What a shitty demo

I actually left the office for my 15 minute lunch today -- not to eat, but just to run to the electronics store and buy a few capacitors to fix a TV. I got back, went to the cafeteria and grabbed a quick sandwich, then headed up to my desk, because I had a teleconference to attend. After I ate, I dialed in to watch a product demo from a vendor.

As I'm sitting there, I realize that something stinks pretty bad.

That's not so unusual though, because lots of people eat at their desks, and they bring in all kinds of rank-smelling food. Normally, they microwave their bucket of rotten fishheads or whatever downstairs in the cafeteria, then they bring it back upstairs and sit at their desks and suck it down, all the while allowing the stench to permeate throughout the entire floor.

I've smelled some pretty bad stuff before, but this really smells terrible. The bad thing is that the smell seems to be coming from my just-finished lunch. The food is bad, but generally not that bad. It's only a chicken wrap with hot-sauce for chrissake. How bad could it be? I sniff around a bit, but don't find anything. Then, as I'm looking around under my cube, I catch a whiff.

My amazing powers of smellocation zero in on the culprit.

It's my pants.

My pants smell like shit. And by "like shit" I mean "like actual, honest-to-god feces."

They didn't smell like that this morning when I put them on. I'm pretty sure of that, although I have been on my own for almost 24 hours now, and anything is possible. Spontaneous laundry funkification is, while perhaps not likely, definitely within the realm of possibility.

I investigate further, and realize that the reason my pants smell like shit is because my chair smells like shit -- and my pants have been sitting on my chair. For an instant, my awesome deductive prowess leads me temporarily astray, and I think: "Someone has been sitting and/or shitting in my chair."

I immediately discount this theory as ludicrous, but there is that evidence bomb of the shit-stained chair to contend with. After all, it wasn't there when I left. Maybe somebody hates me. Paula? Maybe. She hates me, but she wouldn't poopify my cube, I don't think. That's pretty rough, even for her.

In the movies, they always say if you want to figure out the motive for a crime, just follow the money trail. In this case, since there was no movie, I was left following the only trail I had, and that trail was much less fun, and much more brownish.

How had shit gotten on my chair? How indeed, Watson. I follow the trail. It leads me directly to the yellowish-brown, oatmeal-cookie-shaped turd that is pancaked to the bottom of my left shoe.

This revelation leads to another.

It seems I have a bad habit of tucking one leg under the other when I sit in a chair. The mystery was solved, as such:



Elementary, my dear Watson.

God, I hate dogs. Why can't they crap in a box like a civilized animal?

So I excuse myself from the meeting, with a quick "brb" to a co-worker via IM, and head for the bathroom. I am walking through the hall very carefully, so as to not drop a small pancake loaf in the middle of the aisle.

I take off my boot, and while balancing on one foot, I hold a paper towel over the sharp edge of the garbage can, and scrape the shit into the can. I then wet a paper towel, and go to work on the little "vibram" logo on the bottom of my sole, which has a nice ring of yellow brown around it.

I'm running the shoe under the faucet, trying to dislodge the last remnants, when someone walks in.

He has a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste in his hand.

He looks at me. He looks at my shoe.

I look at him. I look at his toothbrush.

I scrape a little more crap into the sink and wash it down the drain.

"Dog shit," I inform him.

He turns around and walks out.

That's ok. I never got that whole "brushing your teeth at work" thing anyway. Nothing like a little dog shit on a shoe to really drive my point home. I could have really used that toothbrush though.

The next twenty minutes of my life revolved around cleaning carpets, jeans and chairs, and then rubbing a Mennen Speed Stick that I found in an abandoned cube all over every available surface.

Now everything within ten feet of my cube smells like a man-whore.

Or, to be more precise, a man-whore dipped in dog shit.