Do The Math

456 cough drops sounds like a lot. What am I going to do with all those cough drops, you might be thinking? And we’re here to tell you: a lot. But they won’t last nearly as long as you think. Just look how quickly they go:

• Go to one movie with a mild cough, 2 cough drops.
• Sneak into a second movie, 2 more cough drops.
• Third movie, 2 more cough drops.
• Repeat this the next day, 6 cough drops.
• Need an excuse not to talk at the work meeting, 2 cough drops.
• Need an excuse not to talk to your boss on the way to elevator after the work meeting, 1 cough drop.
• Three more meetings this week, another 9 cough drops.
• Let out an extremely loud cough and then shove 5 cough drops into your mouth on the bus to avoid anyone sitting next to you, to and from work, each day for a whole work week, 50 cough drops.
• Fun idea for some winter weekend fun, the cough drop snowman: 1 cough drop for each eye (2), 1 cough drop nose, 5 cough drops in the smile, 4 cough drop buttons down his torso, a total of 12 cough drops.
• Cough drop snowman is a family man: 1 cough drop spouse, 2 cough drop children, 36 cough drops needed.

At this point, we’ve used 122 cough drops in just about a week. Let’s keep going:

• Still doing your 5-cough-drop-each-bus-trip trick to get your own seat, but now you’ve gotten so used to them you you’ve built up a dependency, meaning you have one cough drop hour during work, so 18 per day, 90 per work week.
• To get clean, perform a joke: walk up to strangers and say, “Hey, why do they call them cough drops?” When they say “I don’t know, why?” you drop a handful of cough drops (~4); repeat this joke at least twice each day, even days off, 56 cough drops.
• Put out a bowl of cough drops on your desk (“A more thoughtful alternative to candy, especially this time of year,” you say to your coworkers), filled with 20 cough drops.
• Spread a cold around the office, because the bowl of cough drops are too tempting, thus requiring you to replenish the bowl twice before the weekend, 40 more cough drops.
• Four more meetings this week, with four more trips to elevator after, 12 cough drops.
• Snowman’s parents have come to visit, as well as his in-laws, and also this brother’s family, 8 more snowmen, 96 cough drops.
• A stroke of genius, throat-soothing sugar cookies: simply make sugar cookies, but then, instead of sugar on top, use crushed up cough drops (and maybe incorporate the syrup center into the dough), let’s say 20 of them?

OMG! That’s it! We’re out of cough drops and it’s barely even been two weeks. Although, maybe you placed three orders, meaning you’d have 1,368 cough drops…

[Editor’s note: at this point, the copywriter began openly weeping and refused to go on]