The smell itself had a powdery sweet reek that seemed to suggest mold – but I wasn’t sure. It was Monday, and the fresh start of a new work week seemed like a good time to clean out the cabinet.
So I steeled myself. As I peered into it’s dark recesses of the break room cupboard, two or three possibilities caught my eye: a nondescript, unmarked tin of something, a box of bran cereal, and a half-eaten loaf of bread. I chose the bread.
The plastic bag was neatly twist tied, and the printing on the bag helpfully obscured the contents inside. So I reached up and grabbed it to get a better look. Perhaps this was the source, perhaps not...
The inch of bread crust visible through the bag was fairly innocuous. It looked bread-ish enough. Still, I was suspicious. So I opened the bag to see what was inside.
To my surprise, it was not green, spotted or otherwise obviously moldy. I was initially concerned that it didn’t look quite right, but the color of the bread was uniform – not brown bread, not white bread – just sort of tan.
I had an immediate decision to make here: is this the normal state of the bread in question? Without direct experience with this brand, I resorted to reading the label to see what I might be dealing with. Hmmm….multigrain. That’s distinctly unhelpful.
I say to myself: “Multigrain bread can be a variety of colors – it can range from coarse brown to barely tan.” Without any other options left to me, I decide to take a little whiff.
That first bout of retching was very nearly unproductive. It was more of a cough/spit thing than actual throwing up. So I stood up from the trash can and took a deep breath to steady myself. Wrong move.
Of course, the bag was open. And the air was full of spores and nast. So I caught my breath, and that did me in for real. No more of this playing around…we mean business. Full vomit. Malt-O-meal, coming right up.
Now, if you’ve never tried to close a bread bag with a twist tie immediately after two waves of nausea, let me just mention that it can’t be done. Plus I had to hold the bag up closer to my face than I was really comfortable with. It wasn’t really working for me.
So instead I decided to throw up again. In retrospect, I don’t know if that was the best choice…but it seemed appropriate at the time.
With three bouts of nausea under my belt, I felt it was best in the end to just throw the whole bag of un-bread away and tie the garbage bag shut. When I tried to untie it later, I found that I’d pulled the knot so tight that I couldn’t undo it. Adrenaline is like that, I guess.
In the future, I think I won’t actually attempt to see if the thing I’m throwing away is the actual culprit…I’ll just start chucking ( no pun intended ) things and see if the smell starts to go away.
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