When a Diet Coke Explodes…

… You get this:

What a lovely mess!

When I got to the studio today, I found the refrigerator door ajar about 3 inches.  Which caused me to think  “WFT?!?!?!?”

Opening the door a bit further, this was what I found.

Lovely.

In addition to the obvious mess here, a sizable quantity wound up underneath the stereo system – and the microwave.

Lovely.

But wait, there’s more…

The fun continues...

So here’s where the majority of the diet coke wound up…

Needless to say, cleaning this up was a project.

With no running water in the studio and the closest source of H2O being down the hall to the common bathroom, you can imagine how complicated it was to clean all this up – after hauling all the canned and bottled drinks down to wash them in the sink.  Everything that wasn’t a sealed drink was a complete loss.  And the freezer converted an impressive amount of humidity into about a one inch thick layer of new ice.

Lovely.

The culprit!

So this is the culprit.  The cause of all the fun and games…

You can see how the can swelled up until the seam that keeps the top fastened to the rest of the can just ripped itself loose at what must have been fairly high velocity  (I’m sure it was an impressive event).

About 45 minutes later, we had all the drinks cleaned up, the interior of the fridge as clean as possible and both stereo and microwave moved, counter cleaned – and re-populated with equipment.

Then the “defrosting the refrigerator” dance…  Removing as much ice as possible by hand, I then wedged a thick layer of ShamWow under the fridge to soak up all the soon-to-melt ice (I’ve been getting grief for these things since I bought them years ago.  But they actually work pretty well.  HA!) — and left, evidence in hand.

Exploded Coke Can

Upon arriving home, I took “the culprit” out to our screened in porch, where we have good light, and took a few photos of the badly-behaved container so I can forward them to the nice folks at Coca Cola.  Pretty, isn’t it?  And shiny, too.

You have to give their design department credit for creating a pretty, shiny, reflective (if slightly untrustworthy) container for the less caloric version of Coca Cola’s very popular cola drink.

I think they should include face shields and kevlar vests with this product.

What would have happened if I had just picked it up when it “went off”?  At a minimum I’d need a bath.  But I also might need a digit or two reattached as well…

The Culprit part deux.

So tomorrow we’ll mosey back on down to the studio to wring out the ShamWows, dry out the rest of the mess, reload the fridge and start the process of getting it back down to the correct temperature.

And then off to the store to replace the supplies that defrosted during the festivities…