vituperation

January 10, 2003

Warning: Boring entry below. If you value your current wakeful state, please close your browser now.

Paul Roundtree leaned back a little further in his chair and shifted his butt to get more comfortable. His mind drifted to the cute waitress he’d seen earlier that evening at Kendrick’s, when he’d stopped for coffee and pie on his way to work. Sitting at a desk in front of screens monitoring the flow of the city’s garbage to an incinerator all night might not be the most boring job possible, but it was easily in the top five.

Besides, the waitress had a pretty memorable butt.

He smiled at the memory, at the way she’d been flirting with him to get a bigger tip. Not that he minded, of course; the view down her blouse each time she bent toward him was worth every penny he left, and then some. He shifted in the chair again - his pants seemed to be binding his crotch - and tipped back a little further.

The siren over the office door behind him went off with a squawk and he jumped, pitching over backwards before he could catch himself. He hit the carpet and lay there for a second, blinking stupidly up at his feet. His office door opened. He tilted his head back and saw the line manager, Jason Barry, looking down at him with a grin playing around the corners of his mouth.

“Shut up,” Paul said, “Just shut up.” He rolled off his chair and stood. He righted his chair in front of his desk and sat down. Jason stood behind him.

Paul brought up the system control program on his computer and shut off the alarm. He scrolled through the messages in the log file. Jason watched over his shoulder.

“What the hell?” Paul said when he found the log for the alarm. “Radiation?”

“Son of a bitch,” Jason remarked. “I guess you better not restart the line.”

Paul and Jason changed into hazardous material suits and stopped by the maintenance closet for handheld radiation detectors before wading into the city’s trash. It didn’t take long to find the offending bag, which they carried into a side room and emptied onto a table. Since the detectors indicated very low radioactivity, the men removed their hoods.

“I love this part of my job,” Jason remarked. The men sifted through the garbage, checking each piece for radiation. The detectors made quick work of the task and soon Paul was holding a Ziploc baggy.

“What the hell?” he asked.

“Looks like shit. Shit and litter.” Jason looked more closely at the bag. “And grass.”

“Smell it,” Paul said.

“Oh, hell no, you smell it if you want it sniffed so bad.”

Paul opened the bag and sniffed delicately.

“Definitely shit,” he said.

“And grass,” Jason added, “Don’t forget the grass.” He grinned at Paul. “How do we log this? Radioactive feline feces with a side salad?”

“I don’t care what you call it, let’s just find out who’s it is and get it the hell out of here.”

Another search through the trash yielded a couple of bills and a magazine, all bearing the same name and address. While Jason restarted the trash line Paul tracked down the phone number of the owner of the trash. He called.

“Mr. Webber?”

“Yes?”

“This is Paul Roundtree, down at the waste disposal center. We have some trash of yours down here, and it has a problem.”

“What sort of problem?” He sounded concerned.

“Well,” Paul said, “it’s radioactive.” He cleared his throat. “A baggie of cat, um, feces in your trash was giving off enough radiation to set off our detectors.”

“Oh.” Webber laughed nervously. “I think I can explain. My cat Mitzi has hyperthyroidism and part of her treatment last week involved getting a shot of radioactive iodine. The vet told me to flush the poop but I didn’t. I was afraid it would clog up my septic system.” He laughed again. “Sorry if it caused any problems.”

“Thanks for explaining it, Mr. Webber. Unfortunately, it is going to cause a problem, because we have to dispose of it now. It can’t be sent through the incinerator with the other trash.”

“Can you just send me a bill for it? The town shouldn’t have to pay for my stupidity.”

“I don’t know about that, Mr. Webber, I’m not in charge of that. All I can do is file a report on what happened. Next time, please flush it like the vet says.”

They hung up. The bill for poop disposal came to nearly four thousand dollars and, true to his word, Webber paid every cent.

The preceding could have been true, but isn’t. Except it sort of is. You see, since I’ve done nothing worth penning an entry about this week I thought I’d do a little creative writing. On a whim I decided to look for news stories to fictionalize, Googled ’strange news stories’, and ended up deciding on this story. Something about this story - probably the poop aspect, I am a male, you know, as well as a cat owner - appealed to me and I thought I might be able to come up with something a little humorous from it.

Unfortunately I failed miserably at making it funny, but it’s not a total crapfest (at least, I don’t think it is) and I did get some dialogue practice.