The diet soda currently sprayed all over my car is pretty bad. Cat puke is bad. Cat piss is really bad, but it's never happened to me. Milk is always nasty.

What's the worst thing that's spilled in your car?

-- never (never@mostly.com), June 17, 1999

Answers

It wasn't actually a spill... more like a crawl. You see one of my favorite things in this world to eat is blue claw crabs. So I was delighted when my friend Eric asked me to go crabbing in his boat with him one summer afternoon. I was even more delighted when he said I could have ALL the crabs we caught... amazing couldn't wait to get home and eat the little suckers. Sadly Eric needed the plastic bucket we'd used to store the crabs in while on the boat, but supplied me instead with a wicker basket which I filled with crabs and then placed into the back seat of my tiny little Geo Prizm. It's important to note here that crabs are mean-rotten-crustacians that will think nothing of snapping their claws at you... they also really hate being in a basket with 35 other pissed off crabs... well picture this... I'm driving down Bay Avenue all sun tanned and feeling good about myself when I sense something moving around my bare (yes bare) feet. Thinking it's a stray cassette box I kick it with my left foot... huge - massive error. The crab that has crawled out the basket, under my front seat an onto the driver's side floor mat now decides I am a threat and clamps down (hard) on my big toe and it's pal mister little toe. The car ends on a sidewalk... the crab ends up semi crushed under the brake pedal. It took me half an hour to scrub the crab parts out of the floor mat. It wasn't until a couple days later (when the smell hit) that I discovered Mister Crab's little friend who had crawled under the passenger seat and decided to stay a while. I still eat crabs. I just don't catch 'em myself.

-- Christian Sean Rogers (spidey@espnmagazine.com), June 18, 1999.

Personally, I have never spilled anything in my car but I do have a friend that can not say the same. In desperate need to visit the bathroom but with no immediate places to stop along the road, he sees no other alternative than to solve the matter by relieving himself into a soft drink cup while he is driving. Now, again, this was not me because not only must I always keep both eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel, I am also a horrible aim in the bathroom and usually have to get down on one knee just to make sure I keep everything inside of the rim. However, even if you are an ideal aim and a skilled driver, this maneveur is still not a good idea merely because the average human bladder can hold a good deal more than 16 ounces. I could only laugh as my friend went on to describe his level of horror upon realizing that fact for himself. He should have paid more attention in biology class, I guess. In the end, he was forced to stave the waters with one hand as he held the sloshing cup between his legs and emergency stopped on the side of the road. I could only imagine the looks on passer-by's faces as they saw a guy in soiled suit pants hopping out of a BMW with one hand clamped around his privates and the other holding a cup of urine.

Men have often bragged about the ability to stand while they pee but sometimes I wonder if we might not be ready for such an easily abuseable convenience.

-- Bradley (StarJacked@Inetone.net), June 18, 1999.

It's a toss up between dog puke and Tide. Both were a real pain to get out of the interoir carepet.

-- Colleen (triggirl@yahoo.com), June 18, 1999.

Orange juice - it smells horrible after it dries up and gets really crusty.

-- Tamara (tamthor@beckett.com), June 18, 1999.

With three nearly adult sons, I've seen a lot of crud in my mini-van over the years, not to mention the car sickness episodes when they were little (in a Datsun wagon then), various pet spills of all descriptions, and school projects gone awry. Those were easy to clean up compared to the Monster Spill: one young son, while working on his pickup, had to take part of the engine to the local machine shop. He carefully loaded it into the back of the van, not remembering my admonitions for laying down many sheets of newspaper before parking the monstrosity on the carpeted floor. He thought it would be okay - he was only driving three miles to the shop, and would drive carefully so whatever foul oily liquid was inside wouldn't spill out if the part toppled over. (I'm no mechanic, so I don't know the name for the part in question.) You guessed right: at the main intersection downtown, he took a hard left and the disaster in the back of the van occurred as the result of gravitational force: over topples said part, disgorging an amazing amount of black oily crud all over the carpet in the back of the van! I found out about it the next day, when the sun shining through the back window warmed it up, and I began smelling hot oil fumes while I was driving down the road... for the record, though, it came up fairly well. I soaked as much of it up as I could with clay cat litter, then tackled the residue with an orange oil cleaner. No stain left, and I didn't have to buy any little pine trees to hang off the rear view mirror for months...

