SDM
2004-06-16, 04:19 AM
Some roommates steal, leave messes, or deposit strange water filled Ranch dressing bottles around the trailer, the purpose of which will forever elude my understanding. Sometimes, the same roommate will finish out the year owing me thirty dollars. Personally, I can deal reasonably well with the former, but goddamn I hate to lose thirty dollars.
With all hope of recovering said thirty dollars lost, I fell back on the crutch of passive aggression, and thus Revenge Week was born.
Knowing that Josh began finals in a mere five days, I decided that the first and primary aim of revenge week would have to be sleep deprivation. To this end my other roommate, Ty, and I hit the local drug and hardware stores to brainstorm, and so came up with phase one of the project.
We began by dissolving an extra large box of Ex-lax in water to separate the active ingredients from the fillers and wax coating. A check of the MSDS revealed that the active ingredient produced strong muscle contractions, and cramping, when ingested...and thus the wax seal was the prevent the ingredient from coming into contact with the digestive tract prior to it passing through the stomach into the intestines. The relevance being that the side effects of the purified ingredient included nausea, strong abdominal cramping, and severe diarrhea.
With the Ex-lax dissolved, I went to Walgreen�s to find something to help the pills along a little bit and after a bit of wrangling I got my hands on a bottle of ipecac. If you are unaware of the effects of syrup of ipecac, you have only to take a quick trip to the Poison Control Center's website to find out that it is a powerful emetic and expectorate. In layman�s terms, it causes cramping and vomiting.
As we dug through his food, a problem became evident: how do we control his dose? Our first impression was to just empty all of the boxes into random coke bottles and open jars, but then we realized the danger of overdose...especially if he ate from more than one source at a given time. To this end, we froze exactly one dose of ipecac into an ice cube with the intention of slipping it into his drink at a later time. Ex-lax is decidedly less powerful than ipecac, so we decided we could be slightly more liberal in its application.
First we planted the Ex-lax.
I found his mustard left out on our table, as it always was. We added quite a bit to the top of it, to ensure that it would all squirt out together with the first squeeze. Then, digging through the freezer, I came across an enchilada dinner...the very thing he assailed us with every morning at 3AM by using the microwave right outside our door and letting the greasy, processed smells find their way inside shortly after to give me dreams reminiscent of late-night puking and exhaustion. I spent over half an hour cutting at the sides with a razor, separating the plastic Shrink wrap from the tray, and slipping Ex-lax into the frozen refried beans, then using a lighter to reseal the Shrink wrap and glue to reseal the outside of the box. I placed it back in the freezer for the glue to get brittle, and began searching for something else, which is when my eyes fell upon his never long neglected jar of salsa on the top of the fridge. With the Ex-lax gone, we started looking for places to put the ipecac.
First, we dripped some onto a slice of bread from his loaf.
Then, we happened across a box of his cookies and soaked ipecac into the first four.
At this point, we had lost all hope of actually slipping the ice cube into once of his drinks, so instead I just dropped it into his bottle of PowerAde, along with a liberal chaser straight from the bottle, seeing as how I seriously doubted he would be drinking the whole thing all at once. Later, I ended up doing the same to his 2 liter bottles of coke.
It took about a day and a half for him to get into his food, but when he did the results were spectacular, and characterized by his sudden sprints from the living room and many a late night disaster as he awoke in the throes of something decidedly urgent. The cramping, shitting, and puking kept him home all weekend, and generally confined to the bathroom floor.
The humor of this entire thing is that while he was sick he didn�t eat, and thus thought he was recovering from food poisoning, or maybe the flu...but as he ate to regain his strength, it would all begin again, to our undying amusement.
The first phase was working well, so we decided to kick it up to phase two, seeing as how time was growing short. I made a trip to the hardware store for some fiberglass, which I then ground to a find powder and sprinkled liberally in between his sheets. We then made another trip to Walgreen�s for a bottle of Nair, which was added to his shampoo.
That evening as he went to shave and cut his hair, I resumed my program of harassment, which I had pretty much kept in effect the whole year prior. Every time he goes into the bathroom, he cranks the stereo in his room as loud as it will go so he can hear it...so every time I heard his electric razor go on, I flipped the breaker and killed his stereo. After about the fifth time of watching him drag his weakened body into his room to turn his stereo back on confused, tired, and sick, I felt that maybe he was onto me, so I let it go.
The next morning, he was a wreck.
The fiberglass crystals had worked their way into his skin during the last, restless night as could be seen in the massive, itchy rash he developed over quite possibly his entire body. He scratched uncontrollably, leaving bloody marks down his arms and neck. Hoping to soothe the itching, he went straight to the shower, only to "discover" his sudden hair loss.
As he went to the cabinets to find some soup or something to eat, he noticed that nothing was quite where he left it, a fact that seemed to elude him for the entire year previous to then; when I got bored, I felt the compulsion to reorganize his things in new, exciting, and confusing ways. He dragged himself cabinet to cabinet for ten minutes or so and then finally gave up: this time I had saved myself the effort and just ate his soup.
The culmination of all this effort was seeing him run full tilt out of his room, puke down the hallway wall and floor, and drag himself retching into the bathroom, where he puked so violently he shit himself, and had to drag himself back out for more clothes in front of all of us in the living room.
After a few episodes like that, he exhausted himself to the point of being able to sleep through the sickness. This could not stand.
I took the rest of my ad, and some Zantrec I had found earlier and relocated to the living room, which shares a wall with his room. There I settled in and began a 12 hour midget porn binge. I pushed the TV speakers up against the wall, cranked the volume all the way, and let myself sink comfortably into the somewhat nerve-rattling ambience. It was my hope and assumption that no one human could sleep, nor even allow themselves to relax, when faced with the gibbering shrieks of midget coitus, and my gamble proved itself right when he stumbled out and asked what the fuck I was doing. I replied that he certainly had no right to judge, and if was offended by the cruel hand the vertically challenged were dealt by the indifferent whims of God, he could shut the fuck up and go back to his room. He did, and it is my sincerest hope that he spent the night shivering and wide eyed at the spectacle he so briefly witnessed.
After all of this, I began to feel the slightest bit remorseful...I decided he deserved an explanation for the horrible luck that had so recently befell him. I found his full name, social security number, and phone number on some papers he had left laying in our living room and convinced someone, who will remain nameless, to make a call for me.
Josh, like me, gave blood at Bio-Life plasma, and was thus subject to the same strict blood tests as I was. Posing as a representative of the blood bank's lab, the caller informed him that his last sample had not passed the screening, and that his recent weakness, hair loss, nausea, and diarrhea was not a result of flu or food poisoning, but AIDS, and the only responsible thing left for him to do was to notify all recent sexual partners and wait for a letter being sent via registered mail to inform him of the procedures for a confirmation test administered by his primary care physician...a letter that would obviously never arrive. As he passed out from alcohol, I realized the joke was at an end. I was about packed to head home, and his finals began the very next day. By all estimates, he had not had a proper night's sleep in nearly a week, and it had been a good two days for me as well. I made sure he had all the quiet he needed to get some rest for what would quite possibly be the hardest time of his life the next day, and finished loading my car. As I looked in on him sleeping so peacefully, I flipped the breaker one last time, resetting his alarm clock. His room bathed in the blinking green of 12:00, I closed the door and walked out of the trailer for the last time.
Fuck you, Josh. Fuck you.
--Copied from CJ guest editorial.
With all hope of recovering said thirty dollars lost, I fell back on the crutch of passive aggression, and thus Revenge Week was born.
Knowing that Josh began finals in a mere five days, I decided that the first and primary aim of revenge week would have to be sleep deprivation. To this end my other roommate, Ty, and I hit the local drug and hardware stores to brainstorm, and so came up with phase one of the project.
We began by dissolving an extra large box of Ex-lax in water to separate the active ingredients from the fillers and wax coating. A check of the MSDS revealed that the active ingredient produced strong muscle contractions, and cramping, when ingested...and thus the wax seal was the prevent the ingredient from coming into contact with the digestive tract prior to it passing through the stomach into the intestines. The relevance being that the side effects of the purified ingredient included nausea, strong abdominal cramping, and severe diarrhea.
With the Ex-lax dissolved, I went to Walgreen�s to find something to help the pills along a little bit and after a bit of wrangling I got my hands on a bottle of ipecac. If you are unaware of the effects of syrup of ipecac, you have only to take a quick trip to the Poison Control Center's website to find out that it is a powerful emetic and expectorate. In layman�s terms, it causes cramping and vomiting.
As we dug through his food, a problem became evident: how do we control his dose? Our first impression was to just empty all of the boxes into random coke bottles and open jars, but then we realized the danger of overdose...especially if he ate from more than one source at a given time. To this end, we froze exactly one dose of ipecac into an ice cube with the intention of slipping it into his drink at a later time. Ex-lax is decidedly less powerful than ipecac, so we decided we could be slightly more liberal in its application.
First we planted the Ex-lax.
I found his mustard left out on our table, as it always was. We added quite a bit to the top of it, to ensure that it would all squirt out together with the first squeeze. Then, digging through the freezer, I came across an enchilada dinner...the very thing he assailed us with every morning at 3AM by using the microwave right outside our door and letting the greasy, processed smells find their way inside shortly after to give me dreams reminiscent of late-night puking and exhaustion. I spent over half an hour cutting at the sides with a razor, separating the plastic Shrink wrap from the tray, and slipping Ex-lax into the frozen refried beans, then using a lighter to reseal the Shrink wrap and glue to reseal the outside of the box. I placed it back in the freezer for the glue to get brittle, and began searching for something else, which is when my eyes fell upon his never long neglected jar of salsa on the top of the fridge. With the Ex-lax gone, we started looking for places to put the ipecac.
First, we dripped some onto a slice of bread from his loaf.
Then, we happened across a box of his cookies and soaked ipecac into the first four.
At this point, we had lost all hope of actually slipping the ice cube into once of his drinks, so instead I just dropped it into his bottle of PowerAde, along with a liberal chaser straight from the bottle, seeing as how I seriously doubted he would be drinking the whole thing all at once. Later, I ended up doing the same to his 2 liter bottles of coke.
It took about a day and a half for him to get into his food, but when he did the results were spectacular, and characterized by his sudden sprints from the living room and many a late night disaster as he awoke in the throes of something decidedly urgent. The cramping, shitting, and puking kept him home all weekend, and generally confined to the bathroom floor.
The humor of this entire thing is that while he was sick he didn�t eat, and thus thought he was recovering from food poisoning, or maybe the flu...but as he ate to regain his strength, it would all begin again, to our undying amusement.
The first phase was working well, so we decided to kick it up to phase two, seeing as how time was growing short. I made a trip to the hardware store for some fiberglass, which I then ground to a find powder and sprinkled liberally in between his sheets. We then made another trip to Walgreen�s for a bottle of Nair, which was added to his shampoo.
That evening as he went to shave and cut his hair, I resumed my program of harassment, which I had pretty much kept in effect the whole year prior. Every time he goes into the bathroom, he cranks the stereo in his room as loud as it will go so he can hear it...so every time I heard his electric razor go on, I flipped the breaker and killed his stereo. After about the fifth time of watching him drag his weakened body into his room to turn his stereo back on confused, tired, and sick, I felt that maybe he was onto me, so I let it go.
The next morning, he was a wreck.
The fiberglass crystals had worked their way into his skin during the last, restless night as could be seen in the massive, itchy rash he developed over quite possibly his entire body. He scratched uncontrollably, leaving bloody marks down his arms and neck. Hoping to soothe the itching, he went straight to the shower, only to "discover" his sudden hair loss.
As he went to the cabinets to find some soup or something to eat, he noticed that nothing was quite where he left it, a fact that seemed to elude him for the entire year previous to then; when I got bored, I felt the compulsion to reorganize his things in new, exciting, and confusing ways. He dragged himself cabinet to cabinet for ten minutes or so and then finally gave up: this time I had saved myself the effort and just ate his soup.
The culmination of all this effort was seeing him run full tilt out of his room, puke down the hallway wall and floor, and drag himself retching into the bathroom, where he puked so violently he shit himself, and had to drag himself back out for more clothes in front of all of us in the living room.
After a few episodes like that, he exhausted himself to the point of being able to sleep through the sickness. This could not stand.
I took the rest of my ad, and some Zantrec I had found earlier and relocated to the living room, which shares a wall with his room. There I settled in and began a 12 hour midget porn binge. I pushed the TV speakers up against the wall, cranked the volume all the way, and let myself sink comfortably into the somewhat nerve-rattling ambience. It was my hope and assumption that no one human could sleep, nor even allow themselves to relax, when faced with the gibbering shrieks of midget coitus, and my gamble proved itself right when he stumbled out and asked what the fuck I was doing. I replied that he certainly had no right to judge, and if was offended by the cruel hand the vertically challenged were dealt by the indifferent whims of God, he could shut the fuck up and go back to his room. He did, and it is my sincerest hope that he spent the night shivering and wide eyed at the spectacle he so briefly witnessed.
After all of this, I began to feel the slightest bit remorseful...I decided he deserved an explanation for the horrible luck that had so recently befell him. I found his full name, social security number, and phone number on some papers he had left laying in our living room and convinced someone, who will remain nameless, to make a call for me.
Josh, like me, gave blood at Bio-Life plasma, and was thus subject to the same strict blood tests as I was. Posing as a representative of the blood bank's lab, the caller informed him that his last sample had not passed the screening, and that his recent weakness, hair loss, nausea, and diarrhea was not a result of flu or food poisoning, but AIDS, and the only responsible thing left for him to do was to notify all recent sexual partners and wait for a letter being sent via registered mail to inform him of the procedures for a confirmation test administered by his primary care physician...a letter that would obviously never arrive. As he passed out from alcohol, I realized the joke was at an end. I was about packed to head home, and his finals began the very next day. By all estimates, he had not had a proper night's sleep in nearly a week, and it had been a good two days for me as well. I made sure he had all the quiet he needed to get some rest for what would quite possibly be the hardest time of his life the next day, and finished loading my car. As I looked in on him sleeping so peacefully, I flipped the breaker one last time, resetting his alarm clock. His room bathed in the blinking green of 12:00, I closed the door and walked out of the trailer for the last time.
Fuck you, Josh. Fuck you.
--Copied from CJ guest editorial.