foam of death

I realize from time to time that I am an Idiot. I was remembering an incident the other day that proves this assumption beyond any reasonable doubt. More then a few years ago I slaved for the evil orange empire, I was an apron wearing member of the worlds largest keeping up with the Joneses store. Yes, I worked for home depot. That in and of itself proves nothing, but what happened shortly after I left the embrace of the whore of the earth does. I had just gone through my first mid-life crises and ended up with a motorcycle, an awesome motorcycle. I also had reconnected with my super cool cousins who also had motorcycles. We had been on several rides together and with larger groups and had one scheduled for the week after I departed the HD. Because we lived all over the valley and had several friends that were still enslaved we had decided to meet in the parking lot of purgatory before heading out for a ride. It was a combination of thumbing my nose at them and bringing a few of them along for the ride. I will have to give a little bit of a backstory here so bear with me. I had been a nominal supervisor over what was called the "pro-desk" we handled large ticket sales and commercial customers. The delivery guys worked with us and we had kick ass schedules that were the envy of the rest of the slaves. We were close, I had worked with Franz (his real name), who was over deliveries since my very first day seven years previous to this encounter and between us we had either hired or recruited everyone on the team, except the jezebel-judas-slime troll whose name we will not mention. She was and probably still is, evil. Moving right along, we all got along. Very well. Wes was my number 1 right hand guy, the one that actually did most of the work and Ryan, Ben, Aarron, Kelly, Kirby, Beagley, Angela, Paul, more then pulled their weight. It was a great team and I was actually sad to go. On the day of the ride I had been a non-slave for less then 10 days and the wounds from my last whipping were still bleeding pretty fierce. I went into the store with some of my cousins and my other Brother Darrell to ostensibly use the facilities but in reality to say hi to everyone. It was Saturday and oddly enough, very slow. So slow in fact that Franz and Ben had been doing all of their work with a grabber. It was pretty funny, they had been pulling paperwork with it, typing orders and signing slips, all with this cool little tool that is usually only used by inmates and oldies with bad backs.

We were laughing at their cleverness and just sort of hanging out when Ben handed it to me to try.

Right away I began to show off, I mean hey, if they can do it I can do it better! So I was pinching all the girls I could reach and picking stuff up and throwing it at the guys and generally acting like a complete knob. That was when I spotted the "GREAT STUFF™ Insulating Foam" for those of you who are not familiar with the hardware movement, Great Stuff is the bomb! It is a maximum expansion foam that sticks to anything, is completely waterproof and expands to 4 TIMES its size as soon as it hits the air. You use it to fill cracks and crevices in anything at all. I picked up a can with the grabber, threw it up into the air.............and caught it. I was the man o the minute. Then I heard the words "bet you cant do that again" and I think he may have even thought "I double dog dare you" because I jumped to the challenge and threw the can even higher! Now take a second to notice the picture of the grabber above, if you look close you will see the sharp angle of metal that is between the two pincher arms. I was following the can with my whole face to enable my super cool catch to succeed. That way when I caught it above my head and the angle of the grabber punched a hole in the enormously pressurized can the resulting stream of foam went directly into my open mouth, nose and eyes. I must have panicked a little because I squeezed the grabber a bit too hard at this critical juncture and caused the can to EXPLODE. It completely covered my face, chest and hands. Ben had been standing directly behind me and had a tom shaped clean spot, the rest of Him was splattered. Everyone else had managed to get out of the way. It was now that I realized a few things. First, foam was warm, that struck me as odd at the time. I guess I imagined it to be cold for some reason. The next thing that occurred to me was that I could not see, hear or breathe. The first one I can do without, the second I never can anyway but the third was problematic. I started pushing my fingers into the mass of foam in my mouth and quickly got it semi cleared. Then I started laughing. I mean, Holy Shit! How funny is this! I think the guys thought it maybe was not so funny cause I felt two of them grab my arms and we started to run down the hall. I figured we were headed for the bathroom to clean me off and I was trying to clear my eyes so I could see where the hell we were going. We made a quick stop by the commercial cleaning supplies and grabbed one of everything then we were in the bathroom and I got my left eye cleared. I looked like I had exploded, that actually made me laugh harder and we started pulling chunks of foam out of my nose and ears. Previously I may have mentioned that this stuff sticks to anything. I was not kidding, and I now learned that it is some super toxic oil base nuclear gel that BURNS your skin. Especially the tender parts under your eyelids and in your nose. At this point I may have been screaming just a little. The door suddenly opened and someone, I am not really sure who, handed Ben a large can of something and said "Biss ish z only fing zat vill tak it off" at least that's what it sounded like to me. The next thing I know Franz (his real name) had grabbed my arms and Ben had dumped the can over my head. It certainly cut through the foam. At this point I am positive I screamed. It was Acetone. For those of you that have had Acetone in your eyes, nose, ears and mouth. I can totally relate. For those of you who have not. Don't. Ben scrubbed at my face and head with the Acetone and Franz held me down, it was a riot. We got as much as we could off and I staggered up to the front. Another quick side note, I had not known that Caprice and the Kids were outside with the bikes until this point when caprice came running in. It seems that Franz (really, its his name) had called her. He was a veteran of calling my wife and knew just how to phrase it. "Tom is OK, But....." Hell, he had seven years of practice. Since Caprice, and my cousins and my friends were all there I had no choice. Even though I wanted to go home and cry I figured I was tough (tomspeak for dumb as a rock) enough to go on the ride. So I went. By the time we got home that night the outer layer of skin was gone from my face. I was bleeding from cracks on my face and forehead. My hair was sticking straight up and was two or three different colors from the chemical soup I had bathed it in and hard as a rock. It was fantastic! Wes's wife had to cut most of my hair off and me and my cousins laughed at me all night. It was a great ride. On a strange ending note, Home depot tried to bill me for the cleanup and every time I go back into that store, even now, I have an immediate attack of IBS. Nerves.