indessed roscivs

I, like approximately a quarter of the population, am a multiple sneezer. The above link defines this type as “the sneezer that keeps sneezing one right after the other until he begins to look like Count von Count from Sesame Street.” My average is probably around five, with a range from two or three (rather rare) to six or seven or more.

This occasionally disturbs people who have not heard me sneeze before. They often ask if I have allergies, or if I’m all right, as if some terrible thing has happened. After moving desks recently, my new cubemate handed me a box of tissues after the first multiple-sneeze incident. I proffered my thanks, but noted that I already had several boxes sitting on my desk and that this was a normal, expected occurrence.

At a previous job, I had a coworker who followed the Latin American tradition of wishing the sneezer “Health” for the first sneeze, “Money” for the second sneeze, and “Love” for the third sneeze. (Wikipedia has a list of responses in various languages.) Apparently if you sneeze more than three times in a row, it throws them off. (This particular coworker insisted that the correct response was to hit the sneezer for each sneeze past three, a cultural peculiarity I have been unable to confirm via Google, but thankfully he never actually followed through.)

I’ve had friends who delight in counting, with much gusto, each individual sneeze, as if encouraging me to go higher and higher. Another individual wanted to statistically analyze my sneezes to determine whether they were predictable, and write a computer program that used past behavior to forecast when future sneezing fits would occur, as well as the estimated number of sneezes that the next batch would consist of.

Recently, during my usual spates of sneezes, I’ll get to around four or five sneezes and then suddenly think to myself, “Hey, I wonder how many I’ll get to! Wait, how many have I already sneezed?” which distracts me, and I stop sneezing. Oops.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.