A few decades ago, back when in I was at LSU for grad school, the NCAA still allowed college sports programs to maintain athletic dorms for their teams. All the players were housed and fed in the same building so the coaches could keep an eye on them and enforce curfews when necessary. This was thought to be especially helpful in maintaining cohesion, discipline and camaraderie among the football players. This practice has since been disallowed, but during the time such facilities were extant, they produced at least one interesting anomaly in pooping behavior.

I became friends that year with one particular guy -- I'll call him Ray -- who was on the swim team. I was working with him on a special class lab project, and on one occasion I visited him in the athletic dorm. When we were through shooting the breeze, I had to take a piss, so I made my way to the bathroom on his floor -- where, I would soon discover, many of the football players lived.

I walked into a large facility with many urinals, showers and closed stalls. But there was one stall on the very end of the row that attracted my immediate attention. Taped to the door was a large posterboard inscribed in magic marker with the following sentiment: "SHIT ON THE AGGIES ALL WEEK RIGHT HERE!" A large arrow pointed to the handle on the right.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I postponed my piss long enough to inspect the stall. Inside, someone had lined the seat with one of those ass-gaskets and taped it down with these further comments scribbled on it: "DROP YOUR AGGIE, THEN FLUSH HIM AWAY!"

When I peered into the pot itself, I saw that someone had left his rather impressive Aggie to fester all by its lonesome. I decided to put him out of his misery and did the belated flushing myself.

After I'd finished pissing, I just had to go back to Ray's room to relate what I'd seen in the bathroom. He brought me up to speed.

"Yeah, the football players do that every time during game week. This week it's Texas A&M. They pick one of the stalls, and every team member on the floor is supposed to take a crap there at least once during the week. Some of them only use that particular stall until the game is played."

"Actually," he added, "some of us in the other sports join in and shit there, too. That one toilet gets a workout during football season."

For the record, LSU blew the Aggies away that weekend; but I don't think they ever knew that practically the entire team had already dumped on them for a solid (or runny) week. Little did those poor guys from College Station realize that they had already been wiped away many times over before they had even taken the field.

Guess there's strength in numbers. Particularly #2.

-- The Big Wiper [1]