We had a house guest in town who had cooked a lot of good meals for us so it was time for me to represent and cook something good myself before she left. I saw there was a bag of these cute little orange peppers in the fridge from somebody's shopping trip so I chopped them up and threw them in with the garlic I was heating as base of the sauce for a chicken fricassee. It was a dish I had made many times from whatever was around.

Before tossing in the other vegetables, I tested the garlic/pepper mix to see if it was ready. It was incredibly spicy hot and I swallowed the sample convulsively while my brain was screaming for me not to. I immediately started to hiccup. Not discrete little hiccups that you figure you can defeat by swallowing a lot in quick succession. I mean bang-the-gong eruptions that get the whole body involved. The arm holding the spatula slammed down into the pan involuntarily.

The resulting splash deposited a portion of the mixture on to my face, particularly around the eyes. The sudden realization that I was not dealing with sweet peppers but something as strong as Habañero was not fast enough to stop me from wiping my eyelids. The hands were saturated with capsicum from chopping the peppers. My eyeballs were now burning.

To save my sight, I tore off my clothes as I ran to the shower. After five minutes of rinsing, the pain abated and the smoke alarm went off. I jumped out of the shower and ran back to the kitchen to turn off the stove. I got up on a stool in order to deactivate the alarm. That is when my wife came home.

She followed the trail of clothes to the Kitchen to find her naked, wet, and crying husband was standing on a stool. With an admirably reasonable tone of voice, she asked me what the hell was going on.

That is when the hiccups kicked back in.