An Untimely Attack of Gas

If you suffer from an excess of flatulence, as I do, it can lead to some extremely hilarious, embarrassing moments.

There is one thing you should never do when dealing with the public and that is because it tends to leave a very bad smell, if you know what I mean, except in this case, it was all the sound and the fury without the whiff. Allow me to explain.

Every morning we had a sales meeting in the sales manager's office to discuss the day's business ahead of us. Now sometimes when sales were not at their best, the atmosphere in that little sales office could get a little heavy. So I decided to lighten things up a little.

My brother, a mischievous soul, had lent me a fart machine. It was a nifty little device that fitted in your trouser pocket with a remote that fitted neatly into the other pocket.

As the sales manager went to sit down I let go a little machine fart and it worked a treat. Very funny, everybody started to snigger. I let go another as his rear end neared the seat and touched base, and before long everybody was roaring with laughter. Even the sales manager himself, a surly soul at the best of times, managed an amused grin. Result. The meeting went well from then on.

After the meeting I went straight out to the showroom to do a handover of a new car to a very prudent middle-aged couple, George and Mildred Smethers.

Now this was at a time when remote central locking had just come out. And I couldn't wait to demonstrate this new car party trick to George and Mildred. And that is when it all went pear-shaped as they say.

Little did I know that the fart machine was operating on the same radio frequency as the remote control to open the new car doors. And even less was I aware that I had inadvertently left the fart machine activated. You can guess what happened when I pointed the car remote at the car to open the doors.

The fart machine in fact had a proper good selection of farts, from a pip-squeak to a full-on orchestral wind section going for the big note at the end of a classical piece of music like Strauss's Sprach Zarathustra. And that is what we got. Oh my god, I didn't know which way to turn.

Mildred turned to her erstwhile, henpecked, husband disgusted. She thought it was him letting off wind.

"George! Really?" she remonstrated. Poor old George simply reddened and said nothing in his own defence.

Then in a heartbeat, Mildred grabbed the car remote out of my hand and pressed the button singing out loud in glee "Oh here, let me try, that is so, so coooooool." The machine let off a very prolonged blast that echoed around the whole showroom. That was it for poor old George.

"RIGHT!" screamed Mildred "That's it, George. Get out of here! if you can't control your bodily functions, then just get out. You absolutely disgust me."

Poor old George, duly admonished, forlornly lowered his eyes to the floor then turned and slumped off out of the showroom.

I just couldn't let George take that kind of punishment and I confessed the real source of the apparent "farts" to Mildred. She let me off, but she didn't give George a break at all, oh no, she was going to get all the leverage she could out of this one, and then some. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Mildred never let poor old George forget, nor forgive him, the day he embarrassed her by doing something he didn't actually do. Come to think of it, I didn't do it neither.