Adding To The List of Cities Where I've Been Sick In Public: Atlanta Edition

Okay, let’s talk about Atlanta. Or as we call it here: HATE WEEK

• I was supposed to arrive in Atlanta around 17:00, having plenty of time to meet up with a co-worker for dinner and some drinks. Due to Charlotte, I arrived at 21:00. Hopping mad, I find a nearby Publix and then go to bed. This, it turns out, is actually the high point of the entire trip.
• Sleep is fleeting; the hotel bedsheets are paper-thin, and I normally just sleep in a t-shirt on work trips. Even messing with the thermostat doesn’t seem to get me warm. foreshadowing
• Monday starts okay enough; others are complaining about the heating and the chilliness of the previous night. Still, after lunch, I’m feeling cold again. As one o’clock turns to two, I reach for my coat, and the sense of doom starts coming down.
• Some time after four, my co-workers are telling me I look terrible and I agree. I am feeling even worse. I know that bad things are going to happen, and I have a limited time to prepare.
• I head back to Publix, because I know there’s a Target nearby, and despite my current avoidance of them, they’re the only place nearby that I know will sell me the things I’m going to need: masks, a thermometer, day/night cold/flu medicine, new pyjamas, crackers, etc.
• I get lost. As I’m walking (it’s only twelve minutes away!), I get confused and turn right too early. I wander around a multi-storey carpark for thirty minutes until I realize it’s the wrong one.
• As time progresses, I am getting worse and worse, and more desperate to find Target.
• Just in time, I enter through the front doors, promptly march into the toilets, take off my coat and jumper…and throw up.
• Mortified, but slightly better than I was ten minutes ago, I buy things in Target. Another customer helpfully intercedes when my pathetic pleas do not enlist help from the assistants when my medicine purchase triggers an ID check.
• I realize that I will not make it back, so I hail a Lyft for the pathetic sub-mile distance back to the hotel. Still: it’s Atlanta, so it still takes me 20 minutes to get back. I throw up again and scramble into my new clothes, turning the thermostat up to 24˚C in an effort to stay warm. My fever spikes at over 40˚C
• I do not go downstairs for two more days. I have little sleep, I remote into the meetings as best I can. Sometimes I pass out and find time is marching on. But obviously also keeping a brave face it on and saying I don’t need anything.
• Wednesday night, I try to go outside to have the first substantial meal since Monday lunchtime. And the first I’d have kept down since Sunday. I end up in a very fancy mall where the benches are made of marble. I discover this after walking into one of them and collapsing over the top. The bruise is quite impressive.
• Thursday, my final day, the fever has gone, and I’m downstairs, masked up, and keeping distance from people, eating separately, and so on. It has been a terrible trip, but I know I’ll be home by the end of the night.
• foreshadowing
• My flight from Atlanta to Charlotte takes off…well it accelerates on the runway and then abruptly stops due to the cockpit door not being closed.
• Still, we take off five minutes later and we land in Charlotte five minutes early; fifty minutes before boarding of my next flight begins, and an hour and a half until takeoff.
• It takes an hour and thirty-five minutes for Charlotte Airport to deign to give us a landing gate. I break down at one hour and twenty, in a rage and tears.
• It turns out that my next flight left five minutes early anyway.
• By the time I get to the agent desk, most of the rage is gone and they take care of me, putting me up in a decent hotel and rebooking me on the first flight out the next morning. They recommend that it might take two hours to get my bags, so I should probably leave them at the airport.
• The hotel ran out of travel toothbrushes two days’ prior.
• I was supposed to have a lie-in on Friday. Surprise Maeryn and get her in the car to go off to daycare with Tammy, then go back to sleep, light shopping, and pick her up in the afternoon. Instead, I’m tired, still suffering from nasty after-effects from the virus/whatever it was, and I don’t get home until something close to 2pm.
• Meanwhile, back home, Tammy has also been getting sicker and sicker, being infected by the world’s cutest plague carrier and bedtime-denier.

So, an almost completely wasted week, I will do almost anything to avoid going through CLT again, but I am now at least home and can suffer in more space and comfort, and continue parenting. I don’t want to leave the city for quite some time.

Oddly, I spent my semi-conscious time watching Peter Cook documentaries, interviews, Mill Hill, of all things…and I’m fairly sure this contributed to some of my comments as the week went on, one of which was described as “straight from “the guide on being British” book”. I will hopefully not continue to rip off Beyond The Fringe sketches in Slack next week.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!

… The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

He could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share — without exertion or even trouble — in their prospective fruits and advantages.

Or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.

He could dispatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient — and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person.

He would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent — except in the direction of further improvement.

Any deviation from it would be seen as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable.

The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper.

They appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace — J.M. Keynes

for no reason whatsoever