Lunch Special

Today was a long day at work and I found myself surviving it with the aid of artificial stimulants, in the form of Diet Mountain Dew. This is a wonderful substance, yellow-green and insipid, with just the right amount of caffeine to overcome the post-lunch desire to crawl under my desk and sleep. (There's way too much glass in my office to get away with that.) Sooner or later, though, it becomes time to pay rent on the soda and so I made my merry way through the cubicle maze to the bog.

First let me reassure you that this isn't one of those stories about some bloke dropping his guts in hideous fashion and driving me out in a paroxysm of choking and retching. No, the bathroom was clean and vacant, meaning that I could point Junior Bison at the porcelain without having to suffer some geezer at the adjacent pissoir attempting to make conversation:

"Hey! How are you doing?"
"Why don't you fuck off? I'm having a piss. Do I look like the kind of man who welcomes casual conversation with strangers when I'm standing with my dick in my hand? Think carefully before you answer, motherfucker."

On this occasion I didn't even have to wade through the pool of piss on the floor left by those whose aged, swollen prostate means that they don't so much spray as dribble, rendering them unable even to reