It gets contagious

Isn’t it amazing how things can be suddenly contagious? For example, on the school bus today one student got on and immediately began coughing. She was coughing so much that I asked her if she was going to be OK and was about to ask her if she wanted to go back home when she volunteered that she just had a cough and didn’t feel bad enough to stay home from school. You can’t get any more subjective than that. Any way, less than a minute later I heard another student start coughing, then another. Pretty soon it felt like I was driving a hospital bus to the whooping cough ward. Then a girl came forward and wanted to know if I could circle back around to her house because she remembered that she forgot to unplug her hair straightening iron and she didn’t want her house to burn down around her sleeping mother. Well, we wouldn’t want to wake up her mother so I granted her request. While she was in the house a boy remembered that he forgot to let out the dog at his house and he didn’t want his brother to get blamed for it. I didn’t bother trying to get to the bottom of that. Fortunately stopping at his house didn’t require a detour, only another stop. And how do you differentiate the relative importance between a mother and a brother while driving a school bus. I half expected to get further requests to revisit other student’s homes because this was getting almost as contagious as the coughing did earlier. I was spared further requests however and we proceeded on with everyone yawning as I dropped them off at school.