Dear John II

Posted by John

Just so you all know I’m not full of shit and just making stuff up for my own enjoyment here, a friend forwarded me the following timely e-mail she received at work today (obviously names and other identifying information have been changed to protect the innocent… and the guilty):

From: Bush, Barbara 


Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 3:58 PM


To: Cheney, Richard; Rice, Condeleezza; Rumsfeld, Richard; Ashcroft, John; Alito, Samuel; Roberts, John; Norton, Gale; Paulson, Hank; Veneman, Ann; Chao, Elaine; Gonzales, Alberto; Spellings, Margaret;

Subject: Cell Phone Found

A cell phone was found in the men’s bathroom, 8^th floor.  It can be claimed from Barbara, ext. 1500.

Literally, I’m not making that e-mail up. Three days after I posted an almost identical story, that e-mail hits my friend’s in-box. In no way am I trying to suggest that I’m some sort of restroom-lost-and-found-profit or some shit; all I’m saying is, this crazy stuff doesn’t just happen to me. There is an entire subset of the population out there consisting of people who lose their cell phones in bathrooms AND there’s an entire subset consisting of people who retrieve cell phones from bathrooms AND there’s an entire subset that send out horribly humiliating yet equally hilarious e-mails to try to find the rightful owners of said cell phones.

Honestly, if you ever find a cell phone in a bathroom, especially a bathroom that you frequent like the one at work, and actually have the immunization shots to give you the confidence to pick it up off the floor/toilet seat/paper dispenser, would you not just do a quick cross reference of the sent and received text messages to see who in the hell the phone belonged to? I mean, fuck it, maybe you’re not feeling that Jack Bauer-ish, but wouldn’t you at least just call one of the numbers in the contacts list and be like, “Hello… yeah, whose phone am I calling you on right now?... George’s phone?... Cool, thanks… Oh, nothing; I was just taking a big shit in the bathroom and found this phone. Figured someone else had just been in here taking an equally huge shit, on account of the fact that the seat was still warm and stuff, and thought I’d find out who it was so I could return the phone and tell him to courtesy flush next time; It smells like a goat crawled up a bears ass, took a shit then died, then the bear shit the goat and the goat’s shit out then died itself. It’s fucking awful.”

But instead of doing that, these people find the need to notify the entire department at work, and when I say the entire department, I mean the entire department. This e-mail went out to everyone – including the women! Honestly, why did they need to copy the women on this e-mail??? Does this place have a legitimate problem with women haphazardly wandering into the men’s room and misplacing their cell phones? Poor George is probably recently divorced and trying to get back into the game when out of nowhere Barbara sends this e-mail out, effectively notifying his entire pool of potential dates that he frequently rocks the thunder mug at work¹.  How cruel is that I ask you? How cruel?

The thing is though, I bet the first thing that every single person who read this e-mail did, both men and women, was check to make sure they had their cell phone on them. “Oh, thank god – it’s not my phone.” 

Seriously, if I ever find a cell phone in any bathroom, work or otherwise, I’m going to procure a pair of latex gloves, pick it up, and call every single one of my friends from that phone and be like, “You will not believe where I’m calling you from right now!... Some dude left his cell phone in the shitter!... I am not making it up!... I know, I know; I told you this shit happens all the time… Oh yeah, it’s positively awful. It smells like a bear shit a goat…”

That e-mail inspired a lively discussion among my friend and I during which she told me about one of her coworkers who once got locked in a bathroom at work in a remote part of the building where no one could hear his cries for help or pounding on the door. If not for his cell phone, he wouldn’t have been able to notify anyone of his predicament. How terrible is that? That is literally one of my nightmares.

Now, I’m no MacGyver, but I consider myself a fairly resourceful dude, so I’m going to tell you all exactly what you need to do if you find yourself in this situation: First of all, put your cell phone away. The last thing you’re going to do is call someone to come rescue you from a bathroom. That is fucking humiliating. Instead what you do is, you pull out your wallet. You retrieve any denomination of paper money from the wallet. You go to the corner of the bathroom that the door is on because you know that’s an interior wall. You lay that paper bill flat against the wall and tight to the corner so the long edge of the bill is parallel to the ground and do so at a height equal to about mid-thigh. Pull out a pencil, pen, keys, whatever you have to make a mark on the wall at the leading edge of that bill. Then you slide the bill along the wall in a straight line, keeping it parallel to the floor so the edge that had been tight to the corner is then flush with the mark you just made on the wall. Make another mark on the wall at the leading edge of the bill again. Step back to observe your work. Put the bill away as well as the pencil, pen, keys or whatever, and mentally prepare yourself for what you’re about to do. Take a deep breath, and with all the force in your body you kick the living shit out of that wall (or inanimate shit, as the case were) with the heel of your foot right between the two marks you’ve made and you keep kicking and kicking and kicking until you’ve opened up a hole large enough to crawl out of. The next thing you do is, you walk straight out the side door of your office building, get in your car, drive home, and not until you get there do you pull out your cell phone to call your boss to say your kid was just in a fight at school and you had to rush out of the office to take care of it then you don’t go back to work until the next morning. When e-mails inevitably start flying and rumors begin swirly around the office about someone who vandalized the bathroom on the 9^th floor and put a hole through the wall and blah, blah, blah, you just play it cool. You keep your mouth shut because you’re never going to tell another living soul what happened to you ever in your life.

Now, you must be asking yourself, what’s with the dollar bill? Well, you see, in the corner of the wall there’s going to be a stud. Stud’s are set 16” apart, measured from center to center. A dollar bill is almost exactly 6” long. If you measure two dollar bill lengths you’ll confidently be kicking between two studs which gives you the best chance at breaking through a couple layers of drywall to free yourself. If you somehow measure incorrectly and kick a stud you’ve really fucked up because the last thing you want to be besides stuck in a bathroom is stuck in a bathroom with a broken foot. You will not be able to explain that to anyone.

Of course, if the walls in the bathroom are tiled, well then, you’ll have a lot of time to sit in that space and think about how you should have paid closer attention to that episode of MacGyver when he improvised a bomb out of paper towels, hand soap, urinal cakes, and toilet water because you are not kicking your way out of that bathroom.

1. I can’t possibly take credit for the term “thunder mug.” A term that brilliant needs credit where credit is due. Granted, I have a policy of never calling out anyone by name on the blog, so suffice it to say, I didn’t come up with the term, someone else did, and it’s fucking brilliant.