So I was walking from the train station to the office and passed this restaurant/bar. I'm not at all knowledgable about the mechanics and plumbing of restaurant kitchens, but periodic visits from a truck that sucks unspeakable things from the grease trap (or whatever) seem to be the norm. Today, just such a truck was parked on the side of the road with a largish flexible hose pipe snaking across the pavement and round into the restaurant kitchen.
At the precise moment that I stepped over the hose, one of its joints burst apart. Fortunately the joint was several metres from me but the combined factors of high pressure 'liquids' and strong wind mean that I ended up splattered in numerous places (literally from head to foot) with deposits of a substance having the consistency and odour of vomit.
I was not the only person affected in this way. You might imagine that the affected parties would form up into an angry mob. However in this case the environment had been transformed with such rapidity into such a festering pile of unpleasantness that none of us had any thought but to make our escape as quickly as humanly possible.
Ten minutes later I arrived at the office and headed straight for the bathroom where I removed clothing items and thoroughly rinsed their affected areas. I also took the opportunity to lather and scrub any affected areas of my body. My return to the office wearing a rather wet shirt and trousers prompted a number of enquiring looks.
I told the story to the three people who sit closest to me and apologised in case there was any lingering odour. Several minutes later I logged on to the $work IRC channel and found that one of them had changed to channel topic to:
Don't ask Grant about the exploding truck of vomit
Don't ask Grant about the exploding truck of vomit.
As I read that, I'm installing Eclipse for some Enterprisey Development on one machine and refactoring a really grotty prototype-that-shipped yacc-based parser on another. Thanks for the metaphor for my Friday afternoon.
The channel topic in IRC is the sardonic hilarity filter of the human experience.
