For two years, now, I’ve been what you might call the Resident Hunk of the WBAP newsroom. The “Alpha Male,” if you will.

You can imagine how the entire newsroom was thrown into disarray when I, of all people, came down with a slight cold.

I don’t get sick very often. The last time was in 2008. At the time, I thought I was just sick of living in Houston, but my doctor said it was the flu. In retrospect, we were probably both right.

That brings us to last week. It started with a tickle in my throat. The next day it was a cough. A few days later, after a particularly violent coughing spell, my colleague, Mark Watkins, came out of the news booth.

“What is all the ruckus?” he asked. “It sounds like a refinery out here.”

“Just a little cold,” I explained.

“Why didn’t you just stay home? You’re going to make the rest of us sick,” Mark continued.

I explained that I didn’t feel sick, it was just this cough. It was harmless.

“Well, are you at least taking cough syrup?”

“No,” I replied. “Cough syrup doesn’t work. Anyone who buys cough syrup is a fool.”

He told me he buys cough syrup and he’s not a fool (although, I would point out, one might expect a fool to be ignorant of his own foolishness). He warned me that without a good cough syrup, my cough would become bronchitis, which would, in medical terms, “knock me right on my ass.”

I sent him that WebMD link and explained, rationally, that I didn’t care if I died from this cough, I was not going to buy cough syrup. Thanks to some website, here’s an artist’s rendering of how my tombstone might look:

We decided to compromise: I would visit two nearby pharmacies and ask the pharmacist whether cough syrup worked or if it was, again in medical terms, “stupid.”

The first pharmacist said cough syrup was effective, but when I pressed him, he got this smirk on his face like I was about to blow the lid off the whole racket. The second pharmacist said cough syrup was “popular,” and when I pressed her, she suggested I buy the pills, which have a higher dose of whatever drug she said is in cough syrup.

I took the pills. The next day, the cough was still there.

“Well, you have to give them a few days to kick in,” Mark said.

“I could have taken nothing and the cough would have gone away in a few days!” I replied.

I decided to treat the cough by drinking some scotch with honey in it. I couldn’t find any honey, though, so I used bourbon instead.

What we need is a control group. The next time I get a cold, I won’t take any pills and keep track of how much coughing there is and measure that against the amount of coughing from this time.

I assume, after all, that my boss has been concerned about the lack of Styrofoam cups filled with phlegm in the newsroom.

Epilogue: Mark developed a cough a couple of days later. I offered him the rest of the pills, but he wouldn’t take them.