As we were driving into to work one morning, I noticed a phone company truck blocking traffic in the middle of the road. A few guys were plummeting down into the manhole, presumably to fix a downed cable. They were pumping out the rotten, stagnant water that often fills these manholes, and pumping in fresh air. To anyone who doesn't know, manholes are not the safest environments in which to work. For one, they are often breeding grounds for rodents and other nasty little beasts. Secondly, as I just stated, they often fill up with the slop that flows off the road during rain and snowstorms. Lastly, since they are subterranean, they fill up with toxic gases, usually carbon monoxide. Needless to say, dropping down below the road surface is no normal day at the office. But beyond the normal, run of the mill treacheries we faced as phone techs every day, we also faced one menacing foe that plagued our local garage for the duration I spent there.

I was only a summer employee. A good buddy of mine, in his infinite wisdom, thought that I should try my hand at phone work for a summer. In hindsight, it was a great job. I made a ton of money and the job was really pretty easy. I can tell you where every WaWa convenience store between Fairfield, New Jersey, and Atlantic City is -- a span of about 165 miles.

Since I was a newbie, my job was to do all the shitty jobs that my senior tech didn't want to do. This meant going into rotten crawl spaces, 110-degree attics, and stank manholes. This particular summer, some phone guy thought it was his job to torture us and shit in the manholes. I don't know how he did it, considering there isn't much room in there. But he did. As I descended into my first manhole, the senior tech yelled down to me, "It's going to smell a bit -- don't slip on the rungs of the ladder." I got to the bottom of the ladder and my foot sunk into what I thought was a pile of road sludge or mud. Then the smell punched me in the nuts. The manhole shitter had done his handiwork at the bottom of the ladder.

I looked down. What I can only describe as a mountain of shit sat before me. I nearly vomited once my mind comprehended what I had just stepped in. I screamed up to the senior tech, "There's a fucken pile of shit down here!"

"Yeah, sometimes raccoons get in there, they crap all over the place," he yelled back.

"No, you don't understand -- there's a pile of HUMAN shit down here! It looks like an elephant took a crap!"

And he laughed. He knew all too well that there would be a pile of shit down there. Turns out the manhole shitter was terrorizing an area of about five square miles. Every manhole he could get his dirty ass in, he was filling up with piles of butt mustard. But there was a method to his madness. He would mark his territory so senior techs would know the manhole shitter had visited this particular manhole. He would put one small stripe of orange paint on the side of the manhole. To us newbies, it just looked like some paint for a utility mark out, nothing really strange. But to the seasoned veterans, it was like lamb's blood -- they knew to pass this manhole on to the summer tech.

And so the summer continued like this. I would see the orange mark and my senior tech would chuckle as he popped the cover. Down I would go into this deep, dark, dank toilet. Each time as I lowered myself into the hole I would wait for the smell of human shit to waft up to my nostrils.

You never get used to the smell of human shit -- you just learn to not vomit once you smell it. I got in the habit of watching my feet as I went down the ladder, trying to avoid stepping in shit. Sometimes the shit would be right under the ladder; other times he got crafty and it would be directly under the cables. The only constant was the size and sheer magnitude of the stink -- like a bag of rotting pig innards. The few times this asshole crapped under the cables were the worst. I was literally inches from total meltdown as I worked on the cables. I would try to concentrate on the task at hand but this pile of magnanimous crap was just staring back at me. At some point I would begin to lose track of where I was, and I swear the shit began to speak to me.

"I know you smell me. I'm right here, touch me!"

"Fuck you, you smell and you're icky."

"Touch me, phone man, put your fingers in my brown goodness!"

"Shut up and let me work! I'll be done quicker if you leave me alone!"

"But I don't want you to leave. It's dark down here, I'm afraid of the spiders."

"Shut up, shit pile! Shut the hell up!"

It was then that I lost all sense of reality and, with one blistering swipe, I pushed the pile of talking shit onto the floor of the manhole. And then I stood there in disbelief that I had just actually touched a pile of shit that wasn't my own. The pile stared at me; I stared at it. The senior tech, who was watching the entire exchange, said, "What the hell is wrong with you?" I just looked up at him, shit still clinging to my work gloves, and said, "I'm almost done."

At the end of the summer, I had been in nearly fifty different manholes. Probably forty-eight of them were filled with shit from the manhole shitter.

On the third to last day of my summer job, we came upon a remote manhole back in a new development. A Bell Atlantic truck sat astride the open manhole. The senior tech looked at me; I looked at him. "I wonder if that's the guy," he said.

"Only one way to find out," I said. I grabbed his five billion candlepower flashlight and ran full speed towards the open manhole. I stopped about twenty feet short of it, caught my breath, and slowly approached. I laid down on my belly and military-crawled to the opening. I clicked on my flashlight and, like a ninja, thrust my head and light deep into the manhole.

What I saw has forever changed my life and how I look at feces. Friends, fellow PoopReporters, and sick fucks everywhere, as I peered down into that manhole I saw a 120 pound, banging hot FEMALE phone tech taking the biggest shit I have ever seen a human being take.

My light glinted off her rubber suit, and she looked up at me like a deer in the headlights. The five billion candlepower flashlight lit up the entire manhole as if Jesus himself was making his grand entrance. She looked up at me and didn't utter a word. A smile crept to her face. A feeling of nausea crept to mine. A single solitary turd hung from her beautiful, tanned ass; and just as I regained my composure enough to speak, it broke free from its dark colonic tomb and fell to the murky floor of the manhole.

We both sat there in silence, neither one of knowing exactly what to do. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to have a hard on from looking at this hot girl's ass or puke from seeing her take a big shit in front of me.

The senior tech leaned over, saw it was a woman, and started back for the truck. Joining the union teaches you a lot of things; getting yourself out of a potential sexual harassment situation is one of them.

We stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity, her crystal blue eyes piercing right through my OSHA-approved hardhat.

Then she spoke. "You mind?"

Did I mind? This woman had terrorized me for months! I was at the point where I was having nightmares of manhole covers and turd monsters chasing me through the streets! "Yeah, I fucken mind! You're a dirty pig, shitting in these manholes the entire summer. I hope a raccoon bites you in the ass and you get rabies!"

"You mind turning down the sun? You're baking me in here." Throughout this entire conversation, my flashlight was shining on her like it was an interrogation. It was a scene right out of NYPD Blue -- I was David Caruso and she was the Shittown Rapist.

"I hope you're happy, you sick piece of trash. If you were a guy, I'd kick your ass."

She raised her hand a bit to shield herself from the light of my flashlight, and said, "Sorry. Sometimes I have to crap." With that, I turned off my light and proceeded to walk back to the truck.

From then on, my life would be different. Instead of living the fairy tale that women didn't poop, I now knew that they did indeed poop; even the very hot ones. My life has been on a downward spiral since then, the summer of 2000.