Recent reports have indicated that “literally everybody” working at Acuforce Accounting is desperately hoping that someone else will take one for the team and say bless you to their weird coworker, Dave.
“Dave’s nice but he’s a little bit weird,” said Amber Jensen who started working in the office about six months ago. “But I feel bad. Someone should say bless you to the guy. I just don’t want it to be me.”
According to reports, the average awkward silence between sneezes and when someone actually says bless you to Dave is about eight seconds with a standard deviation of four seconds.
“Yeah, I’m not really sure why it’s so hard,” said Ben Hyde, another employee at the office. “It literally only takes half a second to say bless you or even gesundheit, but for some reason I just really, really don’t want to do that.”
Hyde added that sometimes he’s willing to say bless you after the first sneeze but a er the second or third one it “starts to get a bit ridiculous.”
Dr. Issa Dawn, a psychology professor at the University of Texas states that this appears to be a weird take on the classic “bystander effect”.
“When everyone thinks someone else will help, no one helps,” explains Dr. Dawn. “Although I’m not quite sure why it’s so hard in this case. They really don’t have to do much. But I’m not sure I would be the first one either.”
At press time, employees were hoping that Dave had remembered to take his allergy medication earlier that morning and were considering just spiking his coffee with Benadryl.
