Badder Skunk

My work schedule and April Fools' has, in the past, tended to miss each other. This has been viewed by those who know me as a good thing.

Several years ago, this wasn't the case: having access to a radio communication system and a helium tank, well...let's just say a series of radio messages enlivened proceedings a tad.

That was then; this is now. Then, I was a landless serf and a grunt on the low end of the employment food chain. Now, I'm a supervisor, in charge of a staff for ten hours a day, four days a week. From the GM to the other shift supervisors for the various departments therein, they know and expect of me the kind of professionalism that my position and title suggest, whatever the situation.

I usually deliver, save for one lil' time: Sunday, April 1, as my work schedule and the day had a less than harmonic convergence.

The harmony was particularly less on this fateful day, for in my possession that morning was a nemesis of the very prim and always proper: a remote-controlled fart machine.

Yep, I can see the gals rolling their eyes and shaking their heads: just like a man.

The remote has a range of approximately 50 feet, and works suitably through a standard wall. Just like the one between my office and that of my officer's dispatch room.

Uh huh: badder Skunk.

Well, just so's the rest of this tale isn't a wasted exercise in male-denigrating "that figures" on April Fools, allow me to enlighten one and all with a few factoids on the personly art of flatulence:

-- the average episodes of flatulence per person is 13.6 per day; and that average is not gender specific.

-- the average release of gas per episode is between 35-90 milliliters, making for an average daily release, per person, of 500 to 2000 milliliters.

-- 99% of what makes up flatulence is both odorless and colorless (carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and methane).

-- microorganisms in the digestive tract take what they need from what an average person ingests daily, and in turn generates waste of their own, in the form of -- you guessed it -- gas.

-- foods containing complex carbohydrates -- made up of three or four different sugar molecules -- are among the worst offenders in creating flatulence that carries with it the signature acronym, SBD (Silent But Deadly), though many such are not silent; they provide a room with seconds of audio warning, before the olfactory horrors kick in. If one is ensconced in an elevator between floors, the warning merely gives one time to try the old "hold the breath until the next floor is reached" method, followed by a stampede.

-- Top food offenders include beans, carrots, raisins, bananas, onions, milk and other dairy

products.

Of course, this is a machine we're talking about, that generates synthetic farts; all the sound, none of the fury. Which is not always realized at the time.

And speaking of time and timing, mine was always abysmal: the thing always seemed to go off when there was a customer in dispatch.

How'd it know to do that? That's what my perplexed, confounded officers wanted to know.

I, for one, am appalled.

But not really.