Quintessentially Quilly

Some days you’re the windshield;
Some days you’re the bug.

I went to work this morning without my lunch. That wouldn’t have been too bad, but I’d elected to skip breakfast and was rather hungry by lunch time. I decided that my forgetfulness deserved rewarding, so I hopped in the car for the three block commute to KFC. Since I rarely eat anything fried these days, I decided to treat myself to extra crispy chicken strips and a diet Pepsi. This is the good part — the lady gave me twice as much food as she was supposed to, but only charged me for the amount I ordered. She gave me 6 chicken strips instead of three, and she gave me twice as much pop.

Now, the two containers of chicken strips made my lunch mates happy, because I, of course, shared. The twice as much diet Pepsi thing was a problem though, because she only gave me the one cup. It went like this:

“Here’s your pop, Ma’am,” said the teller as she thrust her arm out the window. She pressed into my hand a medium soda cup trying to hold a large serving of pop. The wonderfully cold and sticky stuff ran down my arm and soaked into my shirt cuff.

“Urrrrgh!” I explained eloquently to the teller.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” She exclaimed, then pressed a — a — as in one — napkin into my hand. “Have a nice day, Ma’am!”

Uhm, have a nice day? She’d pressed the napkin into my hand that was still suspended out the window — the one holding the soda — and in doing so launched another wave of cold syrup down my arm. The good news is, my shirt cuff was already soaked. The bad news is, the soda rolled right past it and on down to my elbow, where it drip, drip, dripped into my lap.

I tripped the pop cup the slightest bit to pour some of the pop out, while fishing in the food sack for another napkin. There was one, barely postage stamp sized. I used it to wipe off the cup. I pulled the cup into my car and placed it gently in the cup holder.

Then I put my car in gear and eased onto Las Vegas Blvd. I had to make a 45 degree turn to get back onto the street to my school. The turn launched a wave of pop down my left leg. By that point, the cup should have been pretty well empty, but when I got to school and put the straw into the cup, it launched another wave — but I was standing over the sink, so it mattered not.

The most joyous part of the experience was pealing my clothes back off my body every few minutes for the rest of the day. Oh, and being asked over and over and over again, “Do you know you have a stain on your shirt?” Since it ran from the cuff of my left sleeve to the waistband of my pants, the answer should have been obvious. For that reason my most frequent response was, “No! Where?”

A couple of people actually found it necessary to point it out to me.