Pure Genius

I almost got a Darwin Award nomination today. You're familiar with these, aren't you? They're the ones that you usually read about in a forwarded email from one of your friends or maybe the morning commute DJ on the radio will read them. Inevitably, there will be some yahoo that came to his or her premature demise in the most ridiculous of manners.

Some border on urban legend, while others seem downright plausible. One of my favorites is about the guy that somehow commandeered a jet engine and strapped it to the top of his sedan. Ultimately, said tool ran into the side of a cliff as he was unable to stop his car after reaching speeds in excess of 300 mph. Allegedly, this is how it went down, but this might be one of the stories that falls into the legend category.

My situation as much more of what I like to term an "honest mistake". I didn't do anything crazy like drop a frozen turkey into a pot of hot peanut oil and wake up in the hospital with 3rd degree burns wondering if anyone saved any sweet potato pie for me. I actually followed the directions on the box and didn't see any reason why my situation might be the least bit tenuous. What I didn't account for, however, was the fact that not even the meteorologists ever really have an idea what is going to happen with the weather.

I've had a fruit fly situation for the past 5 or 6 days and after several failed "natural" attempts at eradicating them, I opted to get a "fogger" from the store and take care of them once and for all. The instructions said to start the fogger and leave the premises for 4 hours, and upon your return, open the windows to allow proper ventilation for about 30 minutes before remaining in your domicile. That seems easy enough, right? Yeah, I thought so.

Initially, the only grey area was in the specifics. The devil in the details as they say. It said that one can was sufficient for an area 625 square feet. My place is close to 900 sq. ft. and I didn't want to "under"-do the situation, so I guess what I did amounted to slightly over-doing it. Theoretically, two cans should take care of 1250 square feet so while I'd be laying it on kind of thick, I'd be assured of my problem going away.

I returned from hanging out in my building's lobby after about 30 minutes and found that the poison in the air was still thick enough to make one choke, so I left again for another 30. I had opened all of the windows, but I guess this was just that rare night when the wind wasn't whipping around my top floor condo. At the two hour mark, I went back in to turn the fans on in the bathroom, on the stove, and plug in the little portable fan as well. At this point, I was cursing my decision to not get this done in the afternoon as it was now approaching 1am. I tried holding my front door open for the next 30 minutes to get some air flow, but that didn't prove to solve the problem very quickly either.

Finally, at about 245am I decided that my place was about as aired out as it was going to be and I returned to clean the counter tops and such so that I might return to normal operations the next day.

To make a long story short, my lungs reminded me of how lucky I had actually been when I awakened at about 730am in a fit of coughing.

And the winner is...