Last night, I picked up a shift at a restaurant where I used to work. Little did I know that it was a half-night, where fifty percent of sales were to go to a local elementary school. This entailed small children managing to be literally everywhere while I waded through them carrying beers to their parents. At the end of the night, after miraculously surviving my shift, I was asked to fill ketchups.
Now, filling ketchups is a relatively simple task. There is a bladder of ketchup mounted to the wall above an ice cream freezer, but after filling 95% of the ketchups, the bladder ran out. I ran downstairs where backup bladders are stored, switched out the filling-valve from the empty bag, and prepared myself to fill my final two bottles. I fondly remembered my first training session at the restaurant, almost a year earlier, when I had been shown how to change the ketchup bag. My trainer had replaced the ketchup in the wall mount and accidentally triggered the valve in the process, squirting ketchup on herself and me (someone who didn't even eat ketchup because I was so disgusted by it). I silently patted myself on the back for managing to get the bag in place and all these ketchups filled without getting a drop on my clothes.
I grabbed my second to last empty bottle, and simultaneously, the ketchup bladder valve decided it was tired of existing, and spontaneously combusted, spewing ketchup literally everywhere. We're talking that scene in The Shining when the elevator doors open in the lobby and a sea of blood comes pouring out (but with ketchup). I helplessly stood there, trying to jam my hand in the ketchup bag opening to stop the flow while shouting "Help. Someone. Please," as ketchup ran down the back of the freezer below it and all over me, the floor, and anything else in a six-foot radius. Eventually someone grabbed a receptacle for the ooze and captured the rest of it, and I got to spend the following forty five minutes cleaning up the mess to the best of my ability. For minimum wage.
In conclusion, I'm living the dream.
