The Bug You Became

You finish the second-to-last stand-up call by muting your microphone and coughing into the crook of your elbow for forty-three seconds straight. Your lead, a man named Rohan whose camera is always pointed at a potted ZZ plant, says “Great hustle” before disconnecting. You drag yourself through the last one. The code you review looks like alphabet soup left in the rain.

Because you did this, you do not rest. You take a paracetamol with cold water. The next morning, you feel worse, but you are now the person who powered through. The identity calcifies. You log on. You become known for it. When Prakash from QA messages the group chat about feeling feverish, Rohan replies, “Ask Ankit. He’s our iron man.” The nickname is a curse in a company polo shirt.

Six months later, a junior developer named Leela messages you privately. She has a migraine so severe she’s seeing auras. She asks, very politely, how you manage. You stare at the blinking cursor. You type, “Just push through. It’s a mindset.” You send it. You feel the phantom taste of cold paracetamol. Leela sends back a thumbs-up emoji. You see her status go to “Away” for the rest of the day and feel a strange, sour victory.

The annual flu makes its rounds. You get it, of course. You are on a client call, your voice a gravelly whisper, explaining a database schema. You hear a wet, rattling sound. It’s your own breathing, amplified by your headset. The client, a woman in Berlin named Greta, pauses and says, “Ankit, are you quite alright? You sound… unwell.” You insist you’re fine. She ends the meeting eight minutes early. The feedback form that comes to Rohan mentions “concern for team wellbeing.”

A new policy is announced the following week. It is presented in a slide deck with cheerful clip art of people in beds with laptops. “Presenteeism,” the title reads, “is a bug, not a feature.” Mandatory sick days are now enforced by IT, who will remotely disable your VPN access if you try to log on while marked out. You are, silently, the reason for the clip art.

You take a sick day. You lie on your couch and watch the sunlight move across the floor. Your phone does not buzz.