Someone brought saltwater taffy to work yesterday and left it out so everyone could have a piece or two, and—not one to pass up an opportunity—I helped myself to several.

Well…

I might as well have been bouncing off the walls and making cattle calls after that; I was so high on sugar, I ran around the building like a maniac. I simply couldn’t sit still, and my co-workers noticed. One of them feared that I would overdose on the taffy, and as I did the jitterbug in my chair, I assured everyone that I would be fine. Then I proceeded to hum a long list of Broadway tunes at 900 beats per minute while I worked.

The upside was that I finished about three days of work in a single morning. The downside was… heck, there was no downside. By the time I crashed from my sugar high, I’d done enough that I could do whatever I wanted for a while.

The incident made me think of days past. Back when I was a student, I worked at a movie theater, and the house manager just loved to bring me sweets. Normally, I was the epitome of the perfect employee—big, beautiful, wonderful smiles for the customers, even when they were rude. I was so frickin’ charming, I made even the ill-tempered cheapskate smile.

But on sugar, man… I was unstoppable. I was the poster child for ADD.

One night, the manager actually had me manning the portable snack bar, which usually didn’t get a whole lot of customers. However, after he fed me a chocolate bar, I lured so many people from the main snack bar that I broke an all-time record. Not only that, but a total stranger asked me out as he bought a soda, and he seemed completely befuddled in the act.

I don’t know what it is. Sugar just does that to me sometimes. The manager’s theory was that it increased the amperage in my smile, but that’s just a fanciful way of looking at it. I think the truth is that I’m an alien, and sugar is a drug on my home planet.

Thank goodness it doesn’t affect me as much as it used to. I’m getting too old for that kind of thing.

Share this post: