I told this story to my colleagues during lunch on Friday at the counseling center where I work:
Thursday on campus I was in my office for my office hours, and I was sitting there thinking about how hungry I was. About 5 minutes later, this student who looked familiar but who I didn’t know came in and said, “Do you like tacos?” I said, “Why?” and she said, “Because I bought Taco Bell for the office but nobody wanted any!” She looked really disappointed and frustrated, like she was about to cry. I said, “What do you have?” and she said she had a plain taco and some nachos. I said, “Actually, I was just thinking about how hungry I was. I’ll take a taco.” So she handed me a taco and said, “It’s still warm and everything.” She asked me if I wanted some nachos and originally I said no, but then I changed my mind and said, “Sure, I’ll have a couple.” She opened up an untouched platter of nachos loaded with meat and cheese and let me take as much as I wanted. I thanked her, and told her that what she did for her office was really nice and that I was sorry nobody appreciated her gesture of kindness. She looked a little bit happier, and I was a little bit happier to have some food in my stomach! She went on down the hall looking for other graduate students in their offices that she could share the nachos with. How random!
My colleagues’ first reaction was, “You didn’t know her? And you took food from her? What if it was poisoned?! What if it had the date rape drug in it?”
I mean, they do have a point. But it was Taco Bell, and I was hungry, and she looked kind of familiar and sad all at once. It did not seem very likely that she was trying to poison me with taco meat.
That prompted one of the staff psychologists to go to his office and get me one of these cards that you can take with you to the club and you can “smear” a drop of your beverage on it and it will indicate whether or not your drink has the date rape drug in it. He passes them out to his clients.
He said that I should have had one of these with me when I was offered the Taco Bell… maybe I could have dropped some taco meat on there to check and see if it was poisoned. Yes, that’s exactly what I should have done; smeared a slab of meat around on a piece of cardboard before eating it. Hilarious. It wouldn’t have worked anyway though—you have to wait for the circles to turn blue, and I doubt I would have been able to see that underneath all the taco seasoning.