You'll have to slip me a Benjamin to clean that up.

Please forgive me for being so headline-obsessed lately, but I've found another one that I couldn't ignore, from Tuesday's Seattle Post Intelligencer:

"State senator at odds with ferry workers over vomit pay"

My first question was...what the hell is vomit pay? Is it some form of compensation for getting seasick while performing ferry duties? Are these people required to show proof of regurgitation along with an initialed time sheet?

It turns out I wasn't too far off. Washington State ferry workers are paid double their hourly rate for swabbing up previously digested food from the floors of the ferries. Aha, so that's what "poop deck" means.

State Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, has taken issue with this policy, and is pushing to re-align ferry employee pay with that of other state government workers. Her contention is that other occupations, such as prison guards, aren't equally compensated for performing similarly unpleasant tasks.

I must agree. And naturally, many jobs exist, both paid and unpaid, where people are reminded on a daily basis that the human body is ninety percent water. Anyone in the health care profession knows this, as does any human being who has ever performed parental duties.

As a dad of young children, I often wasn't even aware that I wore hazardous waste until I looked in the mirror at work, or a fellow employee told me I was wearing pasty Cheerio bits on the left kidney region of my V-neck sweater.

But what about the other jobs, the lines of work where people are hardly compensated to encounter and deal with a lot of nastiness? The prison guard again comes to mind, not because he or she occasionally must clean up a nasty mess, but also because they're often expected to break up "temporary marriages" as they're being consummated. Sound fun?

How about school teachers? My mom, a former first grade teacher, was thrown up on by a kid who'd eaten hot dogs for breakfast...on her head! That was always good for a chuckle or two around the dinner table.

Or what about bus drivers? Are they entitled to "Sociopath Pacification Pay", "Spicy Cheeto Dust in the Eye Pay" or "Ten Drug Deals Witnessed Before Ten AM Pay"? I don't think so.

Maybe actors also deserve remuneration for putting themselves in harm's way. How many times has Tom Cruise risked the inhalation of previously embedded bodily particulates expelled into his immediate atmosphere as the result of spontaneous couch bouncing? He gets nothing for it.

Listen, ferry workers. I'm not saying your jobs are easy. I've seen you people place yourself directly in the path of large trucks, waving them closer to you for that precious additional space. You station yourselves on the bows of your vessels, Puget Sound's worst tempests pounding at your mustaches and ponytails.

You are entitled to be paid decently and fairly by us, the Washington state taxpayers.

But until I see my mom's hot-dog-barf-to-the-face settlement check, put on an extra pair of  latex gloves and stop complaining.

The throw up lowdown

It's not fun. In fact, that's an understatement. It's gross, disgusting, sickening and traumatic. However distasteful it may be, though, we're all united through our common experiences with it; everyone's got a story about how it happened to them in the worst possible situation or in front of the worst possible person.

I'm talking about...vomiting.

We've got more names for it than almost any other bodily function: hurling, yakking, gargling groceries, throwing food, spitting yams, chumming, barfing, ralphing, backfeeding—I'll stop there. It's not that we don't like to talk about it; we sort of do, but only under the correct circumstances. We don't bring it up at Grandma's dinner table. We don't mention it to our brand new girlfriend—"Wow, when I threw up last week, that gift just kept on giving. I blew my nose the next day and found a piece of carrot." Nope, not a good time to go there.

But when we're with friends or others with whom we feel comfortable, the stories line up like the barf bus just arrived for story time. Today at work, for instance, three of my colleagues each had a couple of yam yarns to spin, with a few to spare. The common denominator for each story was that moment of realization we all experience when we know it's going to happen...the dizziness, the nausea, the cold, clammy skin and increased salivary build-up. That singular moment in time when we think, "I need to find the porcelain."

Of course, witnessing our kids throw up is no laughing matter. No parent enjoys watching his or her child in such discomfort. And, as every parent knows, the first strike from a small child is never into the proper receptacle. It's on the bed, in the car, on the carpet; I actually was thrown up upon by my younger daughter as my older daughter pulled out one of her teeth and simultaneously bled on me. As a general rule, it's never a terrible idea to wear rubber clothing around children under five.

My own parents frequently made the colossal error of plying me with Pepto Bismol in an effort to fend off an attack of technicolor yawning, but the opposite result usually occurred, where a frothy, pink bouquet merely supplemented the toxic cocktail. Or, they would bring out the "just in case" barf bowl, which only surfaced in this situation and primed your pump like a Pavlovian experiment.


The actual act of cookie tossing is quite a marvel of the human body. According to James Hallenback, MD, vomiting protects us from ingesting toxic substances, an evolutionary advantage. "The brain has a variety of receptors that test for potential toxins. Stimulation of these receptors triggers nausea and vomiting, preferably in time to limit further ingestion of poison." He goes on to state that many animal species do not have the ability to vomit, such as rodents.

Well, rodents seem to be getting by just fine.

I'm sure we'd all like to think that our throwing up days are behind us. In a Seinfeld episode, Jerry became distraught when his twenty-year, no-throw-up streak ended after eating a black and white cookie. But let's be realistic, here. It's going to happen again. And we're going to tell our friends.