Ever Checked Your Shoes for Poo in a Carpeted Building?

If you took 2-inch by 4-inch stickers off of plastic boxes about 20 times a day, what would you do with them?

If you answered a question with a question, I’m right there with you… You’re wondering if they are recyclable and if this is a trap question to determine if you are truly green in an age where it is cool to worry about the future of the planet. Well, I don’t know if they’re recyclable. Nor do I care.

The right answer is “Well, Loren, I would probably wad them up into a ball. But not a new ball everyday… No, I’m thinking I’d wad them into the same ball. Every day. For five years.

So I spent last week in Tampa for work. We were looking at the warehousing for a couple of hospitals down there. It was on this trip that I met Baby. Baby is the afore-referenced ball of packing stickers. How many packing stickers would you have assembled, in pounds of course? Well, you’d weigh in at a smidge under 300. Pounds, of course. Naturally, you’d want to put eyes and lips on Baby, and occasionally dress her up.

What else happened in Tampa? Good question. You just got your participation points for the week. Let me tell you what else happened in Tampa… We got sabotaged. While my creativity rots away in a cubicle from 8 to 5, even in my imagination’s prime, I couldn’t have made up the following…

I had just badged back in from the bathroom. Yes, badged in. As I walked into our conference room that we were working in for the week, a coworker immediately asked “Do you smell that?” It was at that precise second that I could and did respond with “I do now… What is that?” “I don’t know. I just saw a guy walk by and spray something in here.”

That something must have been the intestinal lining of fourteen cows and the melted glass from twenty-three thousand used rectal thermometers, in aerosol form. I have smelled something similar before… In your effort to learn more about me, you’ll be excited to know that I used to work in a fireworks warehouse. It was there that I was introduced to the Wild Geese Rocket.

Fireworks come from… brace yourself… China. Apparently, cardboard, paper, and urine are the preferred packing products. After a trip across an ocean and 2,000 miles of non-ocean, the cardboard really starts to smell. Don’t worry, the urine doesn’t smell at that point.

Anyway, it smelled [insert your preferred synonym for dreadful here]. We marveled at the odor for a while, which I believe to be analogous to watching a school bus teeter on the edge of a cliff, with nothing but a herd of helpless sheep below. Then we began to look for a solution. People who work in the areas around our conference room began to wander in just to see if it really smelled as bad as they had heard. No one left disappointed.

The guy we were working with most of the time came in and immediately told us to evacuate. Done. So, we’re hanging out in the hallway when he decides to begin the manhunt. Blue shirt, white tie. Look out.

Everyone at the facility has their picture up on the wall… Well, everyone except for the prime suspect. Facility guy comes to us, picture in hand, “Is this him?” Coworker, “I didn’t get a good look at him. I just saw the back of his head.” As I wonder how this guy got profiled as the assailant, facility guy explains, “He has a history of doing stuff like this.” I really want to know what you have to do to get the kind of reputation where you are immediately accused of stinkbombing a room full of strangers in a professional environment.

Regardless, Febreeze and Lysol started coming from various locations and the fumigation began. There’s really no elegant way to go into your office and come out with a can of Lysol. Still, it worked for the most part. A couple of hours later, all that was left was a potential blog post. You can thank public enemy number 2.