with IT remotely for the tech specs Mark was handling.”
My own to-do list was now a terrifying scroll.
“Excellent.” He clapped his hands. “Let’s keep pushing.”
“This is our moment.”
As we filed out, Gary brushed past me, a faint, sickly-sweet odor clinging to him. “See?” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “Told you.”
“Work ethic.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response. I just felt a growing dread. And, if I was honest with myself, the tiniest, most unwelcome tickle at the back of my own throat.
That Damnable Itch
The tickle started subtly on Wednesday afternoon. A faint scratchiness, like a tiny feather duster had taken up residence in my esophagus. I tried to ignore it.
I drank more water. I popped a throat lozenge from the emergency stash in my desk drawer. It’s just stress, I told myself.
Or maybe the dry office air.
But by the time I was packing up to leave, the tickle had become a persistent itch. My head felt a little fuzzy, my eyes a bit too warm. Denying it was becoming increasingly difficult.
Driving home, I replayed the last few days in my mind. Gary’s coughs. His proximity.
The shared air of the breakroom, the conference room. It was like watching a slow-motion car crash you couldn’t prevent. I’d been so focused on everyone else, on the project, I hadn’t seriously considered that I’d be next.
“You okay, hon?” Tom asked as I walked in the door. He took one look at my face and his smile faltered. “You look… rough.”
“Just tired,” I lied, not wanting to worry him, or perhaps not wanting to admit it to myself. “Long day. Henderson account is a beast.”
Michael came running for his usual hug. “Mommy!” I hugged him, but a little voice in my head screamed, Germs!
I quickly steered him towards washing his hands before dinner, using it as an excuse to scrub my own for an extra-long time.
Dinner was a quiet affair. I picked at my food, the itch in my throat now accompanied by a dull ache in my sinuses. Tom kept shooting me concerned glances.
“Seriously, Laura, are you coming down with something?” he finally asked as we cleared the table. “You’ve barely said two words.”
I sighed, leaning against the counter. The energy to maintain the pretense was gone. “I think… I think I might be.”
“Gary Thorne came into work Monday sick as a dog, coughing everywhere. Half the office is out now. And I’ve had this scratchy throat all afternoon.”
Tom’s expression darkened. He knew about Gary, the office martyr. I’d complained about his performative workaholism before.
“That idiot,” he muttered. “He’s going to take the whole damn company down with him. You should call in sick tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” I said, the words tasting like ash. “The Henderson presentation is next Monday. Gary was supposed to handle a huge chunk of it, and he’s clearly not up to it, even if he was in the office.”
“Amelia’s out. Mark’s out. If I go down, the whole thing could collapse.”
The weight of it felt crushing.
“So let it collapse,” Tom said, his voice firm. “It’s not your fault if that moron infects everyone. Your health is more important than some damn project, Laura.”
I knew he was right, logically. Ethically. But the project manager in me, the part that prided herself on delivering no matter what, recoiled at the thought.
“I just… I need to see how I feel in the morning,” I prevaricated. But deep down, as the ache behind my eyes intensified, I knew. The viral tide was coming for me.
Project Lifeline, Fraying Fast
Thursday morning. The itch was no longer an itch. It was a full-blown assault.
My throat felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper. My head throbbed with a relentless, dull pulse. Every joint in my body ached.
Getting out of bed felt like climbing Everest.
“Nope,” Tom said, taking one look at me as I stumbled towards the bathroom. “You are not going to work. Call Henderson.”
“Tell him you’re sick. Tell him Gary Thorne is a public health hazard.”
“I can’t just…” I started, my voice a pathetic croak, then coughed, a dry, racking sound that sent daggers through my chest. Okay, maybe he had a point.
I checked my work email on my phone from the sofa, wrapped in a blanket despite the mild October weather. More out-of-office replies. An email from Priya, the data analyst, saying she’d woken up with a fever.
Even Gary had finally succumbed. An email from his personal account, brief and misspelled: “Not feLing gud. Won’t be in.”
“Henderson stuff on my desktop.”
His desktop. Which was at the office. And probably coated in a fine layer of his DNA.
Fantastic.
The sheer, infuriating irresponsibility of it all made my head pound harder. He’d come in, a walking biohazard, for two and a half days, spewing germs and rhetoric about “work ethic,” infecting half the department, and then decided he was too sick to even email his files properly.
An email pinged from Mr. Henderson, addressed to the “Henderson Project Team Remainder” – which, at this point, felt like just me and perhaps the intern, Ben, if he hadn’t wisely fled the county.
“Team,” it read, in his usual upbeat tone that now grated like nails on a chalkboard. “Hope everyone who’s under the weather is resting up! Just a reminder, the client pre-brief is still scheduled for this Friday afternoon via Zoom – they want a sneak peek of the core campaign concept.”
“And the main presentation is Monday AM sharp. Laura, I assume you have everything under control? Let me know if there are any red flags.”
“We need this win!”
Red flags? I thought, staring at the email through blurry eyes. The entire field was a giant, waving, crimson banner of red flags. I was sick.
Key team members were sick. The supposed “dedicated” one had crashed and burned, leaving his work in limbo.
