Never immune from winning the award, and without doubt one of the most spectacular winners of the SPOTD, I awarded the prize to myself, for a demonstration of how not to take out the rubbish.

Heading out the door to go to Uni at 8:30am, I noticed a bag of rubbish in the kitchen, as well as an empty 4-litre icecream container that was holding some old food that needed to be disposed of. I figured it seemed just as easy to take out the rubbish now as later that evening when I got home, so picked up the bag in my right hand and the icecream container in my left hand.

The icecream container, it should be noted was nowhere near filled, but did contain approximately half a litre of juice from a large tin of sliced peaches, as well as about 20 peach slices. Since we’d opened such a large tin, it had taken a while for the two of us to reach the end of it, and so the peach slices were beginning to get soft and unsafe to eat.

Also in the container was the remains of a dessert experiment from two nights previous - an apple and blackberry pudding. It did not really work too well, not setting properly, and was a very vivid hot pink colour. The main problem with it was not that it looked pink, but that it TASTED pink. There is no other way to describe how it tasted - a blindfolded person would probably have said it was an “apple and pink pudding”. Perhaps if one was starving, it would be an acceptable dessert, but we’d chalked it up in the books of “do not make this again”.

At this moment though, all this sloshy material was being held in the left hand of a naturally right-handed person. Walking to the front door, I reached out to turn the door handle with my right hand, the handles of the rubbish bag looped over my wrist. The act of leaning forward to open the door caused the pudding/peach mixture in the container in my left hand to lurch dangerously forward, almost slopping out of the top of the container. In a desperate attempt to prevent spillage, I jerked my right hand back up to catch the bottom front of the container, and hold it steady.

As I did so, I forgot about the effect the relatively light bag of rubbish dangling freely would have on the attempt to stop spillage. With my hand sweeping upward in a rapid move, the bag followed suit, and with the freedom to hang on the wrist, swung upward in a lazy arc. It connected fully with the base of the container being held now at the top by my left hand, and resting on my right hand, but not gripped firmly.

The momentum of the bag thudding into the base of the container caused most of the material in the container to leap upward a half inch or so in the air, temporarily lightening the load as it became airborne, albeit still within the vertical walls of the container. A split second later, the container returned to it’s previous weight as gravity took over, and the material slopped downward once more.

As it hit the base of the container once more, the sudden increase in weight, combined with my poor grip on the container combined to cause the entire container to fall out of my hands. Transfixed, I could only watch in horror as the entire container and sloppy contents raced toward the carpet, pausing only in it’s rapid flight to clip the bag of rubbish still looped on my wrist.

The small collision with the rubbish bag spun the container so that it landed on the very corner, and even though it landed upright, the general fluidity of the contents caused the container to wobble alarmingly due to wave motion. With a series of shock waves heading in every direction, as well as the bouncing effect of hitting the floor, the peach and pudding mixture suddenly went from a calm mixture of foodstuffs to be disposed of into something more evil. Something more willing to put up a fight in an attempt to avoid becoming landfill. Something airborne and bright pink…

Realising with a yelp that there was nothing that could be done, I decided to save myself and leaped backward into the clothes horse directly behind me, spearing myself in the buttocks on a pointed edge. The immediate pain effect was ignored however, as I stared in dismay at the events unfolding in front of me.

Able to do nothing else, I could only watch as the pudding mixture efficiently and ruthlessly decorated every single object within four feet - the carpet, the front door, the kitchen table, a chair, the aquarium and stand, the bag of rubbish, my boots. Basically, anything that could be covered in bright pink sticky juice, was. A large upward pulse of it was even projected almost five feet up the wall on the far side of the aquarium, covering everything in it’s path. My three axolotls were cowering down the far corner of the tank, having been disturbed by the sudden addition of a large splat of juice into their domain.

Within a matter of no more than three or four seconds, what had been a quiet and uneventful start to the day was rapidly replaced by a frantic effort to remove as much juice out of the carpet as possible in the short time available before it soaked in. Naturally, I enlisted Diana’s help in this, mainly because she came flying out of bed to discover the reason I was loudly exclaiming some rather bad words.

If it had been juice alone, the effect would not have been so bad, but with the addition of the pudding component - a dessert hued so pink we’d classed the colour as a taste sensation - the sudden transformation of the (originally) beige carpet was a cause for some alarm.

Returning the carpet to it’s original tone is still taking some time, involving lots of scrubbing with a stiff brush and mild detergent. If you’re one of the lucky (?) Australians who can recall a certain anti-stain carpet’s advertising campaign where Pro Hart spilled spaghetti, red wine and creamed cheese on his carpet to form artwork, I assure you - this is the reason it was invented.

The sad part is that no matter what anyone else did during the day, I knew by 8:30am that nobody stood a chance of beating my efforts. There are just some things that, so far as the SPOTD award go, are unbeatable attempts. This was one of them…

Categories: SPOTD