Bless You

I am at work this morning, surfing the web and hoping my boss would think I was just fervently working on a nine-page Excel spreadsheet of our mid-year inventory when the woman in the office next to mine started sneezing and couldn't stop. I have an obsession with sneezes; I have to say "Bless you" every single time. It has little to do with God or any actual blessing, it's more of an obsessive tic. When Jason sneezes he really does it up right, he sneezes like seven or eight times in a row. He sneezes so much at one time you can smell his brain. And I bless each individual sneeze.
So this woman starts sneezing, and I start blessing, and then I hear her trying to muffle her sneezes--trying to keep them inside her head--but hi, she's obviously still sneezing, so I keep blessing. You can't hide a sneeze from me. You didn't suddenly stop sneezing and start spitting. Please. But then it dawns on me that my bless yous are making her uncomfortable for some reason. Maybe because I'm screaming down the hall like a four-year-old and it's distracting? Something. So I made a forced decision to quit. But then like ten minutes later she cleared her throat and I yelled "BLESS YOU!" again like an OCD psychopath. I guess I had that one stored up.
After that she didn't make any noise whatsoever at all. I heard her barley whispering into the phone like she was curled up in a fetal ball under desk. It occurred to me to go into her office and tell her "Hey, I heard you drop a paperclip a minute ago, can I help you find it?" Like a funny icebreaker, you know? Ha Ha, I know how it looks, but I'm really not listening to every little thing you do! But then I thought: what if she's actually just dropped a paperclip? I'm afraid that's an awkward hole of social weirdness from whose depths I could never hoist myself. Even I know my limitations.