At one point in my life I served as a student mover for a university. We responded to the most ridiculous whims of various departments. From moving 1 half-sized file cabinet a few feet to the left, to playing husband for a finicky admin who couldn’t make up her mind about how her employees’ offices were to be arranged, it wasn’t a very nice job. We moved the contents of an entire building (5 floor academic building being renovated to remove asbestos) and moved it back in again in the course of one summer.
We moved everything, and anything you could think of. A display case full of confiscated weapons from the on-campus police department? Check. Cabinets full of rare butterfly specimen? Check. A gross of beakers that read “urine specimen”? Check. A 4,000 pound electromagnet? Check. And these are just the ones that stood out in my mind. We also packed up hundreds of boxes of things like books and papers. Moved equally as many desks, chair, bookshelves, computers, and furniture.
The weird thing is, this sounds like extremely tedious work, right? But we always worked as hard and as fast as we could, and sometimes, if the work orders lined up right, we could manage a 2 hour lunch.
One of the few times we managed a 2 hour lunch, we had planned it from the day before. Someone had heard on the radio that it was impossible to drink a gallon of milk in an hour, without throwing up. I thought I could do it, so I said so. One guy, Matt, said that we should make it interesting. He said that if I could finish the milk, they’d all give me money, but if I couldn’t do it, then I’d have to buy beer, spending the same amount of my own money. Another guy jumped in for the challenge too. If we both finished, we’d split the money. If we both lost, we’d split the cost of beer. If one of us lost, and one of us finished, to the victor would go the spoils, and the loser would buy the beer.
So, during our 2 hour lunch, we stopped by the store and picked up some 1% milk. They wanted us to drink whole milk, we thought skim would be sufficient. We settled on 1%.
We both started strong, and made a small contest of seeing who would stop drinking first. After about a minute, we both stopped taking our drink at the same time, but I had consumed more milk than my co-competitor. We proceeded to drink at our own pace, and I pulled way out in front. I was down to half a gallon, and only 15 minutes had passed. I decide to pace myself, and the challenger was able to catch up.
As the hour continued on, and as I got closer to finishing the bottle, my stomach became tight, and I was feeling kind of woozy. I got up to walk it off, but it wasn’t happening. I went upstairs to go to the bathroom, and they sent someone after me to make sure I wasn’t cheating by throwing up early. Because at this point, we were both sure we were going to throw up.
At five minutes short of the hour, I finished off the bottle. I thought I’d be able to wait the last five minutes, but it was a terrible idea. I could feel the milk at the back of my throat. I was literally full. I tried to not think about throwing up, which made me think about it more. And, without about 4 minutes left in the hour, I rushed outside. You might think holding on for another 4 minutes must have been possible, but not if you had seen the way the milk left my body.
As soon as I stepped outside I opened my mouth and the milk came back out. All of it, all at once. It wasn’t painful at all. It was if I was supposed to naturally produce milk this way.
A little girl riding by on her bike was watching me from the moment I came outside. She couldn’t have been older than 7 or so. She was lazily riding her bike around in circles, watching me over her shoulders the whole time. When I had finished, moments after I walked out the door, she rode a little closer to the porch and said, “I think you drank to much milk.” Then she rode away.
I ventured back inside, and saw that my challenger had developed his own plan. He was going to wait until the last few seconds, down the remains of the bottle, and immediately go outside and follow my lead. In retrospect, this was a much smarter idea.
He finished the bottle, headed out side, and made to lean over the rail. Another of our coworkers started counting backwards from ten. This must have confused my challenger, as the rest of us had already said his time was done. He whipped his head around, as if to question why he still had 10 seconds left. I believe he managed to get out, “Wh-” before a fire hose of milk, Exorcist style, rocketed out of his mouth. This was 6 to 7 feet projectile. It was filthy, and we loved it.
I dutifully paid for a 2 cases of beer, and the winner collected about 25 bucks. We had a cookout during lunch the next day to celebrate, and everyone had a few beers… except me. I figured I’d paid for it, so I was due as many as I wanted. When we got back to work, I told everyone I was going to drive the pickup that we were allowed to use to move things around on campus.
When they convinced me that drinking and driving was a bad idea, especially on the campus where I was enrolled, and from where I was drawing a paycheck, I convinced them to just let me turn it around so we could put our next load in the back from the warehouse more easily. They agreed. I put the truck in drive, and drove the truck 2 feet into the warehouse dock in front of me. I put the truck in park, left the keys in the ignition and got out.
I looked at the truck as if it had done something to ME, turned to the guys, shrugged and said, “Well, shit. I can’t drive,” and proceeded to stumble my way into the warehouse to load the back of the truck. Once someone turned it around properly, that is.
