A Drinking Accident

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 4, 2008

Filed under: Personal 18 comments

It’s Saturday night. I spent the afternoon with my gaming group, playing D&D. The game ended around six PM, but it’s close to midnight now and we’re still hanging out, surfing the web, and talking.

There are three laptops in the room, plus my computer, which allows us waste time with a great deal of efficiency. When clicking around at random, it can take you a few minutes between worthy games, jokes, images, and flash animations. You’ll see several duds before you find something good. But with four of us on the job this search time is eliminated. At any given moment there is always something worth looking at on one of the screens, and so we constantly bounce from one machine to the next. Our communal surfing has become a system of distributed cooperative time-wasting.

As midnight rolls around I grab my coffee cup and head for the kitchen. I don’t remember why. It’s too late for drinking coffee. (I know I mentioned that I quit caffeine a few months ago. I’ve since started drinking half-caff in moderation.) I think I was just getting the cup off my desk so it didn’t get spilled. I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing, though. I absent-mindedly raise the cup to drink. As I swallow two things happen:

  1. I suddenly realize this coffee is hours old, and thus it’s stone cold foul and unfit for drinking.
  2. Someone says something funny.

I choke. Coffee rises up and goes the wrong way inside my head, and I suddenly have cold coffee in my sinuses. Everyone has a good laugh at me as I stand there hacking and sputtering. It feels like it’s going to start coming out of my eyes. Somebody jokes that I’ve just snorted caffeine, and thus it’s gone directly into my system, like snorting coke. (I do not expect you to be amused by this. It was one of those jokes that’s only funny when you’ve got the right number of tired people and the right mood.)

But six hours later it becomes apparent that this was, in fact, the case. The other guys are all night people, but six AM is way past my bedtime and I should have crashed hours ago.

This humorous mishap is really going to set me back. Let’s see if I can recover while keeping up with my various duties:

  1. Gotta keep up with the day job, of course.
  2. Keep up with Chainmail Bikini.
  3. Keep up with this website. (If you click that link you will feel silly.)
  4. I’m about to get rolling on my still-secret new project. It’s the thing I’m most eager to work on and talk about, but certain formalities and logistical hurdles must be dealt with before I can do that.

This should be a challenge. I love a challenge. But I need a nap.

 


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18 thoughts on “A Drinking Accident

  1. Adam says:

    Dude, your rambling. Yeah I have done that, worse if it is alcohol, you get a sudden and very drastic rush. Then you entire head feels like a dry sponge.

    I hope you can get some sleep and rest well.

  2. Aaron says:

    Also known as the “Snarf”, this disease can cause restless nights, inebriation, or pain, depending on liquid consumed during the “Snarf”.

    Good luck with keeping up with all your projects!

  3. Hal says:

    No wife or kiddos on the list? Tsk, tsk ;-)

  4. Joe says:

    See, that’s the exact reason you SHOULD drink coffee way too much. Desensitize yourself for the next time it gets injected directly into your bloodstream. I drink 4-6 cups a day and I’m not dead yet, so I think that means anyone can do it.

  5. Nilus says:

    At least your game ends around 6 PM. My friends mostly work at night, are mostly single, without children. So they don’t even want to start till after 6 PM. and usually they want to game till the sun comes up. If do that I am useless all day Sunday and Monday. Make me feel old, I remember back in Highschool and College. If we had time off we would have marathon game sessions that went days. Game till we all passed out, sleep the day away and the game more. Now I think whats more important, slaying the dragon or getting 6 hours of sleep?

  6. Seracka says:

    LOL…the only way that could have been worse is if the coffee had also been carbonated. Bubbles and sinuses don’t mix.

    Thanks for giving me a good laugh though.

  7. Davesnot says:

    Creativity loves a sleepy brain!!

  8. Carus says:

    A great sadness in the nerd community today: Gary Gygax has died… :(

    http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=ca&q=gary+gygax&btnG=Search+News

  9. Seracka says:

    Carus, isn’t that sad. I was very sad to see that post.

  10. ArchU says:

    *rolls a black d20 for Gary* What a great achiever.

  11. Christian Groff says:

    I’ve had that happen… I am drinking soda when something makes me laugh, and the liquid switches from going down my throat to going up my nostrils. Ouch! X_x

    Good luck with all your stuff. ;)

  12. Namfoodle says:

    In college, I knew a guy who actually did snort caffeine. Regularly. He was a heavy user of “No-Doz” (TM) caffeine pills, and he said the pills “upset his stomach”.

    Wah! His poor tummy!

    So he would dump a bunch of the pills into a plastic bag, smash them to dust, grab a straw and start snorting.

    He was also jamming other recreational drugs up his nose, so I’m not sure how genuine the “tummy ache” excuse really was. I think he maybe thought he could avoid getting busted for real drugs if he was always carting around caffeine dust as camouflage

  13. Once at a gaming session in college (back in the days when I could do ANYTHING for six hours straight) I had the exact same accident, only with warm, flat Carona. Not a sight for the faint of heart, I assure you. And nothing aids in blindly flailing around and knocking things over in agony than having your jackass buddies laughing themselves into seizures at your plight.

  14. FakeFrenchie says:

    How painful!

  15. Telas says:

    A number of years ago, I’m waiting tables at Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant. They’ve got this amazingly addictive Creamy Jalapeno dressing that everyone likes on their chips. Mid-shift, I get hungry and start sneaking individual chips and pouring this stuff on them. I get greedy and pour too much on one, and try to stuff it in my mouth before it spills; I also inhale to make sure it doesn’t drip down my chin.

    Big mistake. I inhale a bit of the spicy sauce, and then cough it into my sinuses. Minced jalapenos, mayo, and buttermilk do not belong there. It’s like tear gas, but I’m waiting tables, and can’t stop to run to the bathroom to snort cool water. As expected, I tear up and my sinuses run like Niagara, but I suddenly have this 20-minute burst of energy from nowhere. I’m wide awake and almost jittery with energy, even after the pain and mucous subside.

    So yeah, I know exactly what you’re speaking of…

  16. Meems says:

    Heh. We usually drink various carbonated sodas during gaming, and every few sessions someone will make me laugh and it will end up dripping out of my nose.
    (The worst one is ginger beer, BTW. It can produce the sinus-blasting effect when you accidentally inhale the gas coming off of it, never mind what happens when the actual liquid gets in there.)

  17. Archgeek says:

    Heh, that happened to me back in high school some years back, but with a fresh 20 oz. mountain dew from the vending machine, the first bloody swig thereof, in fact. The thing was just below 40 degrees F, and well and fully carbonated. A friend at the table answered some random question with a non-sequitur declaration of “fetus”, which, me being in high school, caused the entire initial swig to fly out my nose, whiting out my vision for about a second and a half, and burning more than anything I’ve felt before or after, as well as eliciting the complaint “I was actively drinking that!”

  18. Joey Palzewicz says:

    Oh, man, Mr. Young. This just made my night. I laughed really hard.

    These little stories never cease to amuse me.

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