The Great Ketchup Disaster of 89
There are some people who are just natural catastrophe-magnets. Sure, there are always those individuals who, through carelessness or thoughtlessness, can bring the world crashing down around them, but a select few people in this world attract disaster on levels that leave observers gaping in awe, like a group of Alaskan cruise ship tourists watching giant icebergs calve from the local glaciers. My college roommate Dave was their leader. It wasn’t just the frequency of accidents that made Dave unique, it was the scope; Dave did to the laws of physics what a magnifying glass does to light waves. Oh, he never worked at it or anything like that; it was just that, in his proximity things would happen that would be difficult to explain for an advanced race of aliens, let alone us mere Earthlings.
A good example of this happened in the dorm room one evening. We had a small refrigerator in our cubicle and we had placed it on top of a chest of drawers. The chest functioned as a cupboard so that, together with the fridge, they comprised our pantry. Dave came into the dorm and headed for the fridge to find a drink and something to snack on. When he opened the door, a bottle of ketchup fell out and hit the floor. Now that scene, in and of itself is neither unusual, nor even particularly noteworthy, except for a few oddities. The first is that, as the bottle fell, I remember thinking “That’s odd.” because I had personally opened that same door several times, quite recently, much more quickly and forcefully than Dave, and the ketchup bottle never budged. I can promise you that it did not move, slide, wiggle, wobble, quiver, quake, or scoot. It remained, each and every time, as still and upright as a Beefeater Guard at Buckingham Palace. Then Dave comes along and, almost daintily opens the very same door, and the Hines 57 brand suddenly, inexplicably decides to jump to its death! Impossible, but where Dave was concerned not entirely unexpected. The second oddity was that, upon hitting the floor, the carpeted floor, the bottle burst, that was unexpected.
I have dropped my share of condiments in my time; I have cleaned up the pickle juice, mustard, mayonnaise, whatever, but this was a plastic bottle; the benevolent act of a loving God to those of his children who are Klutzes was to give us plastic containers. I have also dropped these, and then picked them up and put them away… numerous times. The one time I actually did have a plastic Ketchup bottle break, it got about a two inch split; I wiped up a very small spill and transferred the remaining contents to another container, no harm, no foul. Enter Dave. As I said previously, the bottle burst. By burst I mean to say ruptured; make no mistake, it didn’t just split or crack, oh no, Kempenian physics took over and this baby exploded! It was one of the most remarkable things I had ever witnessed. A panel, yes a panel, sort of like the cover on a fuse box, broke right out of the side of the bottle. There on the floor where it had hit, inexplicably, lay a pile of ketchup that appeared two times as big as the volume of the bottle. Moreover, there was an equal amount of Ketchup splattered across the room. The stuff was all over the ceiling, there were gobs of it up there, which would lead one to believe that ketchup somehow has the same potential energy as a superball. It was all over three walls to the half-way mark (which was now marked quite well, thank you) with a diminishing pattern as it approached the ceiling, It was on the furniture, the TV, the blinds…it even somehow made it around a corner (another technically, physical impossibility, if you’re counting) and landed on the sink in the bathroom. The cleanup began with the act of scooping up wads of ketchup with a dustpan, and involved lots of soapy water and washrags. Therefore, I left it up to Dave and diligently returned to studies I had been neglecting before he came home.
To this day I marvel when I think about what I have come to call “The Great Ketchup Disaster of 89”. I have reached one conclusion though. I’m not an expert in applied physics, so maybe my astonishment is misplaced, but I think if Einstein and Oppenheimer had been around to study Dave in action, we might be traveling at light speed today.
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