I'm sitting across from Mads at a restaurant, and I'm going through water like I'm prepping to be a camel for an upcoming nativity scene.

The waitress gets it. She's kind. She keeps refilling my glass table-side without me asking.

And like a Pavlovian dog, every time she finishes pouring, I grab the glass and gulp down water.

Fill, grab, gulp.

Fill, grab, gulp.

Fill, grab, gulp, gasp, panic, freak out, lose all manners, spit.

That last one catches me off guard.

The water has a bite. And it smells like bacon grease. The liquid is clear as water, but I'm half-expecting deep fryer giblets that aren't there.

I take another whiff.

Jet fuel.

Maybe there's some eco-friendly experiment where bacon grease is being distilled down to refuel future hybrids.

Mads, my dining companion, takes a whiff. She's just as concerned. And not-so-secretly delighted that it isn't her drink.

We call the waitress over.

She takes a whiff.

Not a sip. A whiff.

She confirms this is indeed not any ordinary water.

She walks back to the bar area where the bottled water is stored, and I overhear her say to the bartender, "Well, why do we keep it in the same bottle as the water and right next to the water?!"

Turns out the eco-friendly future hybrid fuel experiment is also called "bacon vodka."

Yes, this is a real thing. Craft distilleries actually make it. Some bars even infuse vodka with bacon fat using a technique called fat-washing, which explains why my glass smelled like a greasy spoon diner and tasted like regret.

It's ruined vodka for me.

It's ruined bacon for me.

And it's instilled a deeply suspicious viewpoint on water now.

Pavlov's dogs had it easy. They just drooled at a bell. They didn't have to wonder whether their next sip of water was actually 80-proof pork.

The thing about trust is that it's built in tiny, repeated moments.

Fill, grab, gulp.

Fill, grab, gulp.

The waitress refilled my glass seven times before the eighth one betrayed me. That's an 87.5% success rate, which in most contexts would be excellent. But when the failure involves accidentally mainlining bacon-flavored ethanol, the math stops mattering.

I'm not built for this kind of vigilance.

I'm built for patterns. For routines. For trusting that when someone hands me a glass of water, it's water. Not a science experiment. Not a cocktail. Not some bartender's half-assed cocktail experiment.

Mads thought this was hilarious, by the way.

Of course she did. It wasn't her mouth that tasted like the love-child of a hangover and a breakfast buffet.

But she also asked a good question, "How do you not notice the smell before you drink it?"

Fair point.

Except I was mid-conversation, mid-story, mid-hand-gesture. The glass was just there. The refill was just happening. I was on autopilot.

Which is how most of us operate most of the time.

We trust the patterns. We trust the people. We trust that the systems around us are working the way they're supposed to work.

Until they don't.

And then we're left spitting bacon vodka into a nearby empty beer glass (because I'm etiquette trained like that) while our friend laughs, the waitress apologizes and the bartender scrambles to explain why flammable pork juice is stored in the same bottle, in the same spot, right next to the actual water.

I'm not mad at the waitress. She didn't know. She was just doing her job, refilling glasses, keeping customers hydrated, operating within the system she was handed.

I'm not even mad at the bartender, really. Though I do have questions about organizational systems and the wisdom of storing booze in water bottles.

Actually, I take that back. I'm a little mad at the bartender.

But mostly, I'm just recalibrating.

Because now every time someone refills my water glass, there's a tiny pause. A tiny sniff test. A tiny flicker of doubt.

Is this water?

Or is this bacon vodka?

And that's the thing about broken trust, it doesn't just ruin the moment. It ruins the pattern. It adds friction to the routine. It turns autopilot into hyper-vigilance.

Fill, grab, sniff, gulp.

Pavlov's dogs got bells and treats.

I got trust issues and a bar tab.