The popular mood of planet Earth these days seems to be something along the lines of “How did we get here?” Indeed, everywhere you look, from politics, to the culture war that politics wants to enable right now, all the way to the advent of artificial intelligence and its bid to usurp the arts sector, the most optimal blanket response to it all is a head scratch and a raised eyebrow.
As such, that response is one that we should all have neatly tucked away amongst our most reliable reflexes, so we should be well-equipped to take in just about any event that throws itself at us by now. And yet…
As you can see from the 13-second video above from TikTok‘s @paggia_elmat, the grocery store that our protagonist presumably frequents was recently subject to an incident involving olive oil. The hook? This olive oil incident is bigger than most of our futures.
Putting aside the fact that that’s an obscene amount of olive oil for a grocery store to be carrying, what was the spark for such a spill? Even if that much olive oil did apparently exist within the walls of this supermarket, how on Earth did this many containers manage to spill? It’s possible, of course, that they have olive oil on tap and the mechanism simply got punctured, but having olive oil on tap is itself worthy of the “How did we get here?” response.
This incident, of course, was probably a nightmare for the staff and management at the store (barring those who were very eager to go home that day), as it probably took a fair shake of time and money to remedy. Had the floors not been tiled, however, this could have been an at least marginal blessing in disguise. One adventurous user of Lifehack.com sought to do some field research in the realm of olive oil’s cleaning abilities and found that stainless steel, leather, and certain woods were partial to the buffing abilities of olive oil as a cleaner. So, while we’re still probably a decade or two away from stainless steel and/or leather floors, a wooden floor would have been able to handle this slippery situation better than the tiles presumably did.
The store is lucky, of course, that this occurred during the tail-end of summer rather than the middle. Had this disaster reared its head on the wrong sunny day, this supermarket could have turned into a mass pressure cooker, tasking its workers and patrons with the biggest game of The Floor Is Lava in recent history (the physics of such a statement are of course not true, but as a hypothetical, it’s an entertaining thought).