1. Scooping chili up off the carpet with a clipboard actually works really well.
In the scene on The Office where Kevin spills his famous chili, he attempts to scoop it up off of the carpet with a clipboard, but immediately abandons that method in favor of trying to scoop it up with a mesh paper tray. It’s almost as if the writers of the show had no experience with cleaning up chili spills with clipboards in the real world whatsoever. When you dump a shitload of chili all over the floor, a clipboard actually works as well as anything else to scoop it up. It’s flat, so you can get underneath a lot of chili at once, and it’s rigid enough to push it down into the carpet and sort of squeegee out all of the chili that’s soaked into the fibers. Had the scene been depicted accurately, it would have shown Kevin giving an impressed nod the second he started scraping the chili up with the clipboard and then cleaning it up with relative ease. Towards the end the cardboard in the clipboard would start to get soggy and get pretty floppy, but it would still get the job done. Nice try, The Office.
2. If the pot of chili is hot enough to need oven mitts to carry it, you’re gonna need to keep the oven mitts on to clean it up.
In what world is a huge pot of chili so hot that you need oven mitts to carry it, but then the second you spill it all over the floor you can clean it up with your bare hands? A world filled with bullshit, that’s where. The second that Kevin spills his chili he removes his oven mitts to start cleaning it up, with no sign that his hands are being horribly burned by the piping hot chili. Uh, if you’ve ever actually spilled chili everywhere, you’ve burned the fuck out of your hands if you tried to clean it up without wearing oven mitts. Another pro tip: The mitts help soak up any chili that your clipboard misses, so the cleanup is faster. No one expects TV to be perfect, but come on, The Office. Do your homework.
3. When you begin wallowing in your spilled chili in shame, it doesn’t cut away to the opening credits.
In the Hollywood, Disney-fied version of a big chili spill shown on The Office, Kevin is shown pathetically wallowing in shame while covered in chili for only a few seconds before it cuts away to the show’s opening credit sequence. In the real world, there’s nothing to cut away to. You’re just down there on the ground, soaked in hot chili that you slaved over all night and your own humiliation. The tears aren’t generated by some actor’s trick using Vicks VapoRub, the tears are real. The realest tears you’ve cried. You aren’t about to get the chili cleaned off of you by a beautiful young makeup artist while a director congratulates you on a job well done. You’re someone who has hit rock bottom with no one there to help you back up.
4. Phyllis is there.
The chili-spilling scene on The Office takes place before anyone else has arrived to work, but when you actually spill chili in real life, Phyllis is there. She doesn’t laugh or mock you when you spill the chili, but she doesn’t help you out, either. She just sits there several feet away from the scene with her lips pursed and eyebrows slightly raised as you writhe on the floor covered in scalding tomato sauce and ground beef. Even if you’re able to get the chili all cleaned up before anyone else gets there, Phyllis saw everything. She knows. And that’s one of the most crucial things that The Office gets wrong about what it’s like when this happens for real.
5. You and Phyllis silently eat all the chili off the floor.
Not only did the chili scene on The Office not include Phyllis being there, but they didn’t show her walk up to the chili spill and start digging in like it happens in real life, either. In the real world, once Phyllis breaks the seal and demonstrates that the chili is perfectly edible despite being all over the carpet and your slacks, you join her in the feast. Neither one of you says anything, you just eat the six gallons of spilled chili with your oven-mitted hands like pigs feeding from a trough. There’s a yin and a yang to spilling chili everywhere, and while the scene of Kevin spilling his chili is a classic TV moment, The Office could have tried harder to capture the many nuances of what it’s really like.
