Intoxicated

I don't have a lot of these stories, but this one stands out as one of the most critical failures of all time for me and now, I'm going to tell you all about it.

It happened around early 2001 while I was still working at my old job. Me and the guys had a Tuesday tradition of travelling a short distance to Buffalo Wild Wings on 30 cent wing day. By far the greatest wings anywhere in my opinion. When we first started going there, I started by ordering a Coke. This other guy said, "Hey, we always drink beer and the boss knows about it, did you want one of those?" I decided that was the thing to do. The 4 of us would sit at the bar and have wings and a beer or two. Typically for me that was a tall (21oz) and a short after lunch (16oz) of LaBatts Blue. I quickly discovered nothing quite tastes as good as hot wings and cold beer.

On the day in question I tried BWW's blazin wings. You get 10 wings, but I only managed 4. The sheer intensity was more than I could bear. I ended up drinking a lot of beer that day, 2 talls and a short for a whopping 58oz of beer. Normally I can't drink that much liquid, but magically that day I did. I figure that I had ordered 20 Wings. The first 10 were not very hot so my first 21 went down with that, but the blazin were so much that I needed a lot of liquid to cool me down. In retrospect water may have been the better choice, but I suppose if I had, this story would have been about me drinking water at lunch and most of you would have just waited for tomorrow's post to be entertained.

I started to get the fear about half way back. The other guys knew I was pretty messed up and instructed me to just sit at my desk and not say anything. This was quite confusing to me because I thought I was handling it quite well. My dignity was akin to an english gentlemen. Of course the occasional outburst of, "WHOA, LOOK AT THAT GUY!!!" while pointing out some stranger walking to his car may have been a clue something was amiss. I was issued a stick of winterfresh gum and told to sit down and do nothing.

It takes about an hour and a half to clear a stupor out of the system. The moment I got back to work it hit me, "Hmmm, maybe there is a problem here." I decided to eat some crackers, drink some water, and try and dissolve the sitaution. For the first 25 minutes of sitting at my desk I did as I was instructed. I sat there, staring at my screen. But my job was IT helpdesk, so it wasn't as easy to avoid my duties as I imagined it would be.

A french gentleman approached me with an E-Mail problem. After he described the problem, my cognitive functions told me it would be an easy fix, but my language and motor skills weren't up to par yet. Even so, I got up, and tried to manage the situation. On my way to his desk he attempted some small talk. I don't remember what was said but I remember him and another guy laughing their asses off. I remember not talking after that.

I sat at the guy's laptop and fired up his e-mail. He was right, there was some kind of networking issue afoot. I placed my hands on the keys and... nothing. I couldn't type, it was the strangest problem I'd ever had and I was both fasinated and frightened by my discovery. I stared at my dead stupid fingers and felt betrayed by their defiance. I realized that the french guy I was helping was watching me seemingly commune with the computer telepathically and I decided I had to say something. "This problem is.. serious. I need to reasearch this for a bit." With that I left him. Looking back it may have been the fact that the keyboard was european and all messed up looking, but even so, I still didn't even attempt to try and use it.

I never went back over there that day. I sat down at my desk and went back to doing nothing until my brain was de-toxified. By then it was almost time to go home.

After all that happened, I decided to stop with the beer. Water tastes just as good with wings.