I should have known...

I should have known by the way the other grad students chuckled when they volunteered to help me load returnables into my car that the job was gonna suck big sweaty donkey balls. Let me back up a little. Our department is having its holiday party next Thursday, and tradition dictates that the new second year student (just me, in this case) is responsible for returning a year's worth of bottles and cans in order to have extra money for food and whatever. My initial thought was to just give the bags of returnables to a bum (never in short supply in Detroit) and give the secretary a wad of cash that I thought would cover the money I would've gotten had I done it the right way. A hot wave of lapsed Catholic guilt washed over me and pushed that really good idea out of my head in favor of actually taking the goddamned bottles to the store like a good girl. First of all, the returnables hardly all fit in my car. My trunk was full, as was the back seat. I just hoped to God that they didn't leak before I got to Meijers. More problems: a full grocery cart only half-emptied my car and I apparently hadn't noticed that the bottle return had been moved from the back of the store to its own separate entrance in the front facade several years prior (runonsentence,anyone??). Chris always takes the mountains of our empty beer bottles back, so I don't even remember the last time I got within 20 feet of a bottle return machine. I think I'll go thank him profusely for taking that one for the team as soon as I'm done with my rant here.

Anyway, after I'd finished storming through the whole store muttering about how upper management must think it's damn funny to hide the fucking bottle return - I had to call Chris to ask where the hell it was - I quickly figured out the reason for the earlier chuckling. Mold. If you've known me for more than 30 seconds, you'll know that my two biggest phobias are mold and parasitic worms - not necessarily in that order (the order tends to flip-flop from day to day). I could (barely) deal with the relatively light coating of mold on the cans in the two single-ply bags. I did have to work really hard to hide the look of horror on my face as I gingerly picked up each disgusting can and tried to throw it into the machine. The machine actually told me to stop throwing cans into it! What?!?! I almost punched it at that point because it just seemed like it was trying to mock me. Then I got to the last bag in my cart. Inside, I found year-old multicolored, dry, sometimes fluffy, and now airborne, mold inside nasty fermenty beer cans, and on the outside of the cans. On the potato chips someone had dumped in, thinking it was trash, as well as in the styrofoam coffee cup. I should have known something wasn't right from the way this bunch of returnables was quad-fucking-ruple bagged!! I almost thought I was trying to rip through a set of Russian nesting dolls. Okay, I thought to myself - this is far beyond my mold-tolerance capacity. I must have stood there for a good two or three minutes deciding what I should do with this bag full of nasty because I was damn sure not touching anything in it. I ultimately decided that I would grudgingly load the bag back in my car (there were no dumpsters around), drive it home, and put it in the trash toter. Sorry Mother Earth, but I think the thick coating of filamentous saprophytes will have to do the recycling here because it ain't gonna be me. I decided that the biohazardous waste I disposed of was worth about $10, which I gladly took from my wallet and put in the envelope with the money from the things I could actually stomach returning. Shhhhh!! No one (except for you, lucky readers) has to know about this little indiscretion. That is, until the holiday party when I will inevitably get wasted and want to tell a funny story. Ugh.