Naked and Afraid: The Bizarre Journey From Clean Room to Foreman's Office

It was a Thursday, an ordinary Thursday (if you ignore the tiny fact about me being stark nude, straddling a rolling chair with a three-gallon water jug clutched in my arms and rolling smoothly through a clean room environment). The scene was as surreal as a deep-fried Salvador Dali painting, with the sterile white backdrop of the room only serving to contrast my boldness.

As I whizzed past hooded figures bustled around me, swathed in decontaminated white gowns, their gloved hands managing to achieve a perfect hyperventilating jazz hands routine as they gaped at my audacious appearance. Some squinted at me, their faces scrunched up like old trees, squirming within their gowns, perhaps wondering if they had mistakenly inhaled some hallucinogenic substance.

Do you know the feeling when you're the only naked person holding a jug in a clean room? Somewhere between winning an invisible surf-off and being the hero of a nonexistent, workplace comic strip. Let's say it leans more towards the exhilarating and slightly crunchy.

Then, like a beacon of sanity in my little circus of absurdity, a foreman appeared. A stout lady with a clipboard in hand who looked like she ate impossible scenarios like this for breakfast. Through my blurry dance of chaotic fun, her voice piped up, "Follow me!" Pfft. Clearly, she hadn't realized I was driving without a steering wheel.

Nevertheless, I set my coordinates to ‘Follow the Foreman’ mode, successfully bumping into only a handful of equipment and two rather surprised PhD holders before we arrived at her office. The hullabaloo of the clean room gave way to the stern sterility of her modest cubicle.

All the while, piping through the sterilized ether, the melodramatic notes of Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' ebbed and flowed - the love anthem of the Titanic serenading my iceberg of a situation. If you ever wanted to know what it's like to wrap your naked, jug-holding escapade in a titanic shroud of irony, this was it. Every ‘near’ echoed around the room, every ‘far’ bounced off the water jug, adding to the ‘wherever you are’ of this whole bizarre experience.

In retrospect, you might think this was a terrible set of circumstances, a dreadful Thursday, but let me say this – those who haven't zoomed naked through a clean room, clutching a jug of water and serenaded by Celine Dion, simply haven’t lived. Imagine rolling into the weekend, water jug in hand, Celine Dion in your ears, and nothing but the wind on your bare skin.

After all, isn’t life but a series of rolling chair moments, water jugs of goals to balance, and the occasional foreman to guide the way? The nudity is optional, but highly recommended.