Rudy Q Jones 2: Triangles

Rudy told me this story after he'd worked here for about 3 weeks:

There was a time when he (Rudy) had a thing for triangles. He really liked triangles a lot, and he was always on the lookout for things that formed triangles.

One day, when he was out spraying some sort of herbicide on a lawn, he rounded a big pine tree in some customer's yard and found three mushrooms growing in a triangle. This he took to be fortuitous, so he ATE THEM.

At first, he only ate one of them, thinking that they might not be safe to eat. However, he carefully collected the other two and put them on the dashboard of his truck, until he finished the yard (roughly 10 minutes, from what I gather). Then, once he got back in the truck and began to drive to his next yard, he had the following Stoner's Epiphany:

"I thought, man, I'd better eat all three of these things at once. I mean, what if one of them wouldn't do any good!? Then I'd just be stuck with two of them, and then what if I found a girl to share them with?"

I actually found myself nodding sagely along with this, even though it really doesn't make much sense when you factor in things like, oh, his health. But I'm familiar with the internal dialogue that goes along with eating things that are known to be harmless but psychoactive, so I'm kind of on the same page with him.

He "started to feel funny" shortly after leaving the job, and pulled into a convenience store lot to get something to drink. "I thought it was just heat exhaustion, man!" He asks to use their bathroom, yarks into the stool, and then passes out in front of the door. Effectively locking himself in with his own body.

Something on the order of an hour later, someone reports to the cashier that they can't access the bathroom--and, in fact, there's some sort of dead animal blocking the door (apparently they could just see the back of his head and his hair). Rudy'd completely comatose at this point, so apparently they had to call the fire department to force open the door.

Imagine you're Rudy's boss. You're a little nervous about sending him out because he's a completely unknown quantity, but he's a hell of a worker and 95% of the time he does the right thing (when it comes to his actual spraying job). Anyway, it's May or June, so you're busy as all hell...

And then you get a call from the fire department, telling you that your employee has passed out in a convenience store bathroom, and it looks like he's ingested some sort of poison.

And of all the trucks this joker could be driving, it's the one which contains a myriad of poisons, so you can't just say "oh yeah, he must have drunk some Roundup," because if it was actually Trimec or Chlordane (these dudes were pretty sketchy) Rudy might just die from the treatment.

So now you've got a comatose employee, a very valuable truck sitting in a parking lot, essentially abandoned, and a bunch of paramedics asking questions about all the pesticides on your rig. A pretty impressive array of pesticides and pesticide labels are all spread out on the ground, sidewalk, and truck bed, while everyone argues about what it could have been that has done this to poor Rudy.

At the apex of the argument, Rudy sort of groggily raises his head, looks at one of the paramedics, and says "no, man, it was those mushrooms I ate!" Then passes out again for a couple of days.

He was in the hospital for three days total. All because he liked triangles.