This Little Piggy Was A Virus

***WARNING - images in this post may be disturbing and actually cause you to throw up a little in the back of your mouth. Having been warned, read at your own discretion.***

A dear friend of mine developed warts on his foot. We've all seen warts before. Little calloused looking things that are usually the size of the end of a pencil at most. However, this particular case is an exception to the norm.

In less than 2 years it went from one small pesky bump to this.

Now that you've swallowed your own vomit in the back of your throat, let me continue. I received special permission to post these pictures as long as I adhered to the following request. "You can blog it as long as you keep 'The Foot' anonymous and make it clear that it is a viral infection and not lack of care."

So, I will give no clues as to the owner of the foot, but I will tell you that how this case formed. According to the doctor, was a small cut on the bottom of the foot came into contact with the virus and the virus has spread. When the doctor saw this, he left the room, called his nurse and told her that it was really bad and he'd only seen one other case this bad.

The nurse came back in and began treatment, which consists of rubbing acid over the warts, covering them with gauze and then in two weeks when the acid has caused huge blisters to form all over the foot, come back and cut the dead skin off the foot and reapply a stronger acid. This process will repeat for 3 months and at that time it will be determined if surgery is required to finish removing the remaining warts. Surgery done now would leave my friend unable to walk for 3 weeks. But as the first round of treatment is concluding, he has had to spend his time on crutches and limping in his house slippers because the pain is too great to put his full weight on his foot.

Everyone shiver and let your stomache tighten a bit as you get that out of your system.

I know you didn't think that I was just going to show disgusting pictures and not relate it to something business, so here is my analogy.

One thing that small business owners must be continually aware of is do they have any employees who act like a virus in their operation. Virus employees are those who come in and spread their negative attitude to other employees and eventually to customers too. They start out as an annoying little bump on the bottom of your foot, but if time goes on and if left unattended, their viral attitude infests the whole company making it hard for your company to walk and requiring severe and painful treatment to get rid of. Along the way, the morale of your other, helathy employees will deteriorate. You will begin to lose customers too as they are either disgusted by what they see from this viral employee or they begin to believe what the employee says. Either way, you lose.

So keep a close eye on any problem within your organization. Something as innocent as a small cut can result in a major problem. This is why it is important to continually clean your company and remove problems. Sometimes it hurts to rub a little alcohol on the cut, but the pain of prevention will be much quicker and far less than they agonizing cure.

So, if you have any employees in your company that are causing a cut or are potentially bringing a virus into a cut, don't let them end up turning your beloved company into this.