Time for the annual jab. The nurse loaded up the needle with anti-flu juice and asked: Which arm do you prefer? It's the sort of question that makes you think your limb will hang numb like a sleeve full of ground chuck for a few hours. Well, I'm heading off to a mortgage refi, have to sign a lot of docs, so the left one.
Sometimes you feel virtuous after a flu shot, but you shouldn't preen. Shucks, no need to thank me; just doin' my part to prevent a pandemic.
Not everyone takes shots lightly. I knew a grown-up who fainted after a shot, and if there's anything that livens up the mood in Minute Clinic, it's the nurse saying "Ready for your flu shot?" then wheeling the person out on a stretcher three minutes later.
Here's the problem: We are in the 21st century, and you still have to go someplace to get the shot. At least there are many choices: big-box, grocery and drugstores, and, someday soon, dollar stores, although they probably won't have sharp needles. They dip a pencil in the vaccine and jab you, and it smells like mothballs.
I'm surprised lube joints don't offer shots, complete with arm stickers to indicate the last time you were inoculated. Come to think of it, do high-end grocery stores have extra-luxury treatments? They swab your arm with 24-year-old Scotch.
Anyway. Uber, the not-cab cab company, will be changing the way we get vaccinated. In certain markets they will deliver a nurse to your house to give you a shot, which is cool. If traditional cab companies did this you'd have to wait by the front door for a guy walking back and forth down the street holding up a hypo, looking for someone to wave at him.
This will seem archaic in four years, when you can call Amazon for same-day inoculation and drones will deliver the shots. But probably not the nasal spray version. You get your nostril hooked, and the next thing you know you're flying over the treetops, thinking: must have ordered the flew shot.
