Adventures in Water

First, I'd like to refer you to the most hilarious example of feigned corporate ignorance ever. Anheuser-Busch to world: "What? We - a beer company - host a game with identical rules to beer pong. And the players drink beer? We are shocked, shocked! We told them to drink water." Seriously, that's A-B's lame excuse: they told the beer pong players to play "water pong."

In other water-related news: the pain of being macho. As you know, I'm staying at Jacob's place in D.C. His shower is...flawed. See, you can't adjust the temperature. So the water comes out at one temperature: "burn you to death." But when he explained the inability to adjust temperature, he said "you can't adjust but the temperature is fine."

So when I take a shower yesterday and nearly burst into flames from the sheer heat, I don't say anything. After all, I don't want to be the wimpy, whiney guest. He said the temperature was fine! I leave for a day of interviews and depressing weather, and Jacob showers. He also notices that the water is hot enough to cause atomic meltdown, but thinks to himself "Well, Ben didn't complain about it. Perhaps I just have an abnormally low pain tolerance."

We don't say anything. Because we are manly men and we don't let little things like 3rd-degree burns bother us. Until, after enduring another day of Hell-in-Shower, we both break down and confess that the water is a tad hot (in the same sense that the Holocaust was a tad unhealthy for Jews). And he fixes it. We could both have saved ourselves a lot of pain by just saying this a day earlier.

Moral of the story: never assume the other guy is less of a wimp than you are. And play pong responsibly.