About five years ago I was working as a private investigator for a firm that specialized in business investigations. For the most part, the clients were corporations who would have us investigate franchise owners for doctoring the books and such. Sometimes a client would hire us to go "fishing" for small-time problems like cashiers stealing money out of the till or not registering a sale in the till at all. When these investigations involved bars, the work was great. We were obliged to sit there and get drunk on the clock and on the company dollar as we watched the bartender. I couldn't have asked for a better job... or so I thought. One of the clients was a company that owned the donut shops central to the Canadian cultural fabric. I cannot mention them by name, but they are all but a monopoly, so take your best guess. This company also owned nearly all the highway rest stops between Windsor and Montreal -- a distance of nearly eight hundred miles.
They hired us to drive that distance and back, stopping at each one to fish for skimming cashiers. We would attempt to create a transaction that would make it easy for the cashier to steal and then check the register records to see if that transaction had been registered. This meant we had to buy a certain item over and over again. It had to be that particular item because that particular item involved a single unit of currency, tax included, that couldn't really be inventoried. The cashiers knew the price so they didn't have to enter it in the register. It was a box of tiny little donuts.
As my bosses were cheap, they refused to give us a meal allowance on this trip because -- and I quote -- "You will be eating all those donuts." Yup. Mini donuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for five days straight.
When we weren't in an isolated donut shop trying to catch some schmuck stealing change, we were on the road driving to the next donut shop in the horrendously cold Ontario January. Fellow poopers, this situation had all the elements of a poop disaster of epic proportions. Nothing but donuts and sitting for days on end, usually eighty miles or so from the nearest toilets. This would make Delhi belly look as enjoyable as Tantric sex.
We had just left the fourteenth donut shop along the freeway, day three. It was my turn at the wheel and I felt fine. There was no sign of the horror to come until we were about thirty miles on. Then it hit me. Death cramps. Screaming-holocaust-in-my-intestines cramps. These cramps didn't ramp up gradually as they do in merely average cases of diarrhea. No -- these went right to 11. These cramps were akin to malignant tumors running inside my intestines, giggling as they vomited battery acid within me. I nearly lost control of the car as the white-hot pangs of boiling Hershey squirts captured all of my attention.
Even before I said anything, my cohort said, "Hey, are you alright?" I winced and replied, "Um... I think I have to shit. Soon."
With that statement, the cramps stopped abruptly and were replaced by a thrumming in my rectum. Baby spasms, soon to grow into adult spasms. My bowels had clearly severed their relationship with my will and started the process of warming up for the ejection. The fact that there was no toilet within an hour of us had no impact on my ability to hold it in. The fact that it was the middle of winter and there was no vegetation to hide me had no strengthening effect on my will. I couldn't afford to be Shameful.
Like the moment when you realize that vomiting is inevitable and imminent, I had a moment of unhindered perception of reality. Like it or not, I was going to shit. I could shit in my seat, soiling the company car, making the remaining three days of the trip a living hell for myself and my innocent partner, as well as earning years of workplace ridicule; or I could stop here in the middle of nowhere without as much as a blade of grass for cover and shit in front of a few hundred patrons of the Trans-Canada Highway.
I managed to pull the car over onto the snowy shoulder and get out, running a few yards into a snow-covered field. The temperature must have been -25 Celsius. There was nothing but a field of white. Not a tree. Not a ditch. Not a fence. I should have used the car for cover, but in a strange way I wanted to get as far away as I could from the place in which I was to spend the next seventy-two hours.
The snow was two feet deep. It was pastoral. Norman Rockwell might have painted such a picture, but only my ass could turn it from that to a Pollock painting. I could run no longer. I dropped my pants a mere attosecond before my sphincter went supernova with hot liquishit. Hundreds of liquefied mini donuts hit the snow like a putrid tsunami. The diarrhea didn't merely come out of me -- it ejaculated out of me.
I was squatting, but still I managed to take shit shrapnel splatters all over my ankles and inner thighs. The death cramps were back; I could look down and see my abdomen implode with each shit explosion. The snow that got hit with it melted instantly, forming what looked like a shit Slushy that probably would have tasted like donuts, if one decided to taste it. I saw the steam rise up like a smoke signal.
And then I heard it: the honking of horns. It was Dopplerized, the sound rising and falling as the cars approached and receded. I looked up, red-faced, to see a kid in a car pointing at me. The teenaged yahoos in the next car gave me a thumbs-up. I stood there, bare assed and sick as a dog for all the world to see. It was a moment I shall not forget.
I removed a shit-spattered sock and wiped up. There was not much to wipe as there was not much that was solid -- I didn't wipe it up so much as I sopped it up. I put my bare foot back down and felt it start to freeze in the snow.
One positive thing came out of this: no matter what happens to me from now on, I shall never be as embarrassed as I was then.
We only caught four thieves on that trip.