Once upon a time, I was on my way to work in the morning. I was catching the tram to the CBD.

I hadn’t felt awesome before I left home, but as I sat on the tram i started feeling worse and worse. In particular, my nose started running. And I didn’t have any tissues with me. No good.

At a certain point, in the CBD but still not quite at work, I had to do something because my runny nose was becoming unmanageable. So, spotting a 7-11, I jumped off the tram. In a hurry.

With no time to fuck around, I ran into the 7-11 and headed for the pies and sausage rolls, looking for napkins. There weren’t any. Instead, there was a sign saying that napkins were available at the counter. So I ran to the counter.

“I need some napkins please”, I said.

The cashier handed me one tiny napkin. Nowhere near enough for the massive torrent of mucus I’d been holding back for about 15 minutes by that point.

“I need more than that, I have to blow my nose”, I managed to get out without leaking anything anywhere.

With an expression conveying very clearly exactly how few fucks he gave, the cashier refused.

“No, only one. You can buy tissues”, he said.

“I don’t have time for that, give me more napkins”, I said.

“No”, came the reply, continuing to be accompanied by the aforementioned expression.

So I blew my nose on the napkin he had given me.

Met with roughly a megalitre of mucous at high pressure, the flimsy and insubstantial napkin disintegrated, sending pieces of wet napkin and most of the megalitre of snot all over the cashier’s counter and all over the chewing gum and chocolate bars in front of it. This procedure left me holding half of an inadequate-for-blowing-ones-nose napkin which was dangling and dripping many ropes of horrible semi-liquid stuff. Once the procedure was complete, every subtle movement of my hand caused an exponential jiggling in the awful thing I was holding, and that jiggling then caused a hundred fresh droplets to rain down onto the counter in a hundred interesting new trajectories.

As I turned and left the store, taking care to put what hadn’t dripped onto the counter, products, and floor into the bin, I said:

“Next time, don’t be a cunt”