It had been a long day. My helper Matty and I had spent the day installing an alarm in an old shit-box of a house, which isn't uncommon. It's the nature of the business, I suppose. We do a lot of subcontracting work and most the jobs we do are the freebies all the big alarm companies give out. But work is work.
The crawl space -- that is, the space underneath the home -- of this particular house was rather inhospitable. Very tight and extremely nasty. Myself being of all two-hundred-and-twenty pounds wasn't about to go in there. In fact, since I own the company, there was nary a shot in hell that I would go in there anyway.
Matty shined his Maglight in and just gave me that "I really wish I had a gun so I could shoot you in the asshole" look. (Bonus points to anyone who a] knows what movie getting shot in the asshole is from and b] what is shooting someone in the asshole is called.) But he knew that as the helper, it was his duty to crawl his little boney ass under there and not so much as make a peep about. And he did just that.
"I really deserve hazard pay for this shit," he said, as he military-crawled underneath some ductwork.
"And to think I fired you last week, and here you are today," I replied. "Should have taken that job at Wal-Mark, fucko."
We started wiring up the house as we normally would. Matty was crawling around under the house, running the wires and then handing them out to me. All was progressing nicely until Matty had a problem. I dropped down a wire to Matty and screamed down for him to pull. Nothing happened. I screamed three more times and still nothing. Fearing that Matty had been devoured by a rabid raccoon (he's almost small enough), I went outside and peered my head into the crawl space.
"'The fuck are you doing down here?? Get in the game!!"
Still, no response from Matty. So I crawled in there. And I saw Matty's shoes.
I grabbed his leg. "Dude, what are you doing? I've been calling your stupid ass for like ten minutes. I was kinda hoping you were dead."
He rolled himself over with a whimper and sneered back at me: "I shit my fucken' pants, you asshole. I was trying to get out of here to get to the toilet and I got scared by a big spider and shit myself! What am I going to do?"
"You're sure as shit not getting in my truck!!"
Ever so gingerly, he traversed the labyrinth of this underground hellhole, bitching the whole time. "Fucken' hate this job, fucken' hate you, fucken' shit my pants." I just had to laugh because, well, it was pretty damn funny from my point of view.
Matty went into the house and cleaned himself up as best he could. The underwear, fortunately, was the only casualty of this battle. In true gladiator style, Matty sacked up and finished working the rest of the day -- sans underwear, of course.
On the ride home, we began to discuss the semantics of how one shits oneself. My theory goes as follows: I will hold my shit until it is physically impossible to do so any more and then for ten minutes after that. If at that time I am unable to procure a place of dispatch, I will have no other recourse except to shit myself. This is really the only time that shitting yourself is okay. There are asterisks attached to this, of course, but this is the general principle. If you shit yourself because you were trying to push out big fart: unacceptable. If you shit yourself because you were really shit-faced drunk: unacceptable. If you sneeze and shit yourself... well, that's a tough one. I'll leave that one and the rest of the caveats, addendums, and corollaries up to the PoopReport community to decide.