Fecal Trail of Tears - Part 2

Poop has colored my life in various shades of brown since moments before my birth (but that is truly a story I'm saving for later).  My first job was no exception.  If I were to assign a value to the first work-poop incident, based on the amount of poop and the level of trauma it caused, it would be the darkest brown you could perceive without calling it black.  The Wikipedia entry on shades of brown calls it 'seal brown.'  That's pretty apt, because someone clearly broke a few seals that night - the seal of their anus, the seal of my dignity...need I go on?

My next few jobs were pretty uneventful, at least in terms of bowel movements.  I worked as a cashier in a drug store - no poop.  Just a crazy, obese black lady that would fill her cart with clearance items, ask me to price-check each product, and then buy only one thing.  She kept her wallet somewhere in the separate zip code of her cleavage, but at least she had the decency to use an actual wallet instead of just tucking a wad of sweaty $1's under a floppy, unfettered breast. 

Then I was a telemarketer for a company that sold electric scooter chairs to the elderly and disabled.  My boss was a paraplegic Vietnam vet who must have taken a cue from the Hair Club for Men guy - not only was he the president, but he was also a member.  He'd zip around the call center floor eavesdropping on all of us, but not pooping on anything.  The low point of that job was calling the phone number of an old man who, according to the woman who answered the phone, had just been buried that day.  I wanted to kill myself immediately, but I suspect she may have been screwing with me, because I would totally say something like that to a telemarketer.

The following summer, I got a sweet job as a bus girl at a popular, expensive restaurant at the Jersey shore (but it was nothing like the show, I promise you).  Apparently, it was inconceivable that an English-speaking, mentally-competent female would eschew being a waitress in favor of busing tables.  It took a while for my coworkers to stop speaking to me louder and more slowly than normal, but the customers never quite caught on.  If I had a dollar for every person who loudly over-enunciated the question, "Where are YOU from?" and looked crestfallen when I said "South Jersey" and not "Mother Russia,"  I would have had so many dollars.

But I digress, this story isn't so much about my resume as it is about poop.  One night after closing, I stepped into the customer bathroom to pee.  Normally I would have used the employee bathroom, but it was usually pretty gross, and all the customers were gone, so I indulged myself.  I headed for the middle stall, ready to unleash eight hours of pent-up kidney fury, when I spied something so disturbing I forgot all about my own bodily functions.  The Mud Golem was near.

Against the wall, partially behind the toilet, rested an enormous pile of excrement.  If I wasn't certain that a horse would never have fit inside the stall, I couldn't have accepted that this mass of biological warfare was a human product.  Again, there was no possible way this was an accident.  Getting a little on the back of the seat, maybe.  Dropping one on the floor in front of the toilet - I get it, you pooped your pants and it just sort of flopped out.  But behind the toilet, shoved up all the way against the wall?  Most certainly a delibrate act of fecal terrorism.

I reeled backwards out of the stall, having flashbacks to rival the likes of Timothy Leary.  The trauma of my last close encounter of the turd kind embedded itself in my spinal fluid, and I was reliving every horrific second of the clean-up.  I washed my hands, furiously, and marched out of the bathroom to find the hostess, a kindly, sassy old woman who would surely sympathize with my plight. I approached her station, where she was counting down the tips for the night and flirting with the two teenaged bus boys.

"Diane...I don't know how to say this politely, but there's a huge pile of poop on the floor behind the toilet in the middle stall of the ladies' room." 

"Well, someone's going to have to clean it up."  She glanced around accusingly at the three of us bus persons.

Without thinking, I employed the most desperate yet effective survival tactic I had yet learned in my brief 20 years of life.  My pointer finger flew up to the tip of my nose and I blurted "Not it!" before the other two guys had time to absorb the severity of the situation.

But Diane was already a step ahead of me.  She marched into the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later with the head chef and a diminutive Mexican dishwasher who was staring at his shoes, looking demoralized as he wheeled out a bucket and mop.  "Carlos is gonna take care of that turd, but don't worry, I'm gonna cook him up a steak to take home with him," explained the chef.

God bless you, Carlos.  May the wind be always at your back, and may you always be three steps ahead of INS.

As you can see, our protagonist was learning important life lessons.  While she hadn't yet learned how to avoid jobs where she would encounter a stranger's poo, she was learning how to avoid close contact with it.  In our turd and fecal third and final installment (because all good things come in threes, just like pee, poop, and diarrhea...but I think I may have just gone too far, I'm sorry) we will see that our protagonist came close to wiping the poo of our Lord, as he so famously said "Whatsoever you do for the least of your brothers, you do also for me" or some kind of hippie garbage like that.  All I know is, I've been wiping my own ass for the last 19 years (guys, I'm 25) and I'm not about to start wiping anybody else's.