Are you fed up of watching your friends, colleagues and relatives cough and snivel their way through the latest "thing that's going around" ? Do you feel left out, not one of the "in-crowd" ?
Help is at hand. Just sign up for BorgCo's Virus of the Month Club, and each month trained* BorgCo technicians
will show up to present you with an appropriate inoculation of infective agent. Should you fail to develop symptoms in the expected timeframe, then you can get a second dose free, or alternatively a dose of a different agent to which you may be more susceptible.
The agent is engineered** to have acceptably low*** lethality, ensuring that although you are visibly ill (and indeed feel genuinely unwell) no permanent**** harm will occur.
Membership entitles you to receive a membership card, in brightly-coloured plastic, which you can use to claim discounts***** at pharmacies, medical facilities, suppliers of "comfort foods", and funeral homes.
*Trained, definitely. Trained for the specific task involved, maybe not so much.
**See the above disclaimer on training; the work on the organism will definitely be carried out by qualified and certified engineers. Whether their specific expertise coincides with the requirements of the task, or whether they have to constantly refer back to their notes and data display device, is a different issue.
*** Obviously there has to be some mortality, but we do want you to renew your annual subscription. There will always be a few outliers from the mean survival probability.
****Death is considered "permanent harm". For other outcomes, please refer to the very, very small print.
***** You are extremely unlikely to actually obtain discounts, as there are no arrangements between BorgCo and any other vendors and service providors; however, it's worth a try. You never know, you might get lucky.******
****** The probability is non-zero, but so close to zero as to be almost indistinguishable. Please refer to the very, very, very, very small print.
[We note some Prior Art using the same title, but nothing actually like this idea]