Fudgey
Master of Disaster
So as you know I left the consulting world a couple of years ago and took a sales/tech rep for a vendor that sells water treatment equipment. It was what I could find at the time. It's not bad, but I spend a lot of time visiting clients pushing our stuff and doing training and support. Doing sales on the road is a lonely thing. You have to adjust to spending time alone in the car, in restaurants, and in motels. Unfortunately you pick up some really bad habits as well - habits that ordinarily would horrify you, but, since no one knows about them, you're free to do.
A few examples include talking to yourself, burping, eating in the car, yelling at other drivers, talking to the television in the motel room, sleeping in the nude, farting in the bathtub, peeing in the shower, smoking cigars in the car, and farting in the car. Loudly.
When you're alone so much that you start automatically doing these things, there's a real danger to accidentally doing them when you're finally around people. One time I stayed in an adjoining motel room with a coworker of mine. At breakfast the next morning, he said, "Who were you talking to in the room last night?" He knew I usually leave my cell phone in the car overnight so that nobody can bother me during non-working hours. I had to fumble for answer, but you could tell by the look in his eyes that he thought that I was blue-skinned inbred who needed to be euthanized with a sharp ice pick. I scrambled to remember what I had been yelling at the TV, but it must have sounded sociopathic in nature, because the dude refused to go on business trips with me after that.
My tale of caution today has to do with that last bad habit: farting in the car. I usually pass gas in the car by raising my butt from the driver's seat and expelling it as loudly as I can. This technique expedites the whole process, you don't have to rip a series of junior farts and prolong the process.
I had driven in from across Illinois into Wisconsin and arrived in Madison at the offices of a large design/build contracting firm. I was bringing some plans to several purchasing agents, the entire engineering group, and the VP of that division. That morning I'd slurped down four coffees, a danish, and a particularly foul-smelling ham biscuit, and the whole deal was fermenting in my guts. It felt like somebody had forced a rotting turkey buzzard down my throat, poured a burning can of Sterno over it, let it sit for an hour, and then forced some canned spray cheese into my nostrils and made me swallow it.
I was late for the meeting, so no time to use the restroom first. I came in and we all sat in boardroom chairs. If I had to guess, I would say there were about twelve of us in there, waiting for another VIP to join us. I was bored and lost in my thoughts as the wait began to drag on, and that is when it happened. I had been living and working alone much too long, and it was time to be outed.
Releasing my cheeks, I hunkered my hindquarters up and tried to blow out the festering fart as if I was giving birth to a porcupine. It sounded like a cat caught in the fan belt of a forklift. The entire room went silent and I realized that I'd just ruined my career.
My jaw dropped open and I said the first thing I could think of: "I'm sick."
You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody knew whether to laugh or pretend nothing had happened. A couple moments later, one person started to laugh, and then the whole room exploded. That very instant, the VIP walked into the room. And he smelled it.
He looked as if someone had just told him that his seventy-four-year-old grandmother was expecting triplets after visiting an anonymous sperm bank. I saw several emotions in his expression: surprise, anger, shock, revulsion. And then he started looking around the room to see who had unleashed the fart. All eyes fell onto me, and I wanted to die.
"Are you feeling better?" asked the oldest woman in the room. And then there was another outburst of laughter. The VIP, though, never laughed once. Apparently they walked on eggshells around that guy. I guess he was some type of high-ranking Klan member during his off hours.
The odor lingered in the room like gray clouds of smelting medical waste thrown up by a sick Alpaca. It was the worst half-hour of my life. After the meeting, nobody said a word about it. I got back in the car and went back to the office. When I entered our building, my boss came out of the conference room and said, "What happened over there?" The VIP had called him, and he seemed to think I'd done it on purpose. My boss warned me that I'd be fired if it happened again.
When I applied for a sales with a competitor a while back, the first thing the interviewer asked me was, "Is the fart story true?" By that time I could laugh about it. "Every word of it," I said.
I stayed put, but got the offer me anyway.
A few examples include talking to yourself, burping, eating in the car, yelling at other drivers, talking to the television in the motel room, sleeping in the nude, farting in the bathtub, peeing in the shower, smoking cigars in the car, and farting in the car. Loudly.
When you're alone so much that you start automatically doing these things, there's a real danger to accidentally doing them when you're finally around people. One time I stayed in an adjoining motel room with a coworker of mine. At breakfast the next morning, he said, "Who were you talking to in the room last night?" He knew I usually leave my cell phone in the car overnight so that nobody can bother me during non-working hours. I had to fumble for answer, but you could tell by the look in his eyes that he thought that I was blue-skinned inbred who needed to be euthanized with a sharp ice pick. I scrambled to remember what I had been yelling at the TV, but it must have sounded sociopathic in nature, because the dude refused to go on business trips with me after that.
My tale of caution today has to do with that last bad habit: farting in the car. I usually pass gas in the car by raising my butt from the driver's seat and expelling it as loudly as I can. This technique expedites the whole process, you don't have to rip a series of junior farts and prolong the process.
I had driven in from across Illinois into Wisconsin and arrived in Madison at the offices of a large design/build contracting firm. I was bringing some plans to several purchasing agents, the entire engineering group, and the VP of that division. That morning I'd slurped down four coffees, a danish, and a particularly foul-smelling ham biscuit, and the whole deal was fermenting in my guts. It felt like somebody had forced a rotting turkey buzzard down my throat, poured a burning can of Sterno over it, let it sit for an hour, and then forced some canned spray cheese into my nostrils and made me swallow it.
I was late for the meeting, so no time to use the restroom first. I came in and we all sat in boardroom chairs. If I had to guess, I would say there were about twelve of us in there, waiting for another VIP to join us. I was bored and lost in my thoughts as the wait began to drag on, and that is when it happened. I had been living and working alone much too long, and it was time to be outed.
Releasing my cheeks, I hunkered my hindquarters up and tried to blow out the festering fart as if I was giving birth to a porcupine. It sounded like a cat caught in the fan belt of a forklift. The entire room went silent and I realized that I'd just ruined my career.
My jaw dropped open and I said the first thing I could think of: "I'm sick."
You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody knew whether to laugh or pretend nothing had happened. A couple moments later, one person started to laugh, and then the whole room exploded. That very instant, the VIP walked into the room. And he smelled it.
He looked as if someone had just told him that his seventy-four-year-old grandmother was expecting triplets after visiting an anonymous sperm bank. I saw several emotions in his expression: surprise, anger, shock, revulsion. And then he started looking around the room to see who had unleashed the fart. All eyes fell onto me, and I wanted to die.
"Are you feeling better?" asked the oldest woman in the room. And then there was another outburst of laughter. The VIP, though, never laughed once. Apparently they walked on eggshells around that guy. I guess he was some type of high-ranking Klan member during his off hours.
The odor lingered in the room like gray clouds of smelting medical waste thrown up by a sick Alpaca. It was the worst half-hour of my life. After the meeting, nobody said a word about it. I got back in the car and went back to the office. When I entered our building, my boss came out of the conference room and said, "What happened over there?" The VIP had called him, and he seemed to think I'd done it on purpose. My boss warned me that I'd be fired if it happened again.
When I applied for a sales with a competitor a while back, the first thing the interviewer asked me was, "Is the fart story true?" By that time I could laugh about it. "Every word of it," I said.
I stayed put, but got the offer me anyway.
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