I was at a coffeeshop a little while ago buying some juice and a bagel with cream cheese. I went there mostly for the juice because I’m sick like an animal over here and I figured the vitamins and all that crap might be good for me. So I’m sitting there at the coffeeshop waiting for my bagel and sort of staring blankly in the general direction of the cashier, when all of the sudden she starts coughing. My eyes snapped into focus and I saw something very ordinary, very everyday.

The cashier was coughing into her sleeve.

It took me a few minutes to fully grasp the significance. I sniffled a few times, and felt my temples throb (assumedly with mucus, or some other kind of sickness-related fluid I don’t know about), and then it hit me. Yeah, it’s not particularly attractive to cough all over your shirt, but it’s probably worse to do it all over your hands, right? You don’t grab door knobs and handrails with the crook of your arm, do you? This makes sense. Cough into your god damned sleeve. I turned to my roommate with my epiphany.

“That’s such a good fucking idea!” I said.

“What?”

“Coughing into your sleeve.”

“Yeah. It’s a food service thing.”

So apparently the food service sector has been hip to this for a while. A quick google search shows that the health sector are also aware of the benefits of sleeve coughing. So when the hell is this gonna catch on with the business casual crowd? Nobody at the office wants to get sick, but everybody comes to work sick and coughs all over their hands and grabs everything in sight and then BAM! Here I am with a brutal cold.

The moral of the story is this: cough into your god damned sleeve.