It's one thing to admire your own waste product. It's quite another to parade your excrement for clients. Granted, I've spawned porcelain creatures that I'd have been proud to invite close friends over to discuss, perhaps even including a salmon and wine sampler. But this was different. I was in the corporate trenches, where simple pleasures are neither afforded nor appreciated. In short, this is a story that has all the right stuff -- just at the wrong time.
I am a corporate trainer. As such, I stand in front of a classroom and explain stuff to a new group of strangers each week. Following last week's Nor'easter, and also on the tail of a week on antibiotics for a sinus infection, I was excreting a very slow and inconsistent paste from my rectum. I tried to hydrate, but nothing seemed to lube the drive train. I spent my evenings in the hotel bathroom straining and begging my digestive track to relent. The Virginia Tech killings were over and the rest of the country was grieving the aftermath; I, on the other hand, was still being held hostage to a digestive tract full of dry Play-Doh.
Each night I would only manage to squeeze out small swirls of gear lube. It had many of the same characteristics of meconium, that stuff that seeps out of a newborn's ass for a couple days after birth. The only difference was that mine stunk. Really bad. The cool part was the crisp racing stripes that were left in the bowl.
It was Wednesday morning and I'd had little relief. I found myself daydreaming about diarrhea. Suddenly, as if God proclaimed that I'd suffered enough, I felt some movement down south. It was that unmistakable GI foreplay you get from a playful colon that is about to release. I announced an unscheduled class break and retired to the corner handicapped stall in the men's restroom, thinking that I may need the grab bars and extra real estate for the battle in which I was about to engage.
The rumblings subsided at first, but disappointment was soon replaced by hope as I felt the rectal cavity filling with material staging itself for release. Then it started to emerge -- not explosively, as I'd fantasized, but like a careful baker icing a cake. The offending material exited my asshole and coiled itself in the bowl below. Hoping for a clean pinch as always, I was again frustrated when the contractions stopped mid-exit.
Note that on a normal turd, this scenario is nothing more than an inconvenient truth. A solution requiring only a small premium in the form of an additional wipe or two. However, when you're outputting sheetrock paste, your emotional durability may be dependent on whether you were cut off in traffic earlier in the day. I was nervous.
I sat patiently and waited, hoping for another boxcar to push the offender through the sphincter. No such luck -- and I was starting to get even more nervous. I was ten minutes into a fifteen-minute class break. I had five minutes to finish processing before suspicion arose and some student came looking for me. My forehead was sweaty and my pressed shirt and crumpled slacks around my ankles would still require a few minutes for recovery.
It was turn-around time, and I could wait no longer. I needed to finish with a manual stool extraction and post-op hygiene right now. I knew my crack would require some maintenance, but I had no idea of the extent.
I reached around and took a first swipe that covered my wad of tissue and half my hand. Not only had the forced pinch not properly allowed the material to exit in accordance with the gravitational pull of the Earth, but the sticky substance had refused to let go of my ass cheeks, curling up all around my exit hole and hanging on like cave stalactites.
I took a quick inventory of the toilet paper supply, knowing that this clean-up operation would be on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill or, perhaps, considering the toxicity of the matter, Three Mile Island.
I sat again for a moment while I spun a few more layers off the roll. Another blind wipe yielded a seemingly endless supply of brown paste. No matter how much I wiped, the wads were not getting any whiter. I suspected my Fun Factory was oozing a slow but constant supply of paste. Considering the bowl was already filled and that I was pushing the envelope of bowl capacity with giant wads of browned paper, I flushed, and flushed again. It was an industrial, high-power flusher, fortunately, so everything went down (other than the skid trails, which I would proudly leave behind to document my legacy).
It was now twenty-five minutes into the break, and the search party would be coming through the door any minute now. The disaster would be obvious from the smell that I'm quite certain had already crept under the door and was making its way through the cubicle farm in the main office. I had to compromise hygiene and get back to the classroom immediately. My wipe results had faded to a light brown, so I'd have to cut bait, leaving the remainder for underwear absorption and thigh moisturizer.
I pulled up my pants and looked back at the equipment. There on the seat was not a small dingle ball but a giant brown area of squashed turd. It looked like the inside of the lid on a fresh bucket of spackle. Brown spackle. Then the horrific realization hit me that I'd pulled my pants up over the mirror image of the seat spackle mark -- and that it must still be somewhere on my thigh.
I dropped trou to discover my worst fear.
I frantically scrubbed what I could out of my pants, my underpants, and up and down my thigh and waist area. I wondered where else the demon shit could be. I searched all around, up and down, turning around in front of the mirror. The crime scene looked repaired -- but I had neither comfort nor assurance after finding the crushed dook on the seat.
I cautiously returned to class, knowing that I was enveloped by a vapor cloud of evaporating feces.
I stoically spoke no words of my battle in class, continuing with my lecture where I left off. No one asked where I was, and I was not about to volunteer any leading information. Right now I just needed distance, and time was a moped.
As I paced in front of the class, I would catch a whiff of that distinctive abomination I had flushed earlier. Expecting it was just a pocket of legacy air, or perhaps even just a phantom olfactory memory, I tried to ignore it and just focus on the material I was presenting.
And then, like The Terminator rising out of the ashes of a thermo-nuclear explosion, I looked down at my pants cuff to spot a dollop of intestinal pomade clinging to the fabric.
Given the viscous consistency of this bowel movement, I was horrified to think about all the floor space, chair legs, and people I'd brushed my pants leg up against who were now contaminated by a schmear of my own biotic refuse. There was nothing obvious, but there were positively trace elements of feces throughout the office by now, I was sure.
I returned to the crime scene and removed the cuff turd as best I could. However, like the voices in my head, pockets of office gas would not leave me alone for the rest of the day.
That night at the hotel, I stripped and showered. Dried remnants of the ordeal were found throughout my clothing. My dry clean only slacks would need to be incinerated, along with the rest of my attire from that fateful event. I cursed my intestines by drinking a quart of prune juice and eating an entire box of colon burrs -- a combo that creates a motivational stool that I can only describe as a class-five rapid of chunky green tea.
