RUFKM Quiz: What’s green, smells bad, and will KILL YOU?

I’m about to do something here on RUFKM that has never been done before. An occasion so momentous, so stupefying in its’ audacity, that this website will be shaken to the very foundation!

What is this landmark event you ask? I, TylerDFC, the power behind the RUFKM throne will finally FINISH A STORY.

I know, it IS shocking. After all, if there is one thing RUFKM is known for it’s beginning epic stories of ferret shaped, Craig’s List goodness and then letting them die on the vine in favor of waging a “war” against an irrelevant metal website. I’d link to the story in question but I think we’d all be much happier just to forget it ever happened.

Way back HERE after regaling you with my tale of woe, I alluded to a time when chemistry saved my life. It is now time to tell that tale, although some parties would prefer it remain untold.

A few years ago, I was roommates with one of the messiest people I have ever met. We will refer to him as, oh, let’s call him Loose Cannon. LC is one of those people that you cannot loan CDs to because he uses them as a coaster. There is no real malice in his actions, just an unfounded streak of narcissism mixed with scatter brained tendencies. A nice enough fellow, but you wouldn’t want him doing your taxes.

Over the course of a year I had grown accustomed to his knuckle-headed behavior. I had learned to deal with the dirty dishes scattered around the house like offerings to a particularly filthy god. He used so many glasses daily, leaving them half filled and scattered around the house, that we were more than prepared for the aliens in Signs should they show up in Bumfuck USA. When looking in the pantry for food I often found that the dry goods had been consumed whole in a nightly foraging excursion by Mr. Cannon. Most people eat potato chips or frozen burritos after getting home from the bar: LC prefers Velveeta cheese packets. He’s like a mouse on welfare.

We lived in a townhouse in a tiny town that was adjacent to a slightly bigger yet still awesomely awful town. As such, we had hard water and a bitch of a time keeping the dishes spot free. This truly annoyed LC, which was odd because usually he left dishes under his bed so his obsession with clean glassware was a bit out of character.

We had tried everything to get those dishes spotless using all the special detergents they had on the market but nothing really worked.

One cold winter’s night I was in the living room watching TV. This was one of those winter evenings in the Midwest where the sky is clear and the bitter cold will freeze your eyeballs if exposed for longer than 10 seconds. The kind of night where the concept of going out on the town doesn’t even cross your mind because that would require going outside and into the hateful cold bundled against the weather like you were going to observe penguins face-to-face in Antarctica.

So there I was sitting on the couch, happily watching a documentary on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when quite suddenly I found it difficult to breathe. There was a chemical smell in the now greenish air and my eyes were watering. At the same time I noticed that I had not seen LC for more then a few minutes. Like an industrious 3 year old this was more than enough time for him to bring ruin down upon us. Fighting back tears and stumbling into furniture while my vision doubled, then tripled, I made my way to the kitchen. There I found LC contentedly putting the cap back on a bottle of bleach, somehow immune to the symptoms which were currently crippling me.

I noticed that the dishwasher was running and next to the bleach was a bottle of Lime Away.

Through the haze, memories of high school chemistry class returned to me. Vague recollections of chemistry experiments gone wrong, and warnings of things you should never mix. Bleach came up on the list often.

Finding it increasingly difficult to breathe I snatched up the bottle of Lime Away.

Me: Did you mix the bleach and Lime Away?

LC: Yeah, why?

Me: {blinking back tears} You can’t do that, it’s toxic.

LC: {blinks stupidly, not getting it}

Me: Chlorine gas, you’re making chlorine gas in the fucking dishwasher!

LC: Is that bad?

Me: Not if you are trying to kill us.

Are You F—ing Kidding Me???

At this point I shut off the dishwasher, opened the front door, the ba
ck door, and every window in the house. It was minus 15 that night, and the house immediately dropped 20 degrees. I stood at the back door for 10 minutes sucking in lungfulls of frigid air.

By now the chlorine gas was strong enough to be noticeable everywhere in the house but was starting to dissipate and it seemed that the danger had passed. I was on the verge of frostbite but at least my lungs hadn’t melted. After about an hour we were able to close the windows and doors, our house now a balmy 40 degrees, as the furnace began the Herculean task of re-heating the house to something approaching livable.

The saddest part of all this? LC’s father is a Professor of organic chemistry at a well-renowned university. You’d think some basic life saving skills would be passed on by osmosis or at least genetics. In this case the acorn fell so far from the tree it’s in the bottom of Challenger Deep.

TylerDFC spends his days wishing he was anywhere other than where he is. When he is not, he can be found ruminating on pop culture at Criticult.com