Rambling Rhodes

Toilet Talk (Again)

Here's a little bit of trivia about myself. You can share this information with anyone you see fit. Or you don't have to. Whatever.

I have this thing about public toilets, such as the loos you'd find at restaurants, or schools, or here at work. If there is still poop in a toilet, I will not use it. I'll walk on by and go to the next one.

It would be a simple matter for me to just flush the toilet and complete my business, but there's something about an unknown someone's poop staring back at me that makes the whole toilet stall seem somehow unclean.

And it doesn't have to be a large amount of poop, either. It can be just a few crumbs that didn't go down; that's enough to make me seek out a different crapper. Even defiant streaks spiraling around the porcelain send me packing. I just can't do it. The thought that my butt is hovering over a spot where, just seconds before, another human being's poop was swimming, just makes me feel dirty.

But, I really have a super dooper problem with the people who have no qualms about leaving an entire turd in a toilet, and then not even bothering to even think about flushing. Are they that lazy? Are they proud, perhaps?

Back in high school, a bunch of my fellow football players decided, after practice one evening, to take turns pooping in the same toilet, and not flush. After the sixth or seventh guy had gone, a truly disgusting and somewhat amazing pile of shit towered its way out of the bowl, to the point that the seventh guy to go had to hover above the seat to prevent contact. A little known fact about toilet plumbing: after seven guys work together to fill a toilet with their own shit, the toilet loses its ability to flush down the monumental shit skyscraper. I was just leaving the locker room when the janitor came down and confronted the unexpected and un-called for clean-up job, and I remember the defeated look on his face ("is this where life has taken me?").

I remember that janitor's resigned look every time I enter a stall and see an entire unflushed turd awaiting me. It seems unfair to me to think that I have to be somehow responsible for disposing of somebody else's defecation. That's not what I went to school for. It's not my job to flush somebody else's shit. I'd have to check to make sure, but I'm almost certain it's not in my contract. So, I don't. It's just the principle of the thing.

Why, yes, yes I did just come back from the bathroom and saw a gi-normous unflushed treat looking up at me. No toilet paper or anything. Just a huge loaf floating there all by itself. I opted to slowly close the door, and move two stalls down.

Strangely, I still have no problem looking at stuff like this, however.