Headline of the Week
Abby Humphreys

Features

Headline of the Week

Weekly, the Racer X Slack thread is filled with great headlines from newspapers around the globe. So, we’ve decided to make it a weekly feature here on Exhaust.

If I were the cashier of this gas station, I’d be pissed, too. 

The Huffington Post reported that a woman was cited by police after using a microwave in a 7-Eleven to heat up urine. The police report states that Angelique Sanchez, 26, allegedly entered the gas station in Aurora, Colorado, and placed a plastic bottle into the microwave. The cashier heard a loud bang a short while later and saw a yellow liquid pouring out of the microwave. Sanchez reportedly left the store, but came back in to wipe out the rest of the liquid out of the microwave onto the floor with napkins before leaving again. 

Police were called and found Sanchez at a health clinic a half-mile away that offers drug tests for future employers. The report states that Sanchez said “she had cleaned up the mess and did not understand the problem.” When confronted with the fact that people heat up food in that microwave, Sanchez said it wasn’t real urine.

This opens the door to a few questions:

Why the microwave?

Fresh urine for drug samples comes out at body temperature, so in order to fake a drug test, the sample would have to be heated up. However, it sounds like Sanchez microwaved the capped bottle without allowing any of the pressure to escape as the liquid heated up, which caused the explosion. It takes just one minute for one cup of water to boil in a 1000-Watt microwave, so unless Sanchez’s body temperature is higher than 212 degrees Fahrenheit, she left it in for far too long to pass off as fresh.

Was it real urine? 

We don’t know for sure, but just a quick Google search for “fake urine” produces thousands of results, all mostly geared toward passing drug tests. Urine can be replicated in a lab setting, or you can make it at home with ingredients such as salt, ammonia, magnesium sulfate, calcium chloride, and urea, a byproduct of proteins breaking down in our bodies. (Regardless of how sanitary fake urine might be, I still don’t want it anywhere near my food.)

Police informed the clinic that Sanchez should not be allowed to take a urine test that day and issued her a summons for property damage. 

Here’s what this headline would look like in print: