Work Daze

Has this ever happened to you?

You walk into work feeling great. You’re happy, healthy, full of pep and vim. Then, as the morning progresses, you start feel weak and woozy. Your vision clouds. Every time you try to express your feelings to your manager, your throat contracts and you find you can do little more than rasp out a feeble, “OK, I’ll do it your way.”

By the afternoon you can hardly breathe. You’re tearing up every time you face your computer, and the thought of a late-in-the-day meeting makes your heart start to pound so rapidly you start eying the company defibrillator. When it’s time to go home you’re so tired and sick that you know you will be able to do nothing more that evening than flop on the sofa, sucking down brewskis, and watching the conclusion of “America’s Top Model.”

If this sad description comes close to describing your everyday worklife, here’s good news. The problem might not be your awful, soul-crushing job. Really! Chance are, you aren’t sick of your work. You’re sick because of it.

Lisa Belkin, the Life’s Work columnist at “The New York Times” opened my scratchy, red eyes to this critical issue in a recent screed entitled, “Sickened by the office (Really.) Her theme is that even in allergy season, many people are not suffering from ragweed, but from the ragging they get at work.

The syndrome is called “work-induced allergy” and, according to Belkin, it is “fairly simple to diagnose: the symptoms worsen as the workday progresses, and lessen after you leave. And you feel fine on weekends and vacations.”

And you thought you simply hated your manager!

The specific causes for work-induced allergies listed in the Times article are rooted in the physical world, rather than the psychological torture which we suffer in our workplace Abu Ghraib. The white coats at The Mayo Clinic’s web site (mayoclinc.com) agree. They list 16 professions that are especially at risk for occupational asthma, including veterinarian, cabinetmaker, baker, and hairdresser. [I believe in the new Adam Sandler movie, “Don’t Miss with the Zohan,” the fearless, hairdresser super-spy is eventually brought down by the fumes from a jar of Dippity-Doo.)

For the worker in the more traditional office environment, Ms. Belkin puts the blame for our weakened conditions on sneeze-inducing carpets, rather than snooze-inducing meetings. I’m sure that the cheap building materials and shoddy health standards our companies provide are to blame for much of our misery, but carpets and drapes are hardly the entire cause of our problems at work.

After all, it’s one thing to be allergic to peanuts. It’s quite another when you’re set off on a depressive, downward spiral because of a supervisor who is nuts.

Fortunately, some of the recommended cures for allergic reactions will also work when trying to protect yourself from a psychotic supervisor. For example, sitting at your desk wearing a full-face ventilator mask attached to a C-PAP machine will not only assure you a source of clean, fresh oxygen, but it will also allow you to spend the day dozing without anyone being able to see you’re asleep.

Another workplace irritant that has received a good deal of press lately is the automatic allergic response many of our fellow employees suffer when they come in contact with a co-worker’s odorific perfume or cologne. Right now a number of cases are bubbling through the court system as the judges try to balance the rights of the occupant in the next cubical to be free from nausea and migraines with your right to slather yourself in Paco Rebanne.

[While I would be the last person on earth to tell you to use chemical warfare to defeat an office opponent, if you can rid yourself of a competitor simply by spritzing yourself ten times a day with Calvin Klein’s Obsession, I say, “spritz away!”]

One final fact that is clear in the issues surrounding workplace irritants is that while the employee is certainly free to complain to management or even to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA,) you may risk more than a stuffy nose.

One ailing worker who complained found that management “started treating me like a potential lawsuit, giving me bad reviews and sending me for meetings with H.R.”

My advice: stock up on antihistamines and start stock piling Kleenex. Being sick as a dog is no fun, but anything is better than a meeting with H.R.