Swing and a miss

The company hired a new engineer last week. Seems like a nice guy...we’ll call him Rudy. He’s retired from General Motors. Why, at sixty years old, he would ever want to assimilate himself into the industrial hell-hole in which I work is completely beyond me. Anyway, he wandered into the recticle (two cubicles with the center section removed in the dead of night) this morning. A flying Fuji apple passed mere inches from his nose

You see, I’d issued the command, “Dave: Apple!” only seconds before his entrance. I eat an apple every morning at about nine of the clock. I’m a creature of habit. I think it has something to do with being toilet trained at gunpoint. As Dave is the guy who shares my workspace, and the fridge is on his side of the area...well, he throws me stuff.

Rudy, brought to an abrupt halt by the projectile Fuji exclaimed, “Whoa! You guys throwing fruit?”

I never, ever, ever miss the opportunity to punish people for questions like that. My comeback: “Yup, we’re training to be bouncers in a gay bar.” Except at the last minute I slammed the clever-brakes in my head. It never came out. Rudy is very religious.

Only for the slightest second was I offset. The next snappy remark was literally coming out of my mouth. No stopping it now: “You’re lucky you didn’t come by two minutes ago, we were throwing...”

***screeeeeecchhhhh***

The clever-brakes in my head are now glowing red. I was going to say watermelon. Rudy is an African American.

My cadence was only interrupted for a split second. Watermelon was replaced with the considerably less funny grapefruit. It was the only thing I could come up with in that 5/1000ths of a second window. He looked at me very strangely.

This whole mental exchange lasted a mere two seconds. I blew it.

I should have went with the bouncer joke.

Damn.