Adventures in Defecation

Today, it all fell into place. The pink, elementary school floor door color, the floor tile, the manual toilet, the rowdy overpressured pipe sounds — the bathroom was like something out of the ’60’s and it felt like the perfect fallout shelter. Think of it! Thick walls protect the outside world from the sounds and scents of the bathroom. In a nuclear attack, they’d protect you from the initial radiation blast. The spartan, sturdy design provides plenty of shock insulation and an absence of small moving objects. Most bathrooms at work don’t have windows, so nothing would shatter from the pressure wave.

The more I think about it, the more plausible it sounds. Especially for tall buildings, where is the safest place besides the basement or the stairwell? The bathroom! I guess it makes sense for man to design the place (or is that palace) of defecation to endure acts of war. Destruction? We laugh at it. Death? We can deal with it. But don’t you touch my bowl!

At work, the water pressure in our bathroom varies from extreme to psychotic. Today, I was sitting on the bowl when someone in the girl’s bathroom flushed. Now if this were any other bathroom in the world, you’d swear some 7′ tall hunk of bodybuilder woman jumped on the handle, because the flush was so violent. I mean, you could feel the walls vibrate, and the pipe that lead up to my bowl. I could even feel the vibrations on the seat. That’s when I thought, “I feel just like an astronaut!” I was ready to blast off. “3, 2, 1, we have liftoff!” I don’t know why they engineered the bathrooms like this. Did the plumbers get a kick out of the sounds of high-velocity turd water? Did they care that when one person flushed, everyone in a bathroom on the same floor knew about it? There’s a story in there somewhere.