Let’s talk about the three second rule – for the un-initiated, the three second rule applies when you drop a piece of food on the floor…if it stays there for less than three seconds, it is deemed acceptable to pick it up and eat it after first blowing on it or wiping it with your sleeve. It’s a rule most fat girls have in their kit bag, along with toddlers who don’t care who dropped what and when, if it’s on the floor it’s fair game.
Like any rule worth it’s salt, it can be ignored…I mean obviously if you dropped something sticky in a pile of freshly mown grass you’re probably going to look at it and decide to bow out gracefully. But as a fat girl with a broken food filter, if I can possibly make the rule apply, I will. The rule can even be extended or amended under the right circumstances. In my house for example, it’s a two second rule, because I have a three second dog and if you snooze, you lose.
Now, at first look you think, hmm…it largely depends on where you drop it. If you drop it at home, where you know it’s clean or at least you know which bits of the floor are clean, it’s a safer bet. At the very least, there are fewer folk likely to look at you with a combination of pity and disgust as you scrat around on the floor chasing after the morsel of whatever it is that you’ve dropped. Outside the home might be a bit more…icky.
What made this spring to mind was a recent incident on my trip. Bearing in mind, bar the odd birthday cake-related dilemma I had been really bloody careful with my food choices (evidenced by a one pound loss whilst I was away, I forgot to mention that yesterday in my haste to have a rant about the gremlins!) and so when we arrived at the airport to come home I’d mooched perfume and stuff in the duty free shop but avoided any goodies which might have been too hard to resist. My skinny string bean friend on the other hand had bought a massive bag of cheese flavoured crispy bugle thingies which under normal circumstances would have been right up my alley.
I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I covertly watched every one of those little pieces of paradise pass her lips in the same way that my pooch sits in his bed and quietly drools his way through human suppertime whenever we’re eating. She offered the bag around…a couple of people took a handful, one or two people declined, and then it was my turn. Would you like some..?
Hell would I! What I wanted to do was to take the bag out of her hands, straighten it up, tip it up and pour the entire contents down my neck. What I really wanted to do, encouraged by the asshole in my mind was to run back through the departure lounge, go into the shop and empty their shelves of these orbs of cheesiness, shoving them all into my hand luggage so I could munch them for the entire duration of our ten hour flight home.
But no…I was in control. Adjusting my halo, I took one. Said thank you and admired the way it looked…smelled it in anticipation. It smelled so cheesy my mouth was twitching. And then I dropped it. On the floor. In the departure lounge, where lots of people had walked, trolley wheels had criss-crossed the carpet tiles all day long, and there were bound to be nasties lurking in their hundreds of dirty thousands. The moment had gone…the offered bag had moved on, and my cheesy bugle sat there on the floor just crying to be eaten. I shit you not I could have wept at the injustice of it.
In the three seconds I had to react, I looked, in what felt like slow motion at all the people buzzing around…had anyone noticed? Would anybody notice if I picked it up off the floor and put it in my mouth..? If they did, what would they think? And then I saw her…the skinny-string-bean-glamour-puss flight attendant who looked like she’d never eaten a cheesy bugle in her life. She saw. So it had to stay there. I kicked it under my chair with a casual sweep of my foot, looking for all the world like it was nothing.
And you don’t need me to tell you that I thought about that cheesy bugle all the way home 🙁
