I've been taking a new medication lately. Now when my doctor prescribed this medication unto me, he mentioned that it might upset my stomach. Well, I have been taking it for a a couple or few months now and I've noticed a... pattern, if you will. It rarely upsets my tum-tum. But when it does... tape the windows and lock the cellar doors and clear the schedule. I'm in for a long, hah-rah-bul (horrible. For the layman) day. So, it's a gamble with decent odds most days.
Now this isn't going to be some gross-out story where I give you all the gritty details. So you can feel safe that you won't get any on you. You're welcome.
With my job I work out in the middle of nowhere a lot. The stakes are raised in these instances. Let's just say that I don't get many warnings and have had a lot of photo finishes. One particular day, I am doing work outside of a school. This school is... you guessed it; (or didn't. Is there anybody out there? Huh-llooooo...?) in the middle of nowhere. So it comes upon the hour of go time aaand there isn't a store within 10 miles in either direction. However, I am not without options. There is the empty farm field across the road... ooorrr... there is the school.
Thus, I opt for the school. Anxiety-wise, the farm field seems way more appealing, but the legal implications weigh a bit on that side. I walk into the school building and am meeted (meeted? Met? Meeted sounds acceptable, but somehow I know it's not. Eh, fuck it. I got my back wheels in. Meeted.) by the office manager. I ask if I may (I made sure to say "MAY" and not "CAN" because I am now in a school amongst teachers and am in no mood to be asked, "I don't know. CAN YOU?") use the restroom. The office lady was kind enough to say yes and I thought she was going to direct me to a hallway restroom, or a locker room, or the show barn, but she directed me to the teachers' lounge. Where... teachers are having lunch. So...
She leads me to the door with small bit of hallway wall kind of obscuring the view of the rest of the room and this is what she tells me, "Go all the way to the end and it's the door on the left." I thought she meant to the end of the room, but given the horrendous amount of stank eye I got from the women around the lunch table, I could tell that I was not correct. What she actually meant was walk through this doorway, and look left because it's just right fucking there. Hardly constitutes saying "all the way to the end." It's downright hyperbolic when you get right down to it.
Aaanyway. I enter the restroom, which, by the way, is like ten feet from where everybody is having lunch. I can hear them plain as day, so I know they can hear me, too. I'm there trying to perform some kind of internal butt gymnastics to slide bulk past the air and be as quick and as silent as possible. "You should have turned on the sink." "You should have coughed during each fart." Sorry, but no. Aside from making it 50 times more obvious as doing either of those things would have made everything seem, these were dump farts. You hear those no matter what. Like seeing a kid doing everything they can to hide, but they're just right there? Like that, but waaay more humiliating.
Thankfully another teacher came into the room and whatever she said lead everyone into a chorus of uproarious laughter. I took my queue and made haste with the paste. It was every bit as bad as I had imagined. Thank God I had that sound cover from the laughter. Alright. Time for round two. I've already been in here a couple of minutes and need to perform some strategic flushing from round one. By now the chatter has died down. So, I hit the flush handle. buh-WOOOOSH-SHHHHhhhhhh*crackle*crackle*gurgle* Holy damn it! It's like a class 5 rapid just flew through the toilet! The flush lasted, like, a full minute! I take advantage of this noise and drop the boys.
What I haven't mentioned until now is that on the back side of the restroom door... is a full, door-sized mirror. So I get a full-on side profile view of this whole thing, so there's no dignity in this at all, is there? Man. Watching myself take a shit in full screen mode has GOT to be one of the MOST pathetic things I have ever had the misfortune to witness. So I finish up, wash up, and open the door sheepishly to an empty room. What a sigh of relief. I was expecting so much scorn and judgement. But everyone was gone. I made my way out, thanked the office lady, and went back to work.
So I started taking the medication at night.
Goodnight, everybody!
Art credit: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/marketplacefaith/2016/04/break-free-of-your-workplace-identity-crisis/