It was a lot of hot sauce. I could feel my eyes start to burn from across the huge room. I opened my eyes wide to stretch the skin I could feel puckering.
“Oh my God.” Carl turned around, as though he was backing into the wind. “I can’t believe...”
“I know, right?”
Carl and I were making our regular rounds; the complex was large and spread out over several acres of typical industrial wasteland, and we were supposed to go look at each building every hour, making sure that potential miscreants don’t have an uninterrupted night of pillaging. To that end, we were equipped with flashlights, keys, and a golf cart.
We were notably unequipped with walkie talkies or any sort of offensive weaponry. In retrospect, this can only be seen as wisdom on the part of our employer: Giving me and Carl weapons would have significantly increased the chances of our being killed on the job -- not through conflict with potential miscreants, of whom we encountered exactly zero in the time we guarded the complex, but through the simple mechanism of being me and Carl.
Case in point: the large vat of hot sauce in the middle of this warehouse space-cum-manufacturing facility. It was covered, but it wasn’t really sealed, like a tank; it had a lid, and the mechanism for opening the lid was clearly parseable by a pair of bright young graduates of Acme Security’s two-week Guard College.
“Dude,” said Carl.
I think it’s important that I say that at this point I had no idea what Carl was thinking. I’m not sure I do to this day. I did, however, know Carl well enough to look at him sideways, suspicion radiating through the tears welling in my eyes.
Before I could say, “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a bad idea,” Carl was on the rolling step-ladder leading up to the catwalk over the tank. I followed him up the stairs, thinking with every clanking step that I was going to stop him from getting himself killed or getting us fired; but by the time I’d reached the top, I was basically an accomplice to whatever was going on.
He was hard at work on some sort of lighted panel. “Dude,” he said again. “I know what this is, my Mom has one. Not like this, but... you know, smaller.”
I realized what he was talking about as he finished talking about it; my Mom had one too. It was a pressure cooker vat, a really large one. It was sealed and cooking its way through some set of chemical reactions that would speed the mixture toward bottling-ready.
“I think I’ve got it-“
He was still pushing buttons when the lid of the vat shifted a bit. We both turned toward the sound just as the thing exploded.
I say ‘exploded,’ and you’re probably thinking about fireballs and whizzing shrapnel; there was none of that. What there was was a high-kinetic-energy spray of hot sauce, the really high Scoville kind, radiating out at something like three quarters of the speed of sound.
It hit me hard enough to take me off my feet, and when I landed I was covered with well-above-boiling hot sauce.
I’d like to be able to say at this point that I noticed Carl’s predicament and sprung into action right away, but honestly, I was busy popping buttons off my guard uniform. As soon as I got the jacket and shirt off, I used my relatively-clean undershirt to wipe my face and other exposed skin clear of burning red glop; then I kept stripping down, pants and underwear and anything else that might either be saturated with the stuff or used to wipe it off me.
First and second degree burns suck. What really sucks is having them smeared with hot sauce.
Also, the stuff was in my eyes, so I was more or less blind, and in addition to the pain of the burns on my skin, my eyes felt like they were on fire.
I was screaming. It’s important to know that, because it took me a while to stop screaming, and only when I stopped screaming did I hear Carl screaming.
My terrified, pain-filled shrieks had wound down to a sobbing litany of ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck’ when I looked around for Carl, who was still shrieking at the tops of his lungs. He wasn’t on the catwalk.
I was still more or less blind; I mean, I could see shapes and light, but I was spending as much time as I could with my eyes squeezed shut and when they were open everything was a haze of tear-refraction and the bright sparkling lights you get from squeezing your eyes shut, and pain. So it took me a while to find Carl, despite the screaming.
He was hanging from both hands from the edge of the catwalk. I don’t think I could have managed it, hanging on that long with my hands burned and slippery and covered in red-hot pain sauce. I gave up on grabbing his hand almost immediately, and reached over the railing to get big double-handfulls of the back of his jacket and pull him up over the railing.
Repeat the procedure with Carl, getting his clothes off and the glop wiped off him, then down the stairs -- they had grippy metal treads, to prevent slippage, that tore up our feet pretty badly, so by the time we got to the golf cart we were running on tip-toes, because we had open wounds on our feet and there was hot sauce in the open wounds.
I know now that there was an eye wash station at the top of the staircase, and that there was a shower full of special chemical soaps for dealing with capsaicin and related materials just inside the door of the warehouse space. I suppose I could have deduced it at the time; I mean, it makes sense that you’d have those things, when you’re working with boiling hot sauce, right? There was even a first-aid kit with all the things you’d need to treat burns actually bolted to the golf cart, painted white with a big red cross on it, and we’d both been given training in its use.
But at the time, the thing that made sense was that we needed to go to the hospital, so I got in the driver’s seat and gunned it.
I say ‘gunned it’ but it was a golf cart, so we were doing a break-neck fifteen miles per hour when we cleared the front gate and turned onto the road.
We got pulled over about three blocks later, and the cop was a true professional: he called it in and got us an ambulance and then broke out the first aid kit in his car, which had an eyewash kit for dealing with pepper spray, and had me and Carl seeing again by the time the ambulance arrived, and he did all that despite being, for all intents and purposes, incapacitated with hysterical laughter.
