How to survive accidental inebriation at work

About 2 weeks ago, I suddenly became allergic to something in my bedroom. I as of yet have not been able to pinpoint the problem. There is virtually nothing in my bedroom that cannot also be found in every other room of our house, so I can only conclude that I have become allergic to my own mattress; a problem that is very difficult to correct, especially since this mattress is only one year old and is the largest purchase I have ever made (barring University and travel expenses); I'm not about to remove it to see if it's the problem.

Anyway, this story has very little to do with my allergies except for the fact that said allergies have cleverly prevented me from realizing that I am also coming down with a cold. When I woke up this morning with a sore throat, I assumed it was the result of my trying to scratch the itchy allergens out of my own throat all night. In fact, when I started snorting out golf-ball sized wads of mucus from my nose, I thought that maybe my body had finally gotten hold of whatever was irritating me and was flushing it out. It was only when I got to work that I began to realize that I was being affected by more than my usual bedroom allergy.

By 11 am my throat was on fire. I tried to bravely live with the pain for about half an hour, then realized that no one at the bakery was going to have a good day if I continued living in such a manner. A short trip to the 'medicine cabinet'* revealed that the only painkiller we had on hand that day was a bottle of extra strength nighttime cold relief, celebrated for its ability to bring sleep to even the most irritated of patients.

Now, I am not known for my high tolerance when it comes to depressants; in fact, I am rather notorious for my lack of ability to tolerate them. So I should have known better than to go for a bottle of extra-strength anything, especially extra-strength sleep aid, 1 hour into an 8-hour shift in a place full of gas-powered burners, mixers with industrial-sized motors in them, and lots and lots of knives. And I really should have known better than to take 2 extra-strength painkilling sleep aids at once.

I did not know better. In fact, I knew so little that, half an hour after taking said sleep aids, when I began to feel like a box of crayons melting into a lump beneath a radiator, I was actually confused as to why I might be feeling that way. It took me a while to connect my suddenly pain-free throat to the fact that I was about to pass out in the strawberry buttercream.

Luckily, I was not the one in charge of operating heavy machinery that day, which would have made my body a weapon dangerous enough that I may actually have reported my medicating faux-pas to the boss and been relieved of my duties for the day. Deciding to instead stick it out until the medication wore off (4 hours later), my main job for the day became hiding my state of unintentional inebriation from coworkers, supervisors, and customers.

I simply had to avoid any task that would make it clear I was becoming a human strand of spaghetti. For instance, climbing ladders sounded like a particularly bad idea to me, and so, when I was asked to climb up to our top storage shelf and bring down a few stacks of boxes, I simply elected to fold more boxes instead. I made sure I was in a different room whenever someone needed to write out a gift tag for someone, as well.

Unfortunately, 3 hours into my Shift of Inebriation, I found myself trapped on the phoneline with someone who was even worse off than I was. Picture, if you will, one person who is high on cold medication and another person who is high on who even knows what trying to pick out a cake together. We spent a good 25 minutes trying to figure out what size of cake we would need to feed 30 people, what flavours it could be, what flavours it could not be, and why it could not be made to look exactly like the Beach Scene cupcake mural on our website, which was made for 150 people.

The moral of this story is: if you ever find yourself unintentionally high off of cold medication in the middle of a bakery, stay away from the phone.

*aka shelf that also holds rubber gloves and a pair of shoes that no one can identify