Toilet

It's almost the one-year anniversary of an event that shook me to the core and helped to shape me into the person I am today.  I was ashamed at first but now enough time has passed that no matter who reads this, there couldn't possibly be any hard feelings anymore.

Last year, one of my friends - we'll call her Ollie - was going to miss an awesome party because she had to go to her then-boyfriend's frat formal at U of M.  Being the engineering frat, not all of the boys were... winners, and I decided in a fit of cockiness to volunteer my best friend and myself as hot blind dates.  I didn't want Ollie to feel left out and I saw it as an awesome opportunity for adventure.  I insisted it would be a blast and that we had nothing to lose.  I somehow talked everybody into it, acquiring random dates for my best friend and I, while setting my work schedule around the certainty of going.  Naturally I didn't realize the sheer ridiculousness of it all til we parked the car outside the building.  My desperate pleas to go back were not taken seriously.

Though the night was laced with moments of epicness and awkwardness (mostly awkwardness), there was one certain moment that I thought would haunt me forever.

Disclaimer: it may be gross.

It was some ungodly hour of the morning that Ollie and I realized neither of us had used the bathroom in half an eon.  Being located in an enormous frat house, we found some back-room bathroom where the contents of the toilet bowl must have been at least 90% standing frat-boy urine.  Ollie stood guard while I squatted for some light business.  I flushed but before Ollie entered after me she pointed out that the flush was unsuccessful.  I acted before my brain processed what I saw: the toilet had been clogged by previous users.  But I cranked down on that lever somewhere between 3 and 10 times before my brain synapses released a delayed warning.

The toilet instantly overflowed like a treacherous witch's brew.

It bubbled over and splashed onto the floor, flooding the little bathroom in an instant.  The horror.  It all happened so fast.  Never before had I witnessed the catastrophic result of acting before thinking... not like THIS.  The pee-water was headed for me.  I knew that if it hit me I'd just die on the spot, my soul rejecting my body out of pure repulsion.  But by some luck, as I stared at my feet, they moved, as if possessed by the will to live.  Amazing gazelle-like reflexes kicked in and I avoided the pee-water lava by mere milliseconds.

Ollie and I slammed the door shut and ran the HELL outta there.  The pisswater slowed but oozed out from under the door.  We didn't stick around to see what else happened.  There were no other witnesses.

We made a pact to never speak of it again (which failed over time but kept us sane for the rest of the night).  Whenever we caught each other's eyes, our glances were grave, or we giggled out of ridiculousness and fear. We barely found the nerve to let our other friend in on it, which must have been real damn annoying and I'm retrospectively sorry for that.

We never heard of what happened to that bathroom.  We checked the scene of the crime the next day and found it clean, as if I never unleashed the chaos of what had to have been Pandora's toilet bowl.  Day by day I got over the post-traumatic stress of destroying the plumbing of a building with which I really had no business.  It's been a process, the final point being today: I have grown brave enough to blog about it.  It was horrible at the time but retrospectively hilarious.  I'm over it.

... but I still wonder who had to clean that hot mess up.