Dear Girl who was clearing her throat for the entirety of class,
At first I thought it was just a tickle of the throat. After all, that would have been forgivable. But then the half-assed coughing persisted. To give you the benefit of the doubt, I imagined the many times I had choked on a fraction of my saliva, proceeding to hack uncontrollably while simultaneously trying to control my body. However, your soft “ahem’s” couldn’t quite be categorized by this phenomenon. In fact, the utterances you made couldn’t quite be categorized by anything I had ever experienced before.
And every time I tried to pinpoint exactly what you were doing, another “ahem” would interrupt my thought process. My frustration building, I decided to make a game out of it. By recording the time between your throat clearing, I came up with an average of 53 seconds between coughs. This was a ninety-minute lecture. You made that god-awful sound at least one hundred times. A hundred times I was reminded that your sickly germs were in the process of crawling all over my face. A hundred times I was distracted from the (ahem) neurological pathways behind (ahem) stress, which, naturally, stressed me out. A hundred times I was utterly confused at your ability to be so inefficient with a process that the rest of the world has mastered: the cough.
If I wasn’t so concerned about missing part of the lecture (why don’t all professors post slides on Canvas), I would have gotten up and grabbed you some water. Maybe then this insanity could have stopped. Maybe then I could have saved the countless victims that were sitting next to you during class, looking longingly at the clock, counting down the seconds until they could bathe in hand sanitizer. I half considered ramming my hand down your throat to extract whatever was causing this egregious event, in a method akin to hand-fishing. On further consideration, I decided a not so passive-aggressive letter would serve equal purpose, while also protecting your anonymity. This is what being considerate looks like. Some advice to you: buy a cough drop. Drink some tea. Go to the nurse. Enroll in a program that teaches you how to not be such an annoyance to the general public.
Sincerely,
Girl who better not be sick tomorrow
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