The Daily Hassle

Laughs on the go.

Bubble Gun

         

When someone offers you a breath mint, you take it. There are two reasons you take it.

One, there’s a chance your breath really does stink, in which case taking it and using it can only act to your advantage. The second is, the person’s just trying to be nice.

When people are nice, you still take the mint because no matter what we’re all insecure about our breath. The 30 minutes of constant brushing and gargling nearly 2 litres of Listerine anti-septic mouthwash per week does nothing for our confidence if someone offer’s us a mint.

 

So on Tuesday, I was offered a breath mint which took the form of gum. I love chewing gum. I find it the second most therapeutic thing you can do with your mouth, next to eating. I know where your filthy mind went for a second.

 

The problem with flavoured gum is they lose their flavour immediately. So after a minute or two, you spit them out in the nearest bin. This is not a problem for those that have developed the art of the spit. In my 44 years of life, I didn’t. In my earlier years, when I did try to spit out something, at the very last moment I would hesitate and the saliva usually ended up mostly on my shirt or pants. With gum however, I was a little more confident. I achieved a distance that I was confident would make for an Olympic staged ovation if I had a crowd that cheered for that kind of thing.

As with some Olympic events, they are casualties.

 

With the 15 second passing of the minty-fresh flavour, I decided it was time to cannonball this gum to the nearest bin. I took a deep breath and aimed at the nearest bin which wasn’t more than 2 meters in front of me. A shoe-in.

Just at the moment where I was going to discharge my gummy cannonball, the sound of womanly laughter came up from behind me, surprising me to a point where all I expelled was air - leaving the gum partially stuck to my bottom lip and a fraction of a moment later, gently dropping inside the top part of my unbuttoned shirt. As a reflex, I grabbed at the gum, while it was already inside my shirt, causing it to tangle itself into my chest hair. I looked back to see my supervisor, Doreen, who already thought I was a little nutty for my own good.

 

“Just at the moment where I was going to discharge my gummy cannonball, the sound of womanly laughter came up from behind me, surprising me to a point where all I expelled was air - leaving the gum partially stuck to my bottom lip and a fraction of a moment later, gently dropping inside the top part of my unbuttoned shirt.”

 

If she saw me trying to fish out some gum from my shirt, her suspicions would be more than true, I thought. Unfortunately, that was the only thought I had, as I now reached into my shirt and with one tug at the entangled gum stuck fast on my chest, ripped at least 50 hairs by the root along with the gum.

The mission was completed. I opened my hand to see something resembling a miniature dead mammal in the palm of my hand.

As Doreen approached closer, I turned around to face her and with the same motion; I threw the gummy animal over my right shoulder. I didn’t know where it went and frankly I didn’t care. It was away from me.

I smiled at her and her at me. I was happy to avoid what would have been a most embarrassing moment. As she’s passed me by, she looked at my white shirt and said “You’ve got red on you”. I looked down and realised that, “the red” was the blood from my missing chest hair that seeped through my white shirt. Still less embarrassing that what I would have encountered, I convinced myself.

I went to my desk and sat down, when I heard a loud scream nearby. I got up to see a whole crown of people surrounding the centre cubicle where Doreen was. I rushed to the scene, where I overheard one of my fellow co-workers mention something about “a white spider” in Doreen’s coffee. I looked through the crowd and saw Doreen’s fainted body lying near her desk and people pointing toward her cup of coffee and the most unusual site of a tan-like spider with “very thin curly legs” floating on top of the coffee itself.

I thought to myself, “That’s got to be worth at least a three pointer”.