Here’s something to never say at a job interview: “Can we pop by an emergency room?”

But it’s a question Josh Bishop had to ask. The 22-year-old skier had a rubber earbud lodged in his right lobe and it hurt like hell.

“The thing was fully stuck in there,” he says. “I couldn’t see it at all when I was looking at my ear in the mirror. But if I pressed that space between my jaw and lymph nodes, I could feel the rubber compressing.”

You may be asking how this happens to someone. Valid question. This is how: When you get a last-minute invite to interview for the team manager position at Armada Skis, and you fly from Colorado to California in a snowstorm, and you put together a presentation for the interview, and your computer crashes, and you put together the presentation again very late at night, it’s easy to fall asleep with headphones in your ears. And when you fall asleep with headphones in your ears, it’s easy for a little rubber casing to detach and lodge itself inside your head…

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