The summer after freshman year I got royally screwed in terms of employment. After working all of December I had told my former boss that I would be back for the summer. My plan was to earn a shitton of money to do...I dunno...whatever. Anyway the plan was to work all summer and make bank. So imagine my surprise when I went to a coworker's wedding right after school ended and find out that they no longer need me.
Dude. I didn't make any alternative plans for the summer. So now I have no internship, no job, and very little money. And I desperately needed a new car. F that shit. I was pretty pissed.
After several weeks of desperate job searching (read: becoming a craigslist whore) I finally got lucky when my friend's mom told me that she heard through the grapevine that a friend of a friend needed a summer nanny. Score.
So I get the job. This family had just bought a new house. The dad worked all day and the mom was a real estate agent that worked from home but was frequently out and about showing houses and stuff. They had four kids: three girls ages 11, 9, and 7, and a 3-year old son. Upon our 'test' meeting, to make sure that I wasn't like a child rapist or something, I uttered the phrase "cool beans", which I have been known to do. I found out later that I sealed the deal because they kids loved me so much they said "cool beans" in response to just about everything for the next two days. Anyway, thus I became a nanny for five hours a day, five days a week at $6 an hour (just note that MD minimum wage is $7.75 and I was getting paid under the table). It wasn't much pay--and believe me, I took plenty of shit about it from my parents--but it was better than nothing.
In my last week of nannying for this family two of the kids got sick. They were so diseased that I got Monday off. On Tuesday their mom called and said everybody was feeling OK, so I went to work.
On Thursday to celebrate our last week, I took the three girls to see Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs because that's what they wanted to see. It was only playing in the crappiest theater around at a time we could make, so we went.
First off, I drive us to the dollar store to load them up on sugar and other teeth eating candies. Then when we got to the movie theater, I bought the girls two slurpees to share and one for me, since I get a slurpee every time I got the movies.
So we get in the movies, and it's, you know, 11:30am on a Thursday so there's basically nobody in the theater expect a couple of moms and their kids. The previews come on, and they are surprisingly violent for this PG rated film we're about to see (I remember the preview for Gamer being one of them). Regardless, I was still a bit shocked when Funny People instead of Ice Age 3 comes on the screen. The alternative movie has quite the F-bomb load in the first couple of minutes, so I had to make the kids plug their ears and close their eyes, lest their see/hear something terrible.
Thirty minutes later (remember, this theater is crap) we are finally sitting in IA3 and we each got six complimentary tickets. That part was OK.
So halfway through the movie my stomach starts to let me know that it is Not Happy. It's all grumbly, and I'm starting to get a headache and I was just feeling crappy in general. The movie ends and we head out to Penelope. At this point in time Penelope has only been in my possession for maybe 2.5 months. She is still new.
When I told the girls I wasn't feeling too well and thought maybe the slurpee had given me food poisoning or something and asked them if they all felt OK, the middle one said she wasn't feeling to well either. There just happened to be a plastic grocery bag in the passenger seat, and I handed it to her thinking, 'the last thing I need is barf in my new car'. Oh man. What foresight I have.
As we're driving the 15 or so minutes home, I'm feeling worse and worse and worse. I was becoming nauseated and my stomach was still having a bullfight inside me, and my head was pounding, and just....shit. I felt terrible. I was thinking, 'I'm just gonna drop the girls off and tell their mom I need to take the day off because there is no way I'm making it through the rest of the day feeling like hell'. I just needed to get the kids back, and then I'd be OK.
I turn into their neighborhood--literally, I am a mile from their house--and then my stomach just tells me to go fuck myself. I yank the steering wheel over, jam the car in park, and attempt to cover my mouth while simultaneously unbuckling my seatbelt and opening the car door. BBBBBLLLAAAHHHHH.
Since I unfortunately do not have three hands and one was covering my mouth, the other hand only managed to unbuckle my seatbelt before I exploded cherry slurpee all over myself and my new car. In front of the three girls. There is red barf all down my shirt, on my pants, all over my dashboard, the steering wheel, the carpet, in the window buttons of my door, on my windshield, in my eyebrows, EVERYWHERE. It is bad enough to barf. It's worse to barf in front of kids. But to be sitting in my NEW CAR covered in food that I had consumed earlier was just some sort of cosmic Fuck You. Not to mention gross.
As I was so glamorously puking, all three girls had hopped out the backseat and proceeded to flip their shits.
"ARE YOU OKAY!?"
"OHMYGOD! DO I NEED TO CALL MY MOM! WE CAN CALL HER!"
"EEEEEWWWWWWWWW!"
Thoroughly disgusted with myself and the situation in general, I order the girls to get back in the car so I can get them home. They all refuse, on account of how the entire car reeks of puke. "Get in the car. Just hold your noses and you'll be home in a minute."
Youngest girl--with nose plugged--to me driving covered in my own bodily fluids: "I've never seen red barf before!" Kids say the darnedest things, huh?
I pull up to their house and all three little demons go tearing into the house to tell their mom about this. She comes outside, sees me standing there looking like some sort of cheap zombie, gives me a look of pure pity and goes, "Awwww, honey. " I had to wash myself off in the front yard with the hose. The mom lent me a shirt to wear and assisted me in getting the worst of the barf out of my car so that I could drive it home.
As I drive the five minutes it takes to get me home, I call my dad.
Dad: Hell-o
Me: Dad, how do you get barf out of a car?
Dad: What? Who puked?
Me: (really pathetically) I did.
Dad: *Insane laughter*
Me: Thanks Dad. Thanks a lot....(explains story)
Dad: Well I'm home, so I'll help you clean it out when you get here.
When I got home I spent 30 minutes attempting to get all the puke off Penelope. Dad's idea of 'helping' was to hand me three different kinds of car air freshener. Sooo helpful, that man. In the process of cleaning I end up puking again (this time in a bucket). Thus kicked off the most terrible sickness of my life (even worse than uncontrollable shitting). This was at about 1pm, and I puked every 30 minutes or so until I finally fell asleep at 9pm. Everything--medicine, water, gatorade--refused to stay in my stomach, and I have to emphasize how shitty it is to be forced to throw up nothing but stomach bile for hours and hours.
I woke up at 3am feeling less nauseated but extremely dehydrated. I chugged a lot of water and took a shower so I could stop smelling like bile. I had a really hard time falling back asleep because I had some serious chills. Turns out that I was running a 104 fever. Well then.
By 3pm the next day, I felt more or less normal. WTF sickness? I get a call from the mom to tell me that one of the kids was also sick, except her bodily fluids were exploding out of both ends (thankfully this did not happen to me).
So ends my famous puke story. It's kind of sad that the most interesting thing to happen to me during the summer of '09 was that I vomited red slurpee all over my new car.
PS: Other funny thing: the 7 year old asked me what a 'disco stick' was in reference to the Lady Gaga song. Uhh.....video games. I made some shit up about a joy stick or whatever.
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