You Can Call Me Calvin

I just returned from my pre-retirement seminar. You know. The one Hick couldn't find with both hands if it was biting him on the butt.

It will be a miracle if I survive the week. And I'm not even drawing my retirement yet. The weather was SO cold that I almost perished during the presentation. The presentation that somebody who attended last year said would take about an hour. Hmpf! Try an hour and forty-five minutes.

Much to Hick's dismay, the event was held not at the Highway Patrol building, but in the Little Theater. I swear. That place is like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge of Little Theaters. Can't call 'er Galloping Gertie. Tacoma took that name. But we'll call 'er Gusting Gertrude. Wind whistled down the hallway of that place, made a sharp left turn, and chilled me to the bone. I think I was sitting under the eye of a polar vortex. I received maximum coolage. So much so that you could have called me Calvin.

Before the thin lady spoke, I had commanded Hick (HE FOUND THE PLACE BEFORE I EVEN GOT THERE) to shove his camouflage jacket (more on this later) into the seat we left between us, so I could put my coat on backwards and rest my folder and phone on the convenient table we just made. I stopped short of pulling up the hood to cover the bottom of my face like Bazooka Joe's buddy, Mort, in his red turtleneck. Because my coat is purple, not red. That Kris-Kross-y fashion technique allowed me to warm up enough that my hands stopped shaking. I could then resist the urge to run around that Little Theater, grabbing folders of confidential information, and torching them to feel the warmth of a raging conflagration.

But that's not why I might not survive the week. A little cold is but a candle in the wind compared to the blazing fever I will most likely develop after inhaling and absorbing through every pore and hair follicle the deadly virus sprayed on me for an hour and forty-five minutes by the hacker who sat behind me. Oh, she was sly. Came in right when the thin lady spoke, and picked out the SEAT DIRECTLY BEHIND ME. I could feel my hair fluff every time she barked. I tried to hold my breath until her cooties settled due to gravity, but that's kind of hard when you're panting with the cold, puffing out frosty breath that's almost visible.

Even if I outsmarted Typhoid Mary behind me, Patient Zero two seats to Hick's left picked up where she left off. You know how when a man goes to the doctor, and during a part of the exam Doc says, "Turn your head and cough." Well, Patient Zero must have been a man at one time, even though today she was a sallow gal with bags under her eyes. Because every three minutes, Patient Zero turned her head and coughed towards Hick. He didn't exactly know what was going on. He commented that she kept coughing, but he couldn't see what she was doing, because she was on his blind side. What he doesn't know can definitely hurt him.

On the way out, I swear I got frostbite. I only had to walk about fifty yards. But that wind cut like a knife. With the temperature at 7 degrees, I'm not sure what the wind chill was. My hand gripping my unburned folder was so cold that I lost feeling. Then once I got in T-Hoe, that hand started to burn.

The only good thing about the freezing temperature is that maybe the germs did not survive my walk to the car.