Those Mean Old E-coli Blues

Note: We are making our way through Texas and I don’t have time to write a full blog, so here is another story from the Nick Happens file.

I try to be a nice guy. I really am not all that hard to get along with. Just ask any of my ex-wives. My motto is live and let live. We’re all crazy in one way or another, so I try to overlook your quirks in the hopes that you, in turn, will not make mention of my own lunatic traits. But sometimes I run across something and I just have to speak up. So it was one very hot summer day at Elkhart Campground, in Elkhart, Indiana a few years back. We pulled in, parked in our RV site, and got the water and electric hooked up. Then Miss Terry shooed me outside while she started preparing dinner

I was wandering around the place checking to see if anyone we knew was there when I saw a fellow pull up to the dump station in a Class A Fleetwood motorhome. He opened a bay on the side of his rig and took out a pair of chest waders of the type worn by fishermen and put them on. Next, he pulled rubber galoshes on over his shoes and donned one of those paper masks with an elastic band over his nose and mouth, like you see in a hospital operating room. I watched as he then slid on a set of plastic goggles and thick rubber gloves. He looked like he was about to handle plutonium rods or something.

With his survival gear on, his next step was to get out a bottle of some sort of disinfectant, with which he proceeded to spray the plastic cap to the dump station before he unscrewed it. Likewise, he sprayed down his sewer hose after pulling it out of a plastic storage bin. All of this on a day when the temperature was up around 90 degrees, and the humidity wasn’t far behind.

I was pretty sure he’d cook himself in all that rubber and plastic before he ever got his sewer hose hooked up. With my luck, I figured I’d better speak up before he collapsed and I had to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation. I could contain myself no longer.

“What in the hell are you doing?” I asked him.
“You have to be careful dumping these things,” he told me. Or at least that’s what I think he said. It’s hard to understand someone when they’re talking through a mask.
“Careful?”
“Yeah, e-coli lives in places like this. It can kill you.”
“Oh, you’re dumping,” I replied. “I was waiting for you to pull out a snorkel next. In that getup, I thought maybe you had lost your Rolex and were getting ready to go in after it!”

Some people don’t understand my sense of humor and this guy was obviously one of them. He muttered something through his mask and went to work. I left before any stray e-coli germs crawled out of the sewer and bit me on my portly posterior.

In closing, here’s a chuckle to start your day, from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – I always mean what I say. I may not always mean to say it out loud, but I always mean it.