What did you assume was exaggerated until you experienced it?
It was a normal day in Personal Finance class Junior year of high school. Or so I thought.
I sat next to this guy named Nick. Now Nick was a pretty quiet guy, he usually didn’t talk much. Every day I came into class, I would usually say hello to him, but not much else would come out of our conversations, until that hellish class.
I was working on some random assignment when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bottle of hot sauce in Nick’s backpack. But this was no ordinary bottle of hot sauce.
Now being the curious teenager that I was, I asked Nick about this interestingly named sauce.
Nick’s face lit up like the Devil’s when he visits his vast pools of glowing magma.
“This hot sauce is called Endorphin Rush, it’s one of the hottest hot sauces you can get!”
Now I was skeptical. I never had HOT hot sauces, but I figured this colorful bottle couldn’t contain anything hotter than a jalapeño pepper.
I was wrong.
Now being as stupid as I was curious, I asked Nick for some of his hot sauce.
“Be careful Angel, you should only have a drop of this stuff.”
But today, Icarus was going to make the grave error of flying too close to the sun.
I took enough hot sauce to cover the entirety of tip of my index finger, and plopped the infernal concoction into my mouth.
“Not too bad!” I said to myself confidently. It actually tasted alright, and it wasn’t even that hot.
As I joked with Nick about how the bottle didn’t need a warning label, I began to cry.
I didn’t choose to cry either. It was spontaneous, and thus, Dante’s descent into the inferno had begun.
Drool poured out of my mouth like a starving dog that just spotted a juicy T-bone steak. The amount of heat that was filling my mouth must have been similar to that of the surface of the sun. I quickly ran to the water fountain attempting to put out the hellfire that was pouring out of my mouth. I could actually hear my taste buds condemning me for the horrible decision I had made.
My teacher asked me if I was alright. Without context, it must have appeared to him that I had just had a death in the family, or my pet goldfish had just died.
With drool still pouring out of the volcano that was now my mouth I replied,
“NO EVERYTHING IS OK!”
It may have been a hallucination, but I could hear the Devil whisper in my ear:
“No it is not.”
For the next 30 minutes, I experienced the fiery inferno of the underworld.
Now I truly understood why this psychedelically printed container of liquid fury was named “Endorphin Rush”. And I have never made the mistake of underestimating a bottle of hot sauce since.
Originally published at http://quora.com.
