When I was twenty, I was given the opportunity to manage my own store within a corporation of small electronics stores. I won't plug them, but I will say that it's the place in every town across this nation where you can go and pick up a couple transistors or diodes to fix your broken television set. The store that I managed was a tiny little hole in the wall next door to an Albertsons here in Texas. I had a really good crew and, due to our small output volume, we were mostly ignored by middle management. However, just about every three months, our district and regional managers would show up for a (sort-of) quarterly inspection. My day came sometime in January, 2003.

Knowing that I was going to get visited, I decided that I should show up at the store early. The drive over took almost forty-five minutes, and I arrived in the parking lot at about 8:50AM. The nice (read: terrible) thing about this store is that we had a Starbucks only three doors down from us -- so I got a twenty-ounce cappuccino before checking in.

When you work for said corporation, it is absolutely important to be on top of the current offers and deals you can give out to customers. Seeing as how I had two semi-big wigs coming out to visit me, I decided to drink my coffee and check out the latest news on our Point Of Sale system.

I should preface this, though. Basically speaking, when you shut your store down at night, instead of having a whole bunch of individual light switches, the company saves money by making the lights shut off with the store's breaker box. So when you close, you flip all the breakers for the interior lights to make the store dark. If you arrive at the store early and turn on the lights, customers see you and start banging on the front door trying to get in and buy their $1.99 (and I kid you not, this is what we called them) poopy parts. Nobody wants their DM and RM to show up and see that you wrote six tickets for less than $20, so I left all the lights off in the store as I was reading the latest offers.

Herein lies the problem. I have had the worst time with my bowels since I moved out of the folks' house when I was eighteen. A combination of beer and spicy food has kept my digestive system cranking out liquid or semi-liquid shits every single day, often several times a day. Needless to say, I try to keep a friendly bathroom close at hand at all times I am out and about. This day would prove to be the warning shot heard 'round the bowl.

Coffee used to be one of my favorite things in the whole wide world. I drank that brown crap like it was water. In fact, on my days off, I would sit around with a whole pot of hot java, watch TV, and crap all day long. This was seriously one of my favorite things to do. Unfortunately, I learned that important appointments and coffee do not mingle well for me. Halfway through my first page of news and less than a quarter of the way through my coffee, that sickening urge hit me. Two gurgles and a spastic clamping of my large intestine told me that NOW WAS THE TIME.

I was less than fifteen feet from the bathroom. In a frenzy, I ran over to the door, butt cheeks clenched like Rambo's pecs, only to remember that all the lights in the store were still off! The breaker panel was a good twenty feet from where I stood. Feeling the urgency of the liquid battering ram smashing against my puckered anus, I decided to run into the pitch-black bathroom. No lights, no windows, no hope. I hurriedly kicked a family pack of paper towels in the door so the meager light leaking in from the front of the store could provide a minimal landing strip for me. Hands flying, sweat dripping and hope rapidly failing, I tore at my dress belt. Halfway between separation of pants and ass, though, my tortured sphincter gave way and the flood commenced.

That's right. I was only halfway between rescue and failure when the ol' craptory opened up the mass-production lines. Imagine where your pants are when you are only 50% on the way to porcelain bliss. It didn't matter to me at this point -- I was too busy spewing out this flaming-hot mass from my poor bum. After what seemed like an eternity of non-solid hell, my buttocks finally calmed down enough for me to realize what damage had been done. Even in the pale light shining through the doorway, I knew I was screwed. A mix of liquid crapola and marble-sized turds had deposited themselves inside my drawers. Further inspection as well as now-cooling sensations told me that the poo had made its way down my leg and literally into my black mil-spec leather shoes. The deuce had done its damage.

Not only was I sitting on a soiled toilet with pants full of filth -- I realized that it was after 10AM and my store should have been open by now. Any other day of the week, any other month, any other year, this would have been okay -- but as I said, my superiors were coming to visit, and I was the only one scheduled to work that morning. I had only two options:

1. Try to clean all this disgusting stuff off of my body and my clothing in the dark, or
2. Risk the journey to the breaker panel and make sure everything was kosher before making my grand entrance.

Needless to say, due to the severity of the situation, I hobbled -- with pants around ankles and stink quickly spreading -- to the breaker panel, and carefully switched on only the bathroom lights.

If I could imagine a poopy nightmare, that was what I saw in the fluorescent lights there in my store's crapper. Yellow poo (yellow from too much Shiner Bock the previous night) was all over the floor, the toilet seat, and worst of all, my legs, my pants, and my shoes. I crammed my stomach back down my esophagus. This would be the first time my RM would ever meet me and here I am, covered in my own incontinence. To make matters worse, I was wearing the thinnest pair of gray dress pants that I owned -- all things penetrated them with relative ease. A worried glance at my watch demanded immediate action, so I made with the sopping, soaking and cleaning of my clothes first; then the bathroom surfaces.

Holy God, its 10:30AM. Half an hour late opening the store on the day that the guys that hold my job in their hands show up. Only somewhat confident of my cleanliness, I rush to the front door after flipping on all the breakers. The front glass doors reveal a '98 Ford Explorer containing two very angry looking middle aged men peering at me like vultures.

Here is where the story turns even worse.

I unlock the door and greet the two disturbed businessmen. Immediately they tear into me about opening the store on time. They begin to look (read: bitch about) my merchandising when my RM stops mid sentence and squawks, "What the hell is that smell? Did one of your customers take a crap on the floor or what??"

I could barely stifle my laugh. I told him that the sewer had backed up a few days before and I hadn't got the chance to break out the bleach and clean the bathroom floors.

The rest of the inspection resulted in me getting a warning not only for the generally bad organizational skills that I possessed, but also the terrible smell that was lingering around my store for their four-hour visit.

Now, you might think that the smell was just a bathroom thing. You would be sadly mistaken. In my hobbling journey to the breaker box after crapping, some of the marble-shaped nuggets of brown goodness plopped their way out onto the floor. I didn't realize it until about 4:30, when the smell was as strong as it was at ten in the morning.

The result of all of this is that I haven't drunk any coffee since.

-- The Baron von Pooptoven