Our office building has some of the worst restrooms in Houston. I feel qualified to say this because I have worked in and visited countless office buildings around our fine city, and I've used more unfamiliar restrooms than I care to remember. To start with, we're on the first floor, which of course has the busiest restroom, which of course has only two stalls instead of three like all the other floors. To add insult to injury, the entry doors have coded locks (also only on this floor), and the codes are such that you have to press two of the numbers at the exact same time, which is always fun to deal with when you're in a hurry to heed nature's call.

Once you finally get inside, these restrooms suffer from severe flaws in design and execution. The stalls have giant round toilet paper dispensers that take up half the space -- they wouldn't if they were simply hung on the opposite wall -- and get in the way so badly that some woman has taken out her frustration on my usual crapper by scooting the toilet itself over, breaking the caulk seal between toilet and floor and causing leakage. As a result, the property manager has had that toilet moved all the way back against the wall, so now it makes a nice loud banging noise on the tile anytime you sit or shift your weight. (The men's room is on the other side of that wall... I wonder what they think is going on in there!)

Of course the toilet paper is the thinnest one-ply ever on gigantic rolls so it's unnecessarily difficult to pull an adequate amount at any given time. Naturally, the janitors also often refill the rolls facing the wrong way so it's even harder to get a decent wad. And the sink situation is even worse: there are two sinks, one soap and one paper towel dispenser, which would be sufficient except that they're laid out in such a way that if two people are trying to use the sinks at the same time, you have to do a spinning dance move or else drip over each other's backs to get to either dispenser.

Additionally, these restrooms have motion-activated automatic lights, so if your #2 business takes more than about five minutes, you're suddenly s(h)itting in absolute darkness.

On top of all that, our awesome building is constantly having plumbing problems, whether resulting directly from idiocy in the restroom (more on that later) or from the ancient piping and bad soil conditions underground. The latter often results in some truly memorable aromas drifting up through the floor drains. Occasionally the property manager has to turn the building water off completely to have problems repaired, and usually they will send out a notice to tenants beforehand. Usually...

So one morning last week, it was still pretty early when my IBS kicked in at the office. I was working at my desk like a good little automaton when the pain came: that sharp stabbing sensation in the lower left quadrant that lets me know it's time to go, and go quickly. I contemplated running up one floor to the roomier and quieter restroom there, but frankly when an attack like this one hits, I'm lucky to make it to the nearest facility. (Not to mention running itself is made very difficult.)

After grappling with the stubborn door code, I was beyond relieved to find myself in the restroom alone to unleash freely the fury broiling in my bowels. I careened into the last stall and closed and locked the door and grabbed some toilet paper and pre-wiped the seat and unbuttoned and unzipped and dropped my drawers and sat down, all in one continuous flowing motion. And then my colon started a continuous flowing motion of its own, disgorging half a day's worth of digestive flotsam replete with wet, juicy, farty pockets for added odor and sound effects.

While I profess Shameless Shitterhood, I do at least try to spare others from experiencing all that an IBS attack has to offer. So with the cessation of Mega-Dump Part One, I reached behind to perform the perfunctory courtesy flush. "Clink" went the flush handle. Great. So I cleaned myself, stood up and turned around to take the tank topper off and fix the flusher.

Only there was no water in the tank. That's when I realized that the property manager must have finally gotten sick of the sewer smell problem and turned off the building water to work on it. Thanks for the NOTICE!!!

Luckily I had brought in a tiny canister of air freshener a coworker had given me for Xmas... perfect for just such an occasion as I was forced to finish without the benefit of courtesy flushing to maintain decorum. Also luckily, no one else came in to use the other stall because, like I said, I don't like sharing my IBS attacks with others. Call me selfish.

Once finished, I went to find out when the water would be turned back on, and that was when I discovered that property manager time is way different than regular time. Apparently "a few minutes" to them is actually about three hours to the rest of us. I discovered this because I maintained a sort of vigil so I could get the icky bowl flushed before anyone else was scarred for life by seeing what I had left behind. Sadly I was too late to spare the janitor lady, who was coming back in with a plunger as I was leaving after the flush.

I also discovered during this comedy of errors that stress has the opposite effect on my IBS than most others: the attack had stopped at the sound of clink. I knew there was no way I was actually finished -- there's almost always a Part Two, and sometimes a Part Three or even Four -- and I could feel there was more to come, but for the time being everything was groovy. At least until two days later, when it was my turn to cause a problem.

The scene: same restroom, same stall, only this time everything was working as it should, toilet-wise. Thank goodness, because this next attack was particularly heinous in its assault of four of the five senses -- it felt, sounded, smelled and looked absolutely horrifying. It was almost inhuman. Needless to say, it was a bad time all around, with several courtesy flushes, lots of cramping and groaning from the pain, and lots of praying there would be no victims -- I mean visitors -- with whom to share the experience.

Toward the end of this lovely interlude, I started to worry that I was coming up on the five-minute mark for the lights, and I'm sure it doesn't need explaining that cleaning up a messy movement is hard enough without having to maneuver in the dark, right? So I flushed again, then halfway stood up to open the door, lean out a little and wave my arm to reactivate the motion sensor. As I moved back to be re-seated and finish the cleanup process, I knocked my handy little canister of air freshener off the toilet paper dispenser with my elbow, right into the toilet, just as it was finishing flushing.

Now, there really wasn't anything in the bowl at that time to stop me from immediately going after the canister, but honestly I didn't think for one second it would actually go down. I was wrong. It spun around once and then shot straight into the hole -- disappeared completely from view, in fact -- at which time I went after it. This of course is the exact moment when someone else came into the restroom, just as I'm standing in the next stall with my feet facing the wrong way, pants down around my ankles, still brown around the down-under, clumsily splashing my hand into the bowl and down the hole, grasping at nothing because the canister is already gone.

But not gone enough, apparently. I crossed my fingers and flushed again... No go. Or at least it was vvvveeeerrrryyyy sluggish, so not only had I done something so stupid in the first place, but now I felt guilty about it and had to go tell the property manager so they could call a plumber. But first, I had to finish cleaning my backside. Lucky for me, no one else came in after the first lady left because I couldn't perform the necessary cleanup with a toilet that wouldn't flush right, so I had to do the pants-at-half-mast-dance over to the other stall to finish up, hoping to not hear anyone coming in the door while I was out and about.

POSTSCRIPT:
After a solid month of playing around with it themselves instead of calling a professional when I reported it, the property manager has now replaced the toilet... mostly. The new toilet is huge -- kinda like an over-stuffed chair -- with a freakishly large round bowl and a ginormous tank. They even repositioned it back away from the wall again. Then, they put the same old seat back on it. (Do toilets not come with a seat when you buy them??)

So now when you sit on the new toilet with the old seat, the seat part slides to one side because it's too small for the bowl, and you get that unpleasantly cold shock from the underside of your thigh touching the rim. But hey, at least it flushes like a champ!