Let’s begin with a Moment of Silence
Before I begin today’s somber post, I should note that as of this morning I have not heard from the victim and thus do not know if she in fact made it through the night.
Yesterday afternoon, about the moment I was going to the throw a computer through a wall because of its inability to read my mind obey my whims perform a basic task, I thought I needed a pick-me-up call. So, I call one of my childhood friends, Roberta. Roberta’s husband, Robert (yes, I know I still laugh at the name thing) answered the phone. We giggled for a few minutes and he says, “She’s at it again. She THINKS she swallowed a piece of a plastic fork and now is going to die.” Great, this should be a fun call right?
Well, I get Roberta on the phone and ask, “So, you planning on dying tonight?” She says, “I was eating my lunch, a salad, with a plastic fork [as aside here -- how many of you are picturing a 'spork'? I was, too. But no, she later tells me, "not the cheap kind either -- the good kind from Costco."] and I felt it break in my mouth. So I spit out my bite and I can not find it.” She goes on to tell me, in graphic detail, that she has exaimed the bite, made herself throw up and ‘gone through’ that too. She can not find it. She’s worried the fork part (which she tells me is about 1/8 of an inch long of the outside tyne of the Costco plastic fork) will make it through her stomach — you remember the organ with all that acid? — and poke a hole in her “delicate bowel.”
Ok, so I kinda lost it laughing so hard. I probably snorted a few times. First, Roberta has performed MANY a surgery in her lifetime. She freely admits that never has she seen a case of repairing a plastic fork hole in a bowel. However, she’s worried. She’s concerned. So, let’s look at what she did to prepare for her death by plastic fork tyne.
- She came home from work and settled her affairs. This included doing laundry (lest Robert has to face funeral arrangements with less than a full drawer of underpants); paid a few bills; and I think she ran a defrag on the computer.
- She threatened to haunt Robert because he was giving her a hard time about her concern. Mostly because we all know that if it had happened to Robert he’d be impossible to live with.
- Began to predict when she might declare the crisis over. At first she was talking 24 hours, by the end of the call she told me the piece was 1/4 inch long AND it take 36 hours to be sure she’d dodged this bullet.
So, let’s all offer up a moment of silence for Roberta and her fork part. While I fully expect she made it through the night, I’ll be calling in a bit to confirm her still alive status. However, I also expect that she may shun all plastic cultery for awhile — even the “good stuff from Costco.”
September 19th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Well Queen, you did a remarkable job of turning a funny situation into a hysterical piece. When you asked if you could use this in the blog, I couldn’t wait until I got home from work to read it. One thing I have always enjoyed about our friendship was our mutual “sense of the ridiculous” which goes far beyond just a sense of humor. You did however, leave out how much we laughed at the situation and how silly we got giggling about it. So, all is well here. However, I’ll be using regular stainless steel forks from now on.