CARLTON FLETCHER: ‘Typhoid Terry’ spreads ‘Flewis’ around newsroom

Get up, you monkey down with the sickness.

— Disturbed

Surely there is a place in heaven, or at least business purgatory, for workers who, in this age of showing up 40 hours a week — less, if possible — strictly to bring home a paycheck, actually go to work to get a job done.

They’re the ones who old coaches used to say “would run through a brick wall for me.” They’re the ones who take vacations around their company’s busy time, not during, who pitch in and help co-workers who may be struggling.

And they’re the ones who come to work sick.

Now, doctors and health care professionals have made it clear over the years that going to work sick is not a good thing to do, no matter how much it shows the bossman you’re a go-getter, that you’re on the ball, that you’re going places.

Of course, parents don’t need doctors or health care professionals to tell them why you shouldn’t go to work sick. Just sit down and listen to moms tell their day-care horror stories — of viruses shared by entire classrooms and then passed along to family members, from person to person to person or, worse, of head lice picked up by one student and shared with close friends — and you understand Dr. Stay-at-Home’s admonition.

Still, there are jobs where key employees missing a day of work can throw a King Kong-sized monkey wrench into the works and leave co-workers scrambling to cover the slack. It becomes a philosophical question for conscientious employees and their supervisors: Should one — or two or three — of our ace employees come in today to finish that project that has a 4 p.m. deadline, even though said ace employee(s) was barfing up a lung this morning, or is the risk too great for his, her or their co-workers?

Here at The Herald, there is no such thing as a non-essential employee. To get a paper out each day is a team effort in the truest sense of the word. With deadlines screaming not on a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis, but on daily and sometimes hourly intervals, the need for a sick day at the wrong time can be catastrophic. (Catastrophic in the sense that people who are the paper’s weakest links — hint, they’re the ones with offices — the ones who fancy themselves delegators, end up having to get off their duffs and actually rack up some quality time at the old keyboard.)

And so it was the last few days when education writer Terry Lewis came down with this serious funk that appears to be some kind of hybrid flu/congestion/cough/nasal/sore throat/headachy/sinus infection thing. (This, for poor Terry, while he was also without electricity.)

With more than half of the news staff severely impacted by the storm that rocked the city’s world on Jan. 2, getting breathing bodies in the newsroom on a daily basis became an iffy at best proposition, even if those bodies were breathing funk germs. So Terry’s decision to come into work despite his ill health — plus, the guy had no heat, no fridge, no running water and Alabama had gotten beat in the NCAA Championship Game — was seen by his appreciative co-workers as above-and-beyond-the-call … even if they avoided getting too close to him.

As Terry’s symptoms eased up — mind you, they didn’t go away, just eased up, because this funk he contracted is monumental — and things started drifting back toward semi-normal, the inevitable happened. Terry’s funk spread. First Editor Jim Hendricks got a slight dose. Then librarian/reporter/superwoman Mary Braswell got hit a little worse. But, of course, being the sharing soul that he is, Terry saved the funkiest part of his funk for me.

Now my family avoids me like the plague, I’m the one coughing and hocking up gobs of phlegm (hope you’re not eating breakfast, Dave), and the combined stocks of NyQuil and Hall’s have skyrocketed. Still, no one’s pointing fingers at Terry. Well, not really. OK, kinda.

It was Hendricks who came up with the winning proclamation when he dubbed our education reporter “Typhoid Terry.” And this funk we’re all sharing? Hendricks has named it the “Flewis.”

Welcome to the newsroom.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.