I work at a local grocery store in a suburban area. You would think that it would be pretty quiet and uninteresting, but you'd be wrong. Because sometimes eventful... shit takes place.
For the first three years of my career at this grocery store, I was a bagger. In this store, baggers are also expected to clean bathrooms, among countless other responsibilities. In the three years I bagged and cleaned, I saw some things. Horrible things. Things that really shouldn't be talked about. But that's what a site like this is for.
The sight of excessive blood in a women's toilet is something that doesn't surprise me any more. I've seen more solitary turds on a floor than I care to share. But the one mess that stands out in particular in my mind is the one I must share with you all. It was a Thursday, I believe. Mid-afternoon. We were short of staff, which is usual on weekday mornings and afternoons, because a lot of our employees were high schoolers and college students like myself. I was informed by my boss that there was a brown mess in the back men's bathroom that needed to be dealt with, pronto.
At this point I thought I had seen pretty much everything there as to see in a public bathroom. I realize now that I could have never been prepared for what I was about to deal with. I opened the door and left it ajar with a "Caution: wet floor" sign and searched the scene. There was a lone turd on the far end of the bathroom floor, just inside door of the handicap stall. I thought nothing of it, brushing it off as the usual casualty of war with public bathrooms.
I went inside the stall and saw that the toilet was murky brown and clogged. This annoyed me because I now had two tasks to perform, instead of just dealing with a stranger's solitary turd. I decided that I should deal with the turd on the floor before tackling that toilet problem.
I had it all planned out. I went to the meat department and got the hose they use to clean the floors at the end of the night. I attached the hose to a faucet just down the hallway from the bathroom. I turned the faucet on and began to spray the turd in hopes of breaking it down into a liquid state that would go down the drain in the center of the bathroom floor. Thank God for those things -- I had never had to pick a turd up before and wasn't about to start that day. Besides, I had time to kill because it was a slow day.
After about a minute-and-a-half of spraying, the turd was a swirling brown liquid going down the drain. But what I didn't factor into the whole equation was that the faucet I attached the hose to was a hot water faucet. The hot water created A LOT of steam, which escaped from the bathroom and filled the entire back end of the store with a haze of a shit smell. And for those of you who know what heat can do to a smelly situation, you can imagine the stench that filled the store.
As for me, I was disoriented in the bathroom for a few minutes, engulfed in what cannot be explained as anything else but a shit sauna. I thought I was going to choke to death on the smell.
But the story doesn't end there, my friends. Remember the clogged toilet I mentioned?
After the cloud of stench lifted, I investigated the toilet situation. Anyone who deals with a lot of clogged toilets would know that the best way to begin unclogging a toilet is to flush it. As crazy as that sounds, it's not. We call it a test flush. You see, the murky water is full of fecal sentiment that weighs more than water; and when you flush, the poop powder that fills the water can bypass by whatever is obstructing the toilet and thus give you a clearer view of what's going on down there. So who's crazy now?
So I performed the test flush, but it didn't work well as I'd hoped. There was still too much brown stuff in there for me to see what was going on, and the toilet was REALLY clogged, because it overflowed onto the floor, completely undoing all I had done with the floor prior to that moment. A few turds spilled out and were making a beeline to the drain as I scampered out of their way.
I knew I was going to need some back-up, so I called my co-worker, Matt, to come check this toilet out.
When we opened the bathroom door, more feces had poured onto the floor. Matt wanted to leave. But I insisted he stay. I got the plunger and started poking around. I saw that there was a lot of toilet paper in the bowl, so I started plunging. After plunging for nearly five minutes, the toilet was still clogged, but the picture was a little clearer down there. There appeared to be something else in the toilet bowl. Something white and larger than wadded-up toilet paper.
I had Matt grab the toilet brush wand, and together we attempted to tweeze the foreign object from the toilet. We got a hold of it and raised it about two feet above the bowl before we realized what it was: a pair of white XXXL boxer-briefs. Turds were coming out of it legs, and at that moment we both started shouting, because the shorts returned to the water like a great fish made of cotton. I darted to the next stall because I was sure I was going to barf and I didn't want to create another mess.
For an awkward ninety seconds, Matt and I were both dry-heaving at the same time in reaction to what we saw. The soiled boxer-briefs made it easy to see what had happened here. Someone came in to leave a major deposit but didn't make it in time. The premiere turd must have snaked out of his pants leg onto the floor as he shit himself right then and there in the stall before getting his belt undone. The guy then decided to cut his losses, finish his shit on the toilet, and throw the underwear in there for good measure.
We regained our focus, tweezed the soiled shorts out, and put them in a trash bag. After that, the toilet flushed as normal, and I engulfed the bathroom in a final shit sauna to clean up the new mess. To this day, I still haven't seen a bathroom mess top that experience. Maybe because that was the last time I ever cleaned the bathroom at work. After that experience, I immediately went to the service desk and told my boss that that's the last time I deal with a stranger's shit. I had been around long enough and had paid my dues by cleaning up more than my fair share of poop. It was time for some of the newbies to join in on the fun.
And that's what happened. There have been a few smaller-scale occurrences in that bathroom, and the other coworkers always now come to me to explain the proper technique to clean them up. That means that my tale has been passed down from bagger to bagger, and is now one of those store legends that people probably think is a lie at first -- until they are faced with a similar situation.
Moral of the story: if you shit yourself in a public bathroom, don't try to flush your underwear. It won't go down. So save everyone else the trouble and the emotional scars, and just throw the shorts in the garbage.
