Monday, February 05, 2007

Bad or Worse: You Make the Call

I've been contemplating two hypothetical situations and the impact they might have on one's day, and I just can't decide which one would move the needle more. So I figured I'd toss it out there so you could make the call.

Situation 1
You're working from home, and you realize as you pour your first soda of the day that you have foolishly allowed your soda supply to be depleted. However, you're doing some work and such, and you don't really feel like making a special trip to the store just for the soda. So you do nothing. As the day goes on, you decide that it's really not appropriate for your first soda of the day to be your only soda of the day, and you decide to rectify the situation.

The exercise room in your complex has a soda machine in it. Granted a 20 oz. bottle of that which you desire costs a whopping $1.25, but such is your yen for that carbonated NutraSweet-y goodness that you are willing to deal with the extra moolah involved. So you bundle up (it's cold out there), grab a dollar bill and a quarter, and trudge to the exercise room, using the few moments of travel time to ponder a) why there isn't a soda machine in your building or perhaps even your apartment and b) just what it says about you that you are going to the exercise room for the specific purpose of buying a soda. Arriving at your destination, you brush those thoughts away like so many gnats flitting around your head (there are some benefits to the cold, you reckon). You feed the greedy machine the paper and metal money and consider a new quandary: there are two buttons with Diet Coke labels; which one to push? This question doesn't slow you down much, and you punch the top Diet Coke button. The machine responds with the normal whirrings and plunks and you bend down to pull out ... a gahdamned Fanta Orange Soda.

You don't drink Fanta Orange soda. You don't want Fanta Orange soda. If you did, you would have pushed its button, which is at the very bottom of the array of buttons, nowhere near the second one from the top that you pushed. Quick! Use the other button! Nope, sorry. You only brought enough money to buy one soda. It looks like you're going without another soda for a while. Now go back out in the cold and walk home. Take that soda with you, though.

Situation 2
It's early in the morning. Just how early, you're not sure, as you are doing what ought to be done early in the morning: sleeping. Suffice it to say, though, that it is nowhere near an hour when any reasonable person would desire to be awake. You might be engaged in a dream. You might be chewing up the REM cycles. You might be caught in the comfy warm bliss of the dreamless. You might be rolling over. You know not because, as mentioned before, you are asleep.

OW! All of a sudden you wake up because you just bit the ass out of your tongue.

Bad or Worse: You make the call. And my sincerest condolences for any poor soul who suffers both fates on the same day.

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