The Legend of The Throwing of the Pickles

I have a pickle problem.

This is a cautionary tale, an entertainment, and a distraction from more depressing issues.

Notably, I love dill pickles and will eat them as snacks, and apparently do not terribly mind eating too many pickle spears. This has resulted in me getting occasional gifts of pickles from catered events at work. Usually it's a bowl with maybe 20 or 30 spears in it and we'll have it last a few days thanks to our refrigerator.

This last time, it was a bit more. It was a catering tray from Jason's Deli with probably five or six pounds of pickles in it.

I started cracking in at it and had killed maybe five or six in the first ten minutes at which point I proclaimed I needed to slow down. Over the next three or four hours, I think I must have had at least 24 or 25 pickle spears. The tray was noticeably diminished in gravity by the time I had run out of energy and needed to head home.

Side note: I was three weeks out from major neck surgery. Still well within the length of time I have been instructed to "begin trying to look left and right more each day."

The pickles needed to go.

Our refrigerators are both mini fridges, more appropriate for a dorm room than an office. They work great for keeping sandwich parts ready, but aren't going to take a full catering tray of leftovers. We also don't have reusable containers around for excess pickles (though, apparently, that may be something we need to add to the list), so to the trash they went. That's fine, they'd been open and out of the cold all day and were starting to get soggy and discolored. I loaded up my stuff and grabbed the pickle tray and headed out the door.

I made it about two thirds of the way down the stairs and my heel caught the landing.

I am fine. I was fine. Somehow, for the first time in my life, my instincts of self-preservation kicked in and I caught myself with both arms on the handrails. I knew I needed to not fall down stairs while I still had glue on my incision.

The pickles took flight.

Flash forward: I collected my thoughts and went to the hallway phone. The one intended for people having problems in classrooms to use for getting help. It didn't work. A ringtone, it takes key inputs, but no ring. So I fished my phone out of my pocket, still with tinge of pickle juice on my fingers, and called up stairs. "Hey. Yeah. Hey can you meet me downstairs by the dean's office with two rolls of paper towels? .... Yeah, the pickles. .... I fell down the stairs. ... yeah I'm okay."

I didn't just drop the tray, I threw it forward and away from me.

It made sense, I needed to get my left arm out to the side to catch the railing before I fell far enough that the nerve damage I had at the time kept me from being able to reach high enough to grab it.

Correspondingly, there were pickles, pickle juice, and seeds <em>everywhere</em> on the last five steps of the flight and within about a six foot radius of the bottom. We got it cleaned up pretty well; the stairwell vaguely smelled of pickles that afternoon and the next morning, but it was fine by the next afternoon. The pickles all hit the floor. There were no survivors.

Personally, I learned a lesson: never look a gift tray of pickles in the mouth, or anywhere. Don't accept gift trays of pickles. Make sure they're in jars.