Last night I ate a TV dinner. It was a tasty TV dinner but nothing special. Twenty minutes after I pitched the empty container in the trash, I felt a mysterious rumbling in my gut.

I was at work, in the middle of a conversation with a customer, when it hit. No, not explosive diarrhea. Instead it was a sharp, stabbing pain like I had swallowed a knife that had somehow come to life and was trying to escape my stomach by jumping up and down on a pogo stick (also presumably swallowed, or maybe the knife had brought it along).

With only two hours left in my shift I was determined to make it through to the end. Why waste a perfectly good "Get Out of Work Free" card on intense abominable pain? When a coworker finally asked, "Why are you clutching your stomach? Are you in the middle of committing seppuku?" I decided to call it a night.

OK, so no one asked me if I was committing seppuku. But I was clutching my stomach and moaning like a dying cow, much to the indifference of my fellow coworkers.

So I went home and spent the next four hours quietly praying for death in front of the special edition version of Return of the King. As Frodo endures ten previously unseen minutes of excrutiating agony as he makes his way across the realm of Mordor, I couldn't help but think to myself, "Hey, that friggin' hobbit's got it easy. Sure he's crawling around on the edge of a volcano with no water and no shoes, burdened by the most evil piece of jewelery ever forged, but at least his tummy doesn't hurt."

Maybe I should have put on Aliens instead.