Meet Missy: my parent’s 13 year old miniature schnauzer who hates to swim, must have her hind quarters touching another living being at all times, and has an alarmingly pitiful bark. Missy struggles with a very embarrassing personal hygiene issue which makes her ridiculously stinky. If you have a miniature schnauzer you probably know the issue I am talking about, if you don’t… I will spare you the gross details. Regardless… she smells like Butt.

One summer break back in college I spent a few months at my parents house to work on a giant fish for the City of Richmond and brought a whole load of my art and design supplies back with me to work on some projects. In school my focus was on print design, and one of my favorite exercises was printing on sheets of velum and then gluing them together with Super 77 to achieve a rad layered effect. According to 3Ms product site, Super 77 “forms strong bonds with everything from paper, cardboard, fabric and cushion foam to plastic, metal, wood and much more.” If you have ever used Super 77 you are well aware that if you get that stuff stuck on your hands, everything is sticking to your hands for the next few days.

My parents have a utility room where they keep all their odds and ends, canned goods, and fix-it tools… this is the dank area to which they banned all of my art supplies. Once I moved off to college my mother turned my room into her Floral Arrangement-Making studio, and I never again had a real place to keep any of my personal belongings. There… in the Utility room, on a shelf below a light switch sat my 24 oz can of aerosol spray adhesive… right next to a 24 oz can of aerosol doggie deodorant destined for Missy.

What happened next was inevitable… all I heard was screams from the backyard. I ran outside to find a small dog so scared and so sticky, she stood as still as a statue.

So here is the money question: How do you get Super 77 off of a 12 pound salt-and-pepper Schnauzer?

The other questions that followed included … how do you keep herself from licking it and poisoning herself? How do you keep the flys from not sticking to it as she plays outside? how do you stop the blades of grass from attaching themselves to her coat?

So I rang up 3M. The call went like this:

Me: Hi sir, I am having a problem with your product that was mistakenly used in a way not recommended by your company, do you think you could give me some tips on what to do?

3M Guy: Sure, how was this product accidentally used? did you spray your hands? your hair? clothing?

Me: A schnauzer

3M Guy: (Silence)

Me: It was an accident.

3M Guy: A dog?

Me: A small dog, that does not shed. THINGS are sticking to her.

3M guy: (Silence) (more silence) Please hold.

——Cheesy hold music——

3M Guy: Ma’m, we are working on this for you, (roaring background laughter) please hold just a little while longer….

In the end 3M held it together long enough to let me know that they recommended bathing the dog in vegetable oil. The idea of having an oily dog versus a sticky dog wasn’t that much more appealing so we just shaved her.*

The Moral of this story :
Design supplies can be dangerous stuff &
3M super 77 is some Bad Ass Sh*t.

*No animals were harmed in the making of this blog post

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Advice, Get Inspired!, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.