“Oh my God.” Carl turned around, as though he was backing into the wind. “I can’t believe...”
“I know, right?”
Carl and I were making our regular rounds; the complex was large and spread out over several acres of typical industrial wasteland, and we were supposed to go look at each building every hour, making sure that potential miscreants don’t have an uninterrupted night of pillaging. To that end, we were equipped with flashlights, keys, and a golf cart.
We were notably unequipped with walkie talkies or any sort of offensive weaponry. In retrospect, this can only be seen as wisdom on the part of our employer: Giving me and Carl weapons would have significantly increased the chances of our being killed on the job -- not through conflict with potential miscreants, of whom we encountered exactly zero in the time we guarded the complex, but through the simple mechanism of being me and Carl.
Case in point: the large vat of hot sauce in the middle of this warehouse space-cum-manufacturing facility. It was covered, but it wasn’t really sealed, like a tank; it had a lid, and the mechanism for opening the lid was clearly parseable by a pair of bright young graduates of Acme Security’s two-week Guard College.
“Dude,” said Carl.
I think it’s important that I say that at this point I had no idea what Carl was thinking. I’m not sure I do to this day. I did, however, know Carl well enough to look at him sideways, suspicion radiating through the tears welling in my eyes.
Before I could say, “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a bad idea,” Carl was on the rolling step-ladder leading up to the catwalk over the tank. I followed him up the stairs, thinking with every clanking step that I was going to stop him from getting himself killed or getting us fired; but by the time I’d reached the top, I was basically an accomplice to whatever was going on.
He was hard at work on some sort of lighted panel. “Dude,” he said again. “I know what this is, my Mom has one. Not like this, but... you know, smaller.”
I realized what he was talking about as he finished talking about it; my Mom had one too. It was a pressure cooker vat, a really large one. It was sealed and cooking its way through some set of chemical reactions that would speed the mixture toward bottling-ready.
“I think I’ve got it-“
He was still pushing buttons when the lid of the vat shifted a bit. We both turned toward the sound just as the thing exploded.
I say ‘exploded,’ and you’re probably thinking about fireballs and whizzing shrapnel; there was none of that. What there was was a high-kinetic-energy spray of hot sauce, the really high Scoville kind, radiating out at something like three quarters of the speed of sound.
It hit me hard enough to take me off my feet, and when I landed I was covered with well-above-boiling hot sauce.
I’d like to be able to say at this point that I noticed Carl’s predicament and sprung into action right away, but honestly, I was busy popping buttons off my guard uniform. As soon as I got the jacket and shirt off, I used my relatively-clean undershirt to wipe my face and other exposed skin clear of burning red glop; then I kept stripping down, pants and underwear and anything else that might either be saturated with the stuff or used to wipe it off me.
First and second degree burns suck. What really sucks is having them smeared with hot sauce.
Also, the stuff was in my eyes, so I was more or less blind, and in addition to the pain of the burns on my skin, my eyes felt like they were on fire.
I was screaming. It’s important to know that, because it took me a while to stop screaming, and only when I stopped screaming did I hear Carl screaming.
My terrified, pain-filled shrieks had wound down to a sobbing litany of ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck’ when I looked around for Carl, who was still shrieking at the tops of his lungs. He wasn’t on the catwalk.
I was still more or less blind; I mean, I could see shapes and light, but I was spending as much time as I could with my eyes squeezed shut and when they were open everything was a haze of tear-refraction and the bright sparkling lights you get from squeezing your eyes shut, and pain. So it took me a while to find Carl, despite the screaming.
He was hanging from both hands from the edge of the catwalk. I don’t think I could have managed it, hanging on that long with my hands burned and slippery and covered in red-hot pain sauce. I gave up on grabbing his hand almost immediately, and reached over the railing to get big double-handfulls of the back of his jacket and pull him up over the railing.
Repeat the procedure with Carl, getting his clothes off and the glop wiped off him, then down the stairs -- they had grippy metal treads, to prevent slippage, that tore up our feet pretty badly, so by the time we got to the golf cart we were running on tip-toes, because we had open wounds on our feet and there was hot sauce in the open wounds.
I know now that there was an eye wash station at the top of the staircase, and that there was a shower full of special chemical soaps for dealing with capsaicin and related materials just inside the door of the warehouse space. I suppose I could have deduced it at the time; I mean, it makes sense that you’d have those things, when you’re working with boiling hot sauce, right? There was even a first-aid kit with all the things you’d need to treat burns actually bolted to the golf cart, painted white with a big red cross on it, and we’d both been given training in its use.
But at the time, the thing that made sense was that we needed to go to the hospital, so I got in the driver’s seat and gunned it.
I say ‘gunned it’ but it was a golf cart, so we were doing a break-neck fifteen miles per hour when we cleared the front gate and turned onto the road.
We got pulled over about three blocks later, and the cop was a true professional: he called it in and got us an ambulance and then broke out the first aid kit in his car, which had an eyewash kit for dealing with pepper spray, and had me and Carl seeing again by the time the ambulance arrived, and he did all that despite being, for all intents and purposes, incapacitated with hysterical laughter.
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