Come On Get Down Chuck Up With the Sickness

I saw people vomit on back to back days this weekend.

They say you should start a story off with a line that will catch people's attention. I think that should do it.

Yesterday, I was working a beer stand a Miller Park for the Brewers/White Sox game. If there's two towns whose fans know how to drink, it's Chicago and Milwaukee. For Yankee/Mets fans, drunkenness is mainly a means to increase their level of belligerence. For Philadelphians, it's not so much a drink as a projectile. For Brewers/Cubs/Sox fans, on the other hand, drinking beer is an end in itself.

Anyway, around the fourth inning, an usher...umm...ushered a girl over to a folding chair behind our stand. He said she wasn't feeling well and walked off. Almost immediately, the girl puked all over. I ran to get the usher, who didn't seem all that plussed. He called maintenance for a cleanup. The girl disappeared. I assume she was taken away from our beer stand so she wouldn't be a walking (or rather unsteadily sitting) anti-drunkenness PSA.

We sold four kegs of beer during the course of the game. With foam included, that turns out to produce a lot of runoff. It all goes down into a tank, which had to be emptied out once the game ended. So there I was, emptying what was probably a 40-gallon tank through a tiny hose into a 5 gallon bucket. I felt a little bit like Hercules, not in the god-like superhuman strength sense, but more in the endless dull repetitive task sense. Emptying the Augean bilge bucket.*

There was nowhere else to dump the bucket, so I took it into the nearest bathroom to empty it down the sink (gross, I know, but that's what they told me to do). On my way in, an usher warned me that I couldn't clean yet because there was still someone in there. I told him I was just going in to dump my bucket and he understood that I was not using a euphemism.

Inside the bathroom, I saw a pair of feet under the last stall in the row. I didn't think much of it, and went out to refill the bucket. I came in again and the feet were still there. By my fifth-ish time into the bathroom, the usher had apparently become concerned for the person still in the stall. Three police officers went in to check on the occupant.

An officer knocked on the stall door. "Are you ok in there?" No response. "Is everything ok?" No response. "This is the police. We're just here to make sure you're alright." No response. An officer went into the adjoining stall and looked over the divider.

There are a number of things I expected the officers to say right about then. "Do you want us to call the paramedics?" or "Sir please put your pants on." Something along those lines. Instead, what I heard will remain forever imbedded in my memory.

"Ma'am, are you aware that you're in a men's restroom?"



Oh yeah, I guess I should complete the story I promised you at the beginning of the post. I saw a guy by the side of the road throwing up next to his car this morning.

*"Bilge bucket" is a great word and I'm disappointed it's taken me five years to actually use it in a blog

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