I coughed again, a deep, painful spasm. “Under control,” I croaked to the empty living room. My own work ethic, the one that Tom often said was both my superpower and my kryptonite, was warring with the undeniable reality of my failing body.
But Henderson’s email, the looming deadlines, the thought of all that work going down the drain because of Gary’s selfishness… it lit a small, desperate fire under me.
Somehow, some way, I had to salvage this. The project lifeline was fraying fast, and it felt like I was the only one left holding onto the strands.
The Fever Dream Finish: Couch Command Center
My living room couch became my command center. Laptop perched precariously on a stack of cushions, a mountain range of used tissues growing on the coffee table beside a battalion of medications: cough syrup, decongestants, painkillers, throat lozenges. Tom set me up with a thermos of hot tea and a worried frown before he left for work, after making me promise to call him if I felt worse.
Michael, looking concerned, gave me an extra-long hug before school, his small hand patting my back. “Feel better, Mommy.”
The first order of business was Gary’s “competitive analysis.” I managed to get Ben, the intern, to help. Thankfully, he still seemed healthy, wisely working from a remote corner of the office.
He had to go to Gary’s desk, brave the biohazard zone, and email me whatever files he could find.
What arrived was… a mess. It was a half-finished PowerPoint with placeholder text, a few random links to competitor websites, and a spreadsheet with questionable data. The data looked like it had been compiled by a drunken chimpanzee.
There was no analysis, no insight. It was just a jumble of raw, undigested information.
His “polishing” claim to Henderson had been a bald-faced lie.
A wave of fury, so potent it momentarily cleared my sinuses, washed over me. This man, this purveyor of pestilence and platitudes, hadn’t just made us all sick; he’d also completely dropped the ball on his actual responsibilities. His “work ethic” was a sham, a noisy distraction from his incompetence.
I started to cough, a hacking, relentless barrage that left me breathless and aching. My head throbbed in time with each spasm. This was going to be so much harder than I thought.
I had to reconstruct his entire section from scratch, on top of managing my own deliverables, Amelia’s design integration, and Mark’s IT coordination. All while battling a fever that made the room occasionally tilt.
“Okay, Laura,” I muttered to myself, my voice a raspy whisper. “One thing at a time.”
I took a large, painful swallow of tea and opened a fresh document. The Henderson account wasn’t just a project anymore; it was a personal Everest I had to conquer, if only to spite Gary Thorne.
The hours crawled by in a blur of shivering, sweating, and staring intently at the glowing screen. Each keystroke felt like an effort. My focus waxed and waned with the waves of fever.
Sometimes the words on the screen swam before my eyes. I’d close them for a moment, take a deep, shuddering breath, and force myself back.
Delirium and Data Points
Thursday afternoon bled into Thursday evening. Tom came home, took one look at me, and his face creased with worry. “Laura, you look terrible.”
“You need to rest.”
“Almost there,” I mumbled, not looking up from a particularly convoluted spreadsheet I was trying to decipher for Gary’s section. It was supposed to show market share, but the formulas were all wrong. They referenced cells that didn’t even exist.
It was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube designed by a sadist.
He gently took the laptop from me. “No. Dinner.”
“Then bed. Whatever it is, it can wait until morning.”
I was too exhausted to argue. He helped me to the table, and I managed a few bites of soup. Every swallow was agony.
The conversation was minimal; I just didn’t have the energy. Michael looked at me with wide, anxious eyes, which made me feel even worse.
Sleep, when it came, was fitful and filled with bizarre, fever-induced dreams. I was trapped in a giant PowerPoint presentation, pursued by giant, coughing microbes with Gary’s face, all while Mr. Henderson shouted “Flawless! Flawless!” from a distant mountain peak made of discarded tissues.
I woke up Friday morning feeling like I’d been run over by a truck, then backed over for good measure. But the Friday afternoon client pre-brief loomed. I had to have the core campaign concept slides ready.
Dragging myself back to the couch command center, I powered up the laptop. The screen felt too bright, the hum of the machine too loud. My body screamed for rest.
But the deadline was a siren call I couldn’t ignore.
I worked through the morning in a state of grim, aching determination. The data points for Gary’s competitive analysis started to make a twisted kind of sense, or maybe my delirium was just filling in the gaps. I found Amelia’s beautiful mock-ups and managed to integrate them into the main deck.
I resized images with trembling fingers and chose fonts through a haze of fatigue.
I Skyped with Ben, my voice a hoarse whisper, to confirm some technical details Mark would have known. Ben, bless his intern heart, was patient and helpful.
Around noon, a coughing fit seized me. It was so violent and prolonged I thought I might actually cough up a lung. I was left gasping, tears streaming down my face, utterly spent.
For a moment, I just sat there, head in my hands. The sheer unfairness and misery of it all washed over me.
Gary did this. His selfishness, his fake bravado, had led to this – me, sick as a dog, trying to salvage his mess and everyone else’s, all for a project he’d probably try to take credit for if it succeeded.
A new kind of anger, cold and sharp, cut through the fever fog. No. He wouldn’t.
I would finish this. I would make it brilliant. And then… then I would figure out what came next.
But first, the work.
About the Author
