Klutz – but with special effects

I’m not clumsy by nature.

I mean some people can’t get out of bed in the morning without tripping over their own feet, but I’m not one of them.

That being said…

I made myself some sandwiches and a cup of coffee… And headed for my desk. While waiting for the coffee to percolate I had just poured milk into my cup.  So there I am, ambling desk-wards and suddenly random allergies kick in and I start sneezing.

This is not the one discreet “tjhmphf” that you migh get when the sun tickles you, this is fifteen full body sneezes in a row. I’m spazing like a wholly demented fully possessed weird-ass puppet on a string, desperately trying to hold on to my snack. Don’t beat me to the punchline now…

The sandwiches make it just fine, I balance the plate perfectly, but then something goes wrong in the hand-eye muscle coordination thing and the coffee  mug takes on a life of it’s own, jerking out of my hand.

It leaves the clutch of my fingers with unexpected velocity and describes a perfect arc in the air, milk making a fine spray of a white rainbow that can be seen in slow motion like the rain in that scene from The Matrix where blood permeates the water splash kicked up by Neo’s boots. I kid you not, I saw it in slow motion.

There is milk everywhere.

On the floor, on my chair, on my terminal… on the friggin’ walls for crying out loud. I’m kind of grateful the coffee wasn’t done yet, you know? There would have been much more of a splatter effect. Some days a thing like that would piss you off, yeah, but this shit was just funny as hell.

There was no one around to see it, which is kind of too bad, ’cause that’s some vintage slapstick right there. There would have been applause. Possibly score cards too. You know “France 12 points, Roumania 7,9 points…” that kind of thing. Running commentary on how the Russian judges were stingy with the score ’cause their milk-splatter team is far superior, that kind of thing.

So I’ll take my bow here instead. Thank you, thank you, you’re too kind.

ROL

Tools, guys and bad ideas

Gender distortion and metro sexuality aside there are some instances when boys will be boys.

I’ll explain.

So there I am sitting in the break room with a couple of my colleagues. They’ve been putting up a wall, painting, putting up skirting-boards, baseboards, that kind of thing.

It’s hotter than all hell out there, which does all kinds of weird things to the human brain, especially if you’re doing manual labour, so a drop in IQ is perfectly understandable. The conversation rolls around topics like ice cream, short skirts, sweat and such, as it tends to do. Suddenly the 6’4’’ guy in all black worker wear looks up from his mug of coffee and says in a slightly dreamy and far away voice:

-I wonder what the range of hurting someone with a nail gun actually is.

…

…

Now, if there was ever a query likely to end in Jackass like antics, that would be the one.

Those things have a safety measure for precisely that scenario, in case you got nervous. You can’t actually shoot a nail gun at someone – which leads me to believe that, yes, someone tried it. And, yes it worked, and yes, it hurts. And yes, you’ll need to go to the hospital.

That did not stop the conversation from going into how the safety measure can be disabled (and no, I am not sharing) and what the range on that might be, you know, from a pounds of force per square inch perspective. Fucking hell!

So. This is one of those things that I’ll wager only guys come up with after a long, hard day of work over a cup of coffee whereas I am sure the ladies would not follow this particular line of thought long enough for it to derail into the careening, screaming bad idea train that it actually is.

I’m just sayin’

ROL