sugar syrup

One of my co-workers was having a computer problem and he called me into his office to help him out. As I was working on the computer I noticed drops of dried softdrink on his keyboard. I noticed more softdrink splatters on the screen. "Must've had a mouthfull of coke and sneezed," I thought. Disgusting, relatively common occurence geeks are exposed to. I turned to ask him about a specific problem with his PC and noticed splatters on the wall behind him. It was like someone had bludgeoned a can of coke with a baseball bat. I didn't want to disturb someone with a vendetta against helpless cans of pop, but I had to know what had happened. I asked. Apparently my co-worker had bought a couple of six packs of soda and was pulling them from the plastic rings and placing them under his desk. As he got to the last couple of cans one fell out. In cases like this, I generally wind up cursing gravity as a real inconvenience. The reality was much, much worse. The can landed on the top corner slightly opening the poptop. The shaking from falling and landing caused it to fizz violently. Since the pressure was only released on one side of the opening, the can started to spin and spray coke around the room. As I looked around the I noticed sprayed drops of coke were everywhere. Floor to ceiling the room was covered. I think I would have cursed CO2 at this point.

Months later I was retelling this story and my co-worker was walking by. I asked him about his office and he said that he hadn't gotten around to cleaning off his whiteboard yet. Whiteboard writing can be really nice. The squeak of the markers as they slide smoothly over the surface of the board. The clean vaguely chemical smell of the ink. All ruined as you hit a drop of dried soda causing your marker to stick and chatter as your hand overcompensates for the friction. It would have been the first thing I cleaned.