Carrying a bottle of Mountain Dew, Mountain Girl comes back into the lab. "So I just got this out of the vending machine, but the safety seal band around the bottom of the cap is missing. Do you think it's safe to drink? Or did the person who stocked the machine open it and put something in it?"
Here ensues a discussion of bottle-capping and the difficulty of getting those safety bands off. Much is hypothesized about the soda bottling process and the bottle is passed around. MG decides that she'll just go get another bottle.
"Let me see it," says Ace. "I can prove that it's safe." (It's really too bad I can't use his own name, because it's the perfect name for him and a cool name. Seriously, if I put him in a lineup and told you to pick out the guy whose name is _____ _______, you'd pick him in a heartbeat.)
"Oh yeah? You can show that it's mechanically safe?" I ask.
"Yeah, mechanically safe." Ace is really EE, only minoring in ME, so he didn't have to get the lobotomy.
MG hands over the bottle and he examines the base of the cap. He shows it to me. "The last thing they do is stamp the date on the cap. See here? You can see where they stamped the date on—there's some ink on the edge of the cap. And right below it on the neck of the bottle is the ink from the rest of the date." Indeed, the inked spots line up perfectly.
"Great. I'm still not drinking it," MG says.
"Can I have it?" Ace asks.
"Sure." She goes back down to the vending machines.
He opens the bottle, which emits a satisfying, carbonated hiss. There's a free song under the cap too.
302 words | March 7, 2005 10:27 PM | Ivory towerI'd say the CO2 pressurization is a dead giveaway. Like the vacuum seal on jars. Not to many would be social terrorists have machines to repack those.
Posted by: Derek at March 8, 2005 01:46 PMYes, that's what we figured. Besides, I saw him in the lab this morning and he's not dead yet.
Posted by: Nee-chama at March 8, 2005 10:45 PM