Column: Something About Nothing

Imagination is a great thing, depending on how you use it. When the snow is blowing and the wind is howling, I can sit by my Happy Light, close my eyes and imagine I am on a beach in Hawaii with the warm sun touching my face.

With my imagination I can envision a hot pink room decorated with polka dots filled with my favorite candy waiting for me to enter and savor the experience. It doesn’t matter if I am in a room painted black with no door and no windows because my imagination can take me anywhere.

There are times when our imaginations get out of control and run wild. This happened to me recently.

A box from one of our vendors was delivered to my workplace. All of a sudden my workspace upstairs had a peculiar smell. I immediately thought “Gas, we have a gas leak, a bad gas leak.” I made my way downstairs to my co-worker. She too was experiencing the overwhelming odor.

We were ready to run out of the building. I told you imaginations run wild. We then realized this strange over powering odor was coming from one of our packages. We decided to investigate. We opened the package. This strong odor had taken over the package and its contents. It was as if someone had marinated our package in something. What was that smell? We knew we had to get rid of it so we set it out the back door. It had been in our office at the most 10 minutes.

We left for lunch thinking the odor would be gone when we came back. We kept asking ourselves the question “What was that smell?” We determined it smelled like garlic, but why would our package smell like garlic, so strong that it was giving us headaches, long after it had left the building?

We tried to air out the building. I wonder what people imagined we were doing by having all the doors and windows open in a snowstorm? I bet their imagination was running wild. We had headaches, we were feeling light-headed. It was time to close the office.

That is where the old imagination started working overtime. The news that day reported of a few strange packages that had been delivered elsewhere in the United States with some possible toxic powder. Was our package toxic? Was this a terrorist attack? After checking with our vendor we found the package had been sent out of Chicago. Wasn’t Chicago targeted last year by printer parts being sent earlier by terrorists? We are a computer company, after all.

The imagination was running wild. Was there a poison that smelled like garlic? Immediately we checked our most reliable resource, the Internet. There was a poison that smells like garlic, and it is used in small quantities in making computer chips. In large quantities over 24 hours it would cause many bad effects on your body. It would gradually cause toxic side effects.

Should we have opened the package? We touched it, and only a shower and a clothes wash got rid of the smell. Were we doomed? We could feel it. The headache would get worse. Was our skin itching? Were we seeing spots in front of our eyes? Was our speech slowing?

And then the phone call came from the carrier that delivered our package. It was garlic, plain old garlic. Somewhere in transportation our package decided to get friendly with a package from a garlic factory and you know what happens when packages get friendly. They “reek” the rewards and take on the features of those they get close to.

A few days and a few candles brought our office back to normal. We had an extra afternoon off of work to let our imagination run wild.

Yes, imagination is a good thing, if you use it wisely.

Albert Einstein summed it up best:

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net. Her blog is paringdown.wordpress.com. Listen to KBEW AM radio 1:30 p.m. Sundays for “Something About Nothing.”