This is kind of gross, so don’t read just before dinner.
This morning I entered the men’s room near my office to find the toilet was backed up. I flushed it and it started overflowing. So I asked Michelle to call maintenance, and then headed downstairs to use the men’s room on the fourth floor. The need was pressing.
There was graffiti of the wall of the stall:
Where the cute niggaz who get down?
and other stuff in the same vein.
When I was finished, I stood up, turned to flush, and was surprised to see the Official University Seal floating in the bowl. What the hell? Had someone thrown a brochure in the toilet and I hadn’t noticed when I came in? And wasn’t this a flagrant violation of the Official University Policy regarding the use of the seal?
Then I recognized it and realized what had happened. Somehow, as I pulled my pants up, my little calendar book must have flipped out of my hip pocket and landed in the toilet bowl.
This might seem like a quandary, but really I had no choice. I have a lot of valuable information in that little book — appointments and phone numbers and the like. I’d be lost without it.
So I retrieved it and rinsed it off. It took several rinses before all the fecal matter was off. (Does “fecal matter” sound more or less gross than “pieces of shit”?) Then I laid it out to dry on some paper towels on the floor of my office.
Needless to say I washed my hands repeatedly with lots of soap and hot water. Michelle directed me to the rubber gloves and disinfectant in our first aid kit.
Luckily I have a spare calendar book somewhere. I plan to copy the relevant information into it tomorrow and throw this thing away.
Is it just me, or does shit like this happen to other people?
No, but then again I don’t have a little calendar book.
File under: Meat Poetry!
how did this not come up at the webmeeting?
When I was in Xi’an, squatting over a hole-in-the-ground toilet near a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, I suddenly had a flashback to what had happened to my beloved black knit hat — it had fallen down a similar, but more stinky and crap-filled hole toilet near the Stone Forest, Yunnan. I just left it there, though, and went bareheaded for the rest of the trip. So, yes, I’ve had an experience like that. My friend told me a much worse story, about a guy who dropped his whole wallet in a hole toilet and had to reach down and fish it out.
Don’t you mean “Does feces like this happen to other people?”
In the Army, in basic training, the latrines are these enormous pits with bathroom facilities built over them. When the pit’s full, the latrine’s used up. Needless to say, just taking a leak can be a naseuating experience. Of course, in basic training, you bring your M-16 with you everywhere–never let it out of sight. The drill sergeants would say if you drop your M-16 in the latrine, they’d give you a snorkle and send you down after it. Fortunately, that never happened to me. (It never happened to anyone else in my unit, for that matter. Though I wouldn’t have minded seeing a few people try.) I was about 60% sure the drill sergeants were exaggerating, but I wasn’t sure. And I sure didn’t want to risk it.