Coke noses and pop can gestation

In our office kitchen there just appeared a bountiful stash of Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. It's a soda drinker's paradise. I imagine coworkers sitting at their desks with a piles of full and empty cans, product dripping from their noses and mouths, a la Pacino in Scarface.

Well Tony Montana, say hello to my little friends. They're free, unlike your product--all 90-some of them bound together with bird-killing plastic can six-pack thingies on cardboard half box palates like those things at Sam's Club. (Hmmm, that soliloquy really lost steam at the end.)

I know there's no health vaule in this stuff. It's a can of soda water, chemicals, and citric acid, among other undesirables. But reason has no influence on this instinct. If you think I can pass on free pop, you are wrong. I've been conditioned to desperately desire this crap (damn "My Coke Rewards"), so naturally I thought this was a late Christmas bonus, a special gift from someone who cares, or just a damn lucky. I wanted to know who to thank, which hands to shake, who to send a well-crafted thank you card. It's not often I get my afternoon caffeine fix without dropping $1.50. (Speaking of which, here's a tip: the 20-oz bottles cost $1.50. Two 12-oz cans cost the same. 4 free ounces. Ya gotta do the math!)

So I grab a can off the stack of goodness. "Gotta grab one of these," I say under my breath, directed half at the wall, half at the other guy in the kitchen, like we do in the office.

"Yeah, take as many as you want," he says. "They're all expired!"

You gotta be kidding me. He's messing with me. Bottom of the can? "MAR0209CBP." I'm no expiration date writer, but that looks like we're more than ten months past the expiration date. Ten months! 83.3% of a year! That's longer than it takes a human baby to gestate. You could have opened one of these cans on its last day of....non expiredness, drank it, assembled a test tube baby in the can, and had a one-month-old live human by now.

I crack it open and take a whiff. You think 10 months are going to stop me? Wrong again.

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