Suddenly phone calls kept rushing in, and some kind of bizarre pressures had built up. I could catch a hint of tension almost in everyone’s expression while answering the calls. The quiet, peaceful office was suddenly buzzing with abnormal activity.

“What’s up?” I asked one of my colleagues, who just hang up the phone.

“Overload, the communication was down. Damn!” he answered with a curse.

I stared at him in shock, couldn’t believed what he had just said.  “How? What?” I blurted out.

“Rumor said that salt supply might be running out soon, nuclear pollution in the salt fields or something, and everyone started to make calls and rush to buy salt in panic. One thing led to another, you know”

I wanted to laugh only I couldn’t. Shortly after Wenchuan earthquake, we had been fed with enough such wild stories that I thought nobody would take the bait at such nonsense. But apparently I was wrong. I started to forget how easily we could be manipulated during a crisis, and now life just gave me a refresher course. The worst thing about going through a crisis was to suffer in the dread of the unknown, under such circumstance, people tend to jump at any information they could get, no matter how absurd such information is.

But the shortage of salt in Sichuan? It’s a bit far-fetched even at human’s level. Come on,  even as ignorant as a person like me knows that  we are one of the biggest salt production province, and as far as we could go, we could only consume a tenth of the salt we produced--at top. What’s all the fuss for?

There were at least ten reasons why this was a wholly bullshit. One: Nuclear Leakage happened in Japan, and a soothing by-product of geography is two: there are mountains, oceans, far distance between Japan and Sichuan. That meant Three: if we have already exposed to deadly radioactive exposure, the Japan would at least be wiped out---which we all know it didn’t. Besides Four: the Japanese, even the people close to hit area didn’t rush to mass buy salt, or anything else; which led rather conveniently to Five: Salt, any kind of salt, can’t help curing disease from nuclear radiation, or Six : nothing seriously enough for us to be panic if the Japanese could remain calm. In addition with Seven: it’s highly impossible for all the sea salt fields in China could have been contaminated. Eight: If such impossible did happen, we still have sufficient well salt supply. This brought us back to Nine: If nuclear meltdown did happen in Japan and put the whole world in danger, should Salt be the last thing we need to worry about? And Ten: Cross the bridge until we come to it. This fuss was really for nothing, that’s for sure.

And stupid. We now give Salt Fever a complete fresh explanation.