January 5, 2012

Luvdoc,
Ever since my boss learned we live on the same side of town, he keeps asking to ride home with me. How do I tell him no without getting fired? Help!

Uneasy Rider

This is a tough-love approach, but desperate times call for desperate measures: Vomit in your car. Trust me. You can live with the smell of your vomit far longer than someone else can. It’s a fact of nature. However, here’s one important point: Even if you’re one of those people who absolutely detests the idea of blowing beads, make sure you do it yourself. Having a friend or a pet vomit in your car to save yourself the trouble will only cause you to suffer worse in the long run. If you’ve ever had a ferret regurgitate a dead hamster in your backseat, you would totally know what I mean. Plus, if you do the ralphing yourself, you can vividly describe the incident so he’ll associate you with the (ideally) nauseating olfactory sensation. For instance, “I should have known that the layer of fur on my egg salad probably meant that it had gone bad, but I ate it anyway, and then later I puked so hard on your seat that I could feel my anus in the back of my throat.” Yeah, something like that. It also doesn’t hurt if whatever you ingest makes a nice stain … chili is good, spaghetti has some decent staying power, but nothing endures like mustard. Mustard stains linger long after the smell is gone. Maybe knock back a glass of mustard and then tickle the back of your tongue with a toothbrush and see what comes up. If you have the time, let it bake in full sun over the weekend before you make any attempt at cleaning up. Here’s the most important tip: When your boss gets in the car, insist that you can’t smell anything. Keep the windows rolled up and the air on “recirculate.” Not too cool though. You want the car to feel stuffy. If you really want to put a flourish on it, try to let out a long, wet fart sometime during the ride. You can excuse it with a statement like, “I’ve been shitting a river for days.” I know this all seems horrifyingly drastic, but it sure beats being honest with your boss and telling him it makes you uncomfortable to spend so much time with him outside of the office. That would be fucking crazy.