Bad Blood

They had a blood donation drive thingy at work. "Help a hero, thank a hero" it said on the posters, with a noble looking fireman standing somewhere that might have been the World Trade Centre in New York, with a policeman looking on. I wondered how often criminals that the police had shot needed blood, relative to how often policemen needed blood. But I suspect most blood goes on really unsexy things like hip replacements.

Anyway, the sign up procedure was really clever. You went to a web page and booked an appointment, and that sent a confirmation email that I clicked on and it added it to my Outlook calendar. So it's impossible to forget. Almost.

I arrived this morning and realized that I'd forgotten my identity card, which meant I couldn't get into the bike store. The security guy on the car park opened the door for me (but not before he'd checked that my bike had the appropriate registration sticker on it - that's what that was for).

On the way in, slightly sweaty, I saw K, the nurse, who asked if I was giving blood.

Shit shit shit shit shit. So I get my temporary badge, and went to the blood place. Luckily, my appointment was at 10:15, and it was 10:00, so I had a shower to make sure I wasn't too sweaty.

I went back to the blood place, and signed in. I was given a very thick booklet to read, and they said I had to read it. Luckily it was in about 7 languages, so it wasn't as thick as it looked. The first part was about HIV. It said that they were going to ask me if I'd had oral, anal or vaginal sex (along with gentle descriptions of those, in case you weren't sure). It asked if I'd had sex with a man, ever been paid for sex, if I'd lived in Chad, Nigeria or Haiti (or a few other places).

The next section was the mad cow disease section. It asked if I'd lived in the UK for more than three months, between 1 Jan 1980 and 31 December, 1996. I said I'd lived there 17 years during that time (notice that cunning bit of arithmetic?) and they said, very nicely, that they didn't want my nasty diseased British blood.

But they gave me a voucher for a free pizza from Papa John's. It looked complicated to get one's free pizza though (you had to go to a web page and type in a code, and get a number and use that), and it's the sort of thing that I either lose immediately, or look at every day with the intention of using. When I got to my office I couldn't get in ('cos my card opens that too) so I gave the voucher to the person who helped me get in.