On Pudding
The kitchen at work occasionally stocks kozy shack pudding in the small fridge. Our NetOps group at work adopted kozy shack as some sort of weird mascot. But no kozy shack this morning. Sadness.
Gesturing to the window I ask: “Why not walk over to Wegman’s (across the street) and buy pudding?”
Can’t. Kozy shack is downscale pudding. Wegman’s is too upscale for kozy shack. Wegman’s only stocks upscale pudding.
I ask around about the difference between downscale pudding and upscale pudding but everyone not in NetOps looks at me like there’s going to be a quiz. Go away you crazy person asking me about pudding. You’re weirding me out.
Only person who appreciates the question is Eric, who promptly recites this entire scene from The State:
Click to viewI should worry that Eric can recite this scene from memory on the merest mention of pudding but this is not what is on my mind. What I want to know is this: how much kozy shack can you buy for $240?
Being in the car, the only tool I have for the job is my iPhone. I consult Wolfram Alpha which bills itself as knowing everything, ever, about anything. I type into the search screen:
How much chocolate pudding can I buy for $240?
Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know. Fuck Wolfram Alpha. What is this shit? Billing itself as knowing everything why the fuck doesn’t it know how much pudding I can buy for $240?
“Try Google,” Eric suggests reasonably.
Alright. I figure out that the average bathtub holds 100 gallons of liquid substance - nominally water but I find no rigid definition of bathtubs and water exclusivity. Check. Then, poking around, looks like kozy shack goes for $3.09 for 22 oz of kozy shack. Not a useful 32 oz, but 22 oz. Google is also, now, proffering me kozy shack coupons.
We figure out we can’t get far on $240 of kozy shack. It’s enough to fill a few inches of bathtub but not to soak in pudding. It’d take $1800 worth of kozy shack to fill a bathtub entirely with pudding. (Note the original math on twitter is wrong. THIS IS DEFINITIVE AS DONE ON A REAL COMPUTER WITH A CALCULATOR.)
The can of peas pulls it together
“Not something you can casually do while drunk,” Eric points out. You’d have to be out of your gourd to spend that kind of money on kozy shack to fill a bathtub. But say, if you were, where would you go and how much would you buy?
Well, you could go to Meijer, the logical choice for buying so much pudding, but there’s no Meijer in Maryland. The rigid straight jacket of East Coast grocery catches us once again. One has no choice but to go to Costco, get a pallet, and fill it with enough 22oz kozy shack pudding pods to fill 100 gallons of bathtub with kozy shack.
“This,” Eric points out, “would look suspicious.”
That’s when we cook up the plan to add the can of peas. Because while a pallet full of 100 gallons of 22oz kozy shack chocolate pudding pods might look a bit strange, adding the can of peas pulls it all together. Sure one might ask about all that pudding but who would ask questions when presented with a simple can of peas? It all makes sense.
The very saddest thing is how much technology, how many millions of man hours of effort and innovation, I ruthlessly abused to get to this conclusion. Behold! What the Internet is truly for!
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.