rinse bowl I had a very distressing visit to the dentist yesterday. Not for the usual reasons. I didn’t have any painful work done, only a cleaning.

Simple, right?

The visit turned distressing the minute I realized my dentist replaced his usual swirly water spit bowl thingy with a rudimentary funnel-and-hose device in which to deposit my mouth gunk after the cleaning.

“No fair, dude,” I complain. “What is that thing? I don’t like it already.”

“Sorry,” he says. “We replaced the bowl with this to save about a thousand dollars.”

Crap.

So the cleaning is uneventful, I am praised for my mad flossing skills and we get to the part where I’m going to need to spit.

I’m stressing because I see the little cup of water to sip from and now I have to figure out how to aim everything in that small funnel with graceful precision.

I sip, I swish and then the dentist grabs the funnel & hose contraption and gestures for me to use it.

Maybe it’s because I needed an instruction manual with kindergarten-type pictures, maybe it’s because my mouth is bigger than the circumference of a grapefruit, or maybe it’s because I only thought I’d had novocain, but when I went to spit I did it super stupendously wrong.

The spit fell out of my mouth, onto my paper bib, onto my pants and onto the arm of the chair I was sitting in.

And then the dentist, in his most professional dentisty voice possible, said “You got some on the floor, too.”

Not one drop of it went into the funnel.

That is why dentists should never ever screw with the swirly water bowl thingy!!!

It’s his fault they needed a mop after I left.

God.

Stumble it!