Dear John

Posted by John

I apologize for the brief hiatus.

I spend a lot of time talking about humorous incidents that occur in public restrooms. I believe strongly that some of the funniest things in life happen in the lou, though truthfully I never go into one seeking such funniness. In all honesty I would avoid pubic bathrooms at every possible cost if I could, but that’s just not practical.  So every time I do enter one I’m always dreading what may unfold, even if it turns out to be a hilarious story I can retell for years to come.

Sometimes you don’t even need to be present to get a laugh out of someone’s bathroom experience and sometimes the whole event seems rather innocuous at first glance. For instance, just the other week the main administrative assistant for my division sent out an e-mail that was like, “So-and-so left their cell phone in the 12^th floor men’s restroom this afternoon. If you happen to have picked it up, please return it.” Your first thought after reading that is to wonder if you were ever in that bathroom and happened to see the cell phone and your second thought is to hope that so-and-so is able to find his phone. But then if you spend some more time thinking about it, you realize how hilarious this is. First of all, the guy was clearly taking a monster deuce whilst texting or playing games on his phone, set the phone down to finish up his business and forgot to pick it up again. None of that is stated in the e-mail, but it is implied. If I happened to lose my cell phone in the bathroom at work (or any bathroom really) the last thing I would do is send out a mass e-mail looking for the finder of my phone for three reasons: 1. I would be admitting to the entire company that I sometimes take such huge shits in the bathroom that I become disoriented and prone to misplacing my personal possessions as a result; 2. Even if that wasn’t the case, then the only other explanation is the phone slipped out of my pocket somehow which really just means that it spent some indeterminate amount of time resting on the floor of a disgusting bathroom and the last thing I want is to retrieve that phone and start placing it near my ear, eyes, and mouth to make phone calls; 3) The person who found the phone was also likely taking a shit at some point after I was taking a shit so that’s at least two shits within the immediate vicinity of my phone and that’s two shits too many that are too close. For me that phone is as good as lost and my next stop is the Verizon store to get a new one.

Other times you’re inescapably present for the funny awkwardness in a public lav. Just today I had to go up to a different floor than the one I work on to go through several filing cabinets of archived materials to find some information on a project the firm did a number of years ago. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily like looking for a needle in a haystack but I would say it was a lot like looking for a turd in a pile of shit. It seems that “archiving” is just a term the company uses to refer to things they’d rather throw away but legally can’t so it just goes into a poorly organized repository that we try to pretend isn’t there. Really these files are not unlike that girlfriend we had in high school that was fine to date during the school year but once the summer rolled around she was just kind of old news but we didn’t have the balls to really dump her so we just tried to ambiguously get rid of her by saying we wanted to reset the relationship to the point when we first started to get to know one another but she didn’t really get the hint so she just kind of lingered around for three months until she got fed up with us ignoring her and finally moved on to some other relationship that was, quite frankly, a step down from us.

Actually, I’m not sure how that is remotely related to archiving files at work but I appreciate the opportunity to kind of get that out; it was rather therapeutic. I’m actually also not sure how I got so far away from my original discussion about going to the bathroom. Basically I had to go to another floor in the building to dig through a pile of shit looking for a turd and during that long and drawn out process I ended really, really having to take a whiz. The thing is, I can generally go hours upon hours without using the bathroom. I do it all the time when I’m working on the house or driving nonstop for 6 or 8 hours at a time. It’s just that when I really get into something, the absolute last thing on my mind is draining the ol’ bladder. But for some godforsaken reason, the second I get into something that is the least bit outside my normal comfort zone, I have to piss like a racehorse instantly. If I’m walking into a meeting, I have to pee right away. If I’m wandering around a new city, I’m pissing like every 4 minutes. If I get on an airplane I could really go for a catheter in lieu of a barf bag. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve been this way my entire life. When I was a kid I absolutely loved to play games like hide-and-seek, flashlight tag, or capture the flag – games that required stealth, patience, and deception. Without fail though, whenever I was playing those games the second I got into my hiding spot it’s like I’d just chugged 117 ounces of Caprice Sun – my bladder would instantly be on the verge of bursting. It didn’t matter if I had the best goddamn hiding spot in the entire world; I’d be there doing the pee-pee dance trying my hardest not to piss my pants. I can tell you, the only thing worse than being caught in a game of flashlight tag is getting caught in a game of flashlight tag taking a piss on the side of your neighbor’s shed behind their wood pile because you have the bladder of a fucking prairie dog.

I’m pretty sure that the absolute first test anyone goes through to become a sniper is a game of flashlight tag. If you don’t instantly piss yourself you pass onto the next phase where they install a shut-off valve in your urethra and systematically turn your bladder into a pressurized storage tank for urine. I don’t see any other way for them to do it. You make me into sniper and you better send me into the wilderness with like 12 empty Gatorade bottles because that’s the only way I’m killing my target without pissing my pants every few minutes.

Anyway, again the whole point of my story was that I had to go to some other unfamiliar floor to search through a bunch of documents and the second I got there I had to pee but if there’s anything worse than going into a restroom it’s going into a strange restroom so I was loath to acquiesce to the pressure. Unfortunately eventually I had to.

So I went into a strange bathroom on an unfamiliar floor to take care of business. The thing about the building I work in is, the plumbing in the place absolutely blows. There’s constantly backups or overflows and whatever else because it was likely designed poorly, installed improperly, and overused. So when I walked in I found the flush valve on one of the two urinals was stuck so it was just sucking water down the drain non-stop. Normally I wouldn’t even bother with something like that but lately if there’s anything I hate more than people that don’t recycle it’s people that waste water and if there’s anything I hate more than people that don’t conserve water it’s people that are just conservative. Normally when a flush valve on a urinal is stuck you just have to give the handle a good whack to get it to un-stick and stop running. So I did that but in this case the plumbing was so shoddy that when I whacked the flush valve that was stuck it did in fact come unstuck but somehow caused a pressure imbalance in the other urinal so that it started to flow constantly instead. So I went over to that one, gave it a good whack to free it up and wouldn’t you know it, the exact same thing happened to the original urinal and caused it to start flowing constantly. That really started to properly piss me off but I was committed to solving the problem so I stepped back to think for a second and decided maybe the solution was to give both flush valves a good whack at exactly the same time. So I did.

Now, I can tell you with certainty that if you ever find yourself in this situation, hitting both flush valves really hard at the same time will solve the problem. I can also tell you with complete certainty that it is not possible to explain to someone who has just walked into the bathroom at the exact moment that you are attempting to flush two urinals that are side by side at precisely the same time by karate chopping their respective flush valves what in the fuck you are doing.

I would describe the look on the dude’s face as something similar to what I would expect if he had just walked in on his wife having an affair with an avatar. I could quite figuratively see the wheels in his head turning as he thought, “What in the fuck is going on in here???”

I can only imaging the look on my face was similar to what I would expect if Sarah Palin were caught reading Dostoevsky while playing chess, sipping cognac, and listening to NPR. “I would like to explain… but I can’t.”

The moral of the story is, none of this would have happened if I’d enrolled in sniper school like I wanted to after high school. It probably also wouldn’t have happened if I’d just dumped that girl outright instead of letting her linger around all summer. What a waste of time that was.