Two 'Robbie Stories'

Two more of what my mom calls "Robbie stories" took place last week: the kind of things that I confess to her for the pleasure of hearing her laugh. Sometimes she starts giggling before I get to the good part, and it becomes hard to finish the story. Usually she ends up telling me that I remind her of Mr. Bean. It often feels as if these petty disasters can only happen to me.

Refreshing when taken orally

One night, I decided the time was right to take a couple of those chewable vitamin tablets whose packaging invites you to take up to three doses a day of four tablets each. I rummaged in the cupboard above my kitchen sink and popped open a pill bottle that looked like the right one, at least when viewed from the wrong side of the label. The pills looked about the right size and shape, too. But when I started chewing them up, I realized they were actually my Mucous Cough tablets, which smell like something a dog sicked up and taste worse.

Interesting fact: partially chewed Mucous Cough tablets are difficult to spit out into the sink. It took a lot of spluttering and rinsing with tap water to get that awful stuff out of my mouth. Fortunately, the chewable vitamins (next bottle over) have a strong enough flavor that, when I was able to get them in my mouth, they mostly masked the nastiness.

During my lunch break the other day, I went to a local supermarket and bought three cardboard trays of 24 cans of my favorite zero-calorie, flavored sparkling water, which were on sale for 99 cents per four-pack. Past experience has taught me that the cashier always wants to scan every single four-pack, so I put them on the checkout conveyor belt and pushed the cart ahead of me at the till.

When I got the trays back, I had to lower them over the folding child seat to get them back in the cart. This proved to be trickier than it looked. The cans bumped the child seat; it started to unfold while I was trying to get the tray over it. Somehow, I managed to nick one of the cans on a jagged piece of metal sticking out of the child seat. Pressurized fizz immediately started spraying out of the can, and I started to feel a cool sensation in my groin region. In seconds, it looked as if I had wet my pants. Aaaand that's how I looked when I went back to work after my lunch break.

Only me. Always me. And yet after all these years, I keep racking up personal firsts.