Today began like any other, I woke several times to hit the snooze button and finally got up about 45 minutes before I had to walk out the door.  Normally this is not a difficult task, but waking up with my sinuses clogged and my head pounding was not a good sign.

          Just because it’s summer in Texas, you don’t get a reprieve from allergies and to compound the misery it is scheduled to be over 100 degrees for the 20th day in a row.  Joy,

Joy!  Texans are a tough bunch, no matter how bad it gets – most of us would rather live no other place.

          Working the phones can be a difficult task when one must constantly mute the caller and hack into a tissue or distribute snot with ever elevating sneezing fits.  It gives Customer Service a new meaning when one is willing to risk the possibility of being contagious with something like the Swine Flu instead of just reacting to the many things that float unseen on the hot wind.  (Non-Texas commonly call this hot wind a ‘breeze’, but trust me – it’s just hot air – I should know, I work with an entire building of people who do nothing but blow hot air out of their cake-hole all day.)

          I spent the first few hours sneezing so violently that I happened to poke my left eye with the pen I held.  I didn’t mean to purposely “almost” blind myself, thankfully the force of the sneeze made me close my eyes and instead of hitting my eyeball, I merely marked my eyelid and pushed my eye further back into the socket and for this I am thankful we cannot keep our eyes open when we sneeze. 

Of course it was only natural to scream and fall to the floor in a fit of misery and despair – who wouldn’t?  It was the unfortunate circumstance of being tethered to a cord that forced me to snap my head back into something hard and create a knot on the back of my skull just before the phone was pulled off the desk and caught me in the throat.