Mary Hebard, at members.xoom.com/MaryHebard

-- Mary Hebard (mahebard@oregonvos.net), June 18, 1999.

My ex broke a bottle of milk in my new car in New york several years ago, it soured and I ended up selling the car.

The next car I got my daughter did a projectile vomit from the back seat into the front, she had just had red something to drink and milk earlier that morning.

The car after that while taking a friend to the emergency room she spilled a liter of burbon in the back seat.

-- Alice (ReadingBTL@excite.com), June 18, 1999.

My virginity---never did get it back.

-- John B. (rirams@erols.com), June 18, 1999.

Well I don't drive yet, but I have spilled stuff in other people's cars. The worst had to have been the 10,000 ladybugs. I had boughten them at a garden store to release in my yard to kill aphids. Well the styrofoam container broke and all of these little lady bugs came tumbling out. Lady bugs never bothered me or her, but 10,000 anything crawling on you is enough to land a car in the ditch and 2 teenage girls is screaming hysterical fits of panic on the side of the road.

-- Liz Green (weaselchick@hotmail.com), June 19, 1999.

Shortly after we got married, I discovered, under the seat of my wife's car, a curiously light box of butter. The box was still sealed, as were the individual wrappers inside, but there was not a trace of butter. Seems a couple of years baking in the summer sun had first melted, then completely evaporated the butter. Come to think of it, I did used to get the munchies whenever I drove that car ...

-- Hal (halmot@nashville.com), June 22, 1999.

I'd have to say it's a toss-up: Yogurt or Carburator cleaner, both when I was in high school. A friend of mine had borrowed my car and his girlfriend was feeding him yogurt. They were sitting in a parking lot and she was holding the cup of yogurt under his chin and he suddenly sneezed - blowing yogurt everywhere. I was finding little bits of it for years whenever I had to do any work on the dashboard. Tha carb cleaner was a brand new gallon can of cleaner, the kind in which you dip the parts to soak them. It sat in the car while I ran into the grocery store (in 110F Southern California heat!). When I came out to the can 10 minutes later, it had popped its lid and sprayed cleaner all over. Unfortunately, they didn't have orange cleaner back then so I had to live with the smell for a long time...

-- Bruce Shipman (catfood@ix.netcom.com), June 22, 1999.

My husband had a watermelon in his car. He left it in there until it got so rotten and hot outside that it exploded. Now, THAT is nasty

-- Jen (larleroy@dave-world.net), June 22, 1999.

Well, it wasn't exactly a spill. Not technically anyway. At first it was more of an "oops - I dropped it", after several months I though of it as a lab experiment gone horribly wrong.

In high school I drove an AMC Gremlin (one of the models with the little pot-bellied gremlins on the side instead of racing stripes - foreshadowing of a career in network administration I suppose). One day I dropped half of a Mounds bar under the driver's seat. I guess at the time I was just too lazy to pick it up, maybe I just forgot about it. But a few weeks later I was prying a book out from under the seat and caught sight of it again; it hadn't changed. I became curious. Just how long could a Mounds bar survive unprotected in the wild? Longer than 8 months apparently. Although the chocolate had begun to run and melt a bit the bar itself remained untouched and essentially the same for nearly 8 months (prom was coming up so even I was forced to clean my car... although in retrospect I would imagine that in 1984 not even a clean Gremlin would have made much difference at prom). But the point is this - nothing changed that bar. That's not a shelf-life, that's a half-life!

OK, maybe that wasn't really bad, but it was memorable. Hmmm, I wonder how long a Snickers bar would last?

-- Matthew Carson (mcarson@badcatcafe.com), June 24, 1999.

A hot peach pie. I was on my way to a party, running late, and the pie was fresh out of the oven. I put it on several towels on the floor of the passenger seat. Needless to say, I took a hard stop, sending hot peaches & goo everywhere (luckily, not so hot as to burn me). After it happened I pulled over and laughed for 5 minutes. I still find dried up peach bits occasionally.

-- Jess (Jessica_Theodor@brown.edu), July 23, 1999.