Contagion

Not a movie review, this is much better.

Going through the work day and look out the window to see an emergency vehicle pull up at PUMA right outside the brand center.  The brand center is a section of the building where we have all shoes from Spring ’13 set up right now.  People from all over the world are here this week having meetings to talk about the shoes, and make final changes.  That makes it a very busy exciting week around PUMA.  With all those extra people and stress etc. I wasn’t totally surprised to see an ambulance, but then 4 more pulled up...

Time for our meeting.  We went down to the brand center to discuss the shoes that our group was responsible for.  We cover all the shoes, then most of the team heads back to the office.  My supervisor though insisted that we stay longer and look at the whole range of shoes.  Normally great, but I really wanted lunch.  As we were looking through the shoes a guy walks in and announces that some people had come down sick, and we were not to go into show rooms 1 or 3.  The people were going to the hospital to see what was wrong.  I didn’t see the big deal since they said it was just some throwing up and diarrhea (admittedly unpleasant).  We finish looking at the shoes and go to leave the brand center to go to lunch (20 minutes late).  Coming to the door we learned that sometime between when my colleagues escaped the brand center at our meeting's end and the present time they had decided to quarantine us.  Not cool.  Hungry, and I needed to leave early for the day anyway and they weren’t letting anyone out.  I checked around, and they had people guarding every exit and there were people with masks and medical equipment wandering around.

After a while of this, the head doctor called us all together.  He opened with, “I’m sure you have all heard what is going on here.”  Which was followed with an immediate rejection of the claim from the 150 or so of us locked in there who really had hardly any idea what was going on.  He went on to explain that 18 people had come down sick at once and after examining them in the hospital for the cause, decided it was just an ordinary bug, that makes you uncomfortable for 8 to 10 hours and then passes.  Thank goodness.  They let us all go after only about an hour with the advice to wash our hands regularly, not to kiss anyone, and to drink lots.  Most people assumed he meant beer.  Germans...

Anyway, we were released upstairs to explain what was going on to the people who had been on the outside and confused.  They were all terrified to come near us lest we be infected.  Shortly afterwards we all got an email saying that after all the commotion, we should all just head home for an early weekend.  I caught the bus at 13:30 and enjoyed an extra couple hours free.  Just as well, I was going to leave by 14:30 anyway.  I got out earlier and with a story.

Side story:  The meetings this week for the new shoes has been quite memorable when combining the story above at closing with the alarm during the opening ceremonies on Monday.  A pipe had burst and flooded shoes stored in the basement (which I got to clean up with the other development interns), so we all evacuated a little bit and stood outside in the -5F weather (-20C).  The people at the meeting of course didn’t have coats with them.