Gesundheit.

I’ve got this coworker who looks eerily like Tim Robbins. (In fact, I’ve never seen the two of them in the same room together, so take that as you will.) He’s an extremely nice man, very even-tempered, and goes out of his way to speak kindly to everyone. But he sneezes like a damn grenade.

Seriously. It comes out of nowhere, and is so loud and forceful that you are momentarily thrown back against your cubicle wall as little bits of debris fall from the ceiling tiles and car alarms go off in the parking lot outside. It’s terrifying. It sounds kind of like “AHA!” as if he’s just discovered some life-changing revelation, and he’s so excited about it that an uncontainable exclamation bursts forth from his chest like so much Alien animatronics. Our department consists of four cubicles crammed into a room the size of a smallish walk-in closet, and Tim “Sneezey” Robbins has the cubicle next to mine. I wondered why I found shooting range style earmuffs in my desk drawer when I first started; now I know.

There’s never any preamble, like in cartoons where Bugs Bunny starts to take little gasping breaths just before he sneezes, which would totally give his location away to Elmer Fudd, and then Daffy Duck puts one finger under Bugs’ nose and the whole problem’s solved and everybody breathes a big sigh of relief before Bugs’ sneeze catches up with him and outs them anyway, and Fudd comes tearing around the corner, slipping and sliding as he fumbles with his shotgun and starts shooting holes in everything that moves, the very posterchild of PETA and the NRA all rolled into one, until eventually the wily animals lead him off a cliff, where he hovers in midair for a few minutes, all smug that he’s caught up with his defenseless prey and is about to blow their brains out in front of an impressionably young audience of children and twenty-something graphic designers, and then he suddenly realizes where he is, and he cautiously feels around with his toe for a minute to see if there’s something more substantial than air supporting his weight and then, and only then, is gravity allowed to snatch him from the scene, leaving nothing but a little white cloud and maybe a small sign that says “Oh, dwat,” depending on whether or not Chuck Jones directed this one.

My point here is that Tim Robbins doesn’t make those gaspy little breaths beforehand, so I have no opportunity to run over to his cubicle and hold one finger under his nose to thwart the oncoming sneeze. (I’d be afraid to do that anyway, because I’ve heard that under normal circumstances, it is unhealthy to hold in a sneeze, and in Tim Robbins’ case, it might cause an aneurism.) I pretty much live in fear every day, not knowing when the tranquil, headphoned, Jack Johnson-infused serenity of my cubicle will be shattered by what is clearly a mutation of that man’s lungs.

It keeps me on my toes, I guess, in what is an otherwise painfully dull atmosphere. Also, it helps me hit my target heart rate for the day, so I guess that’s a silver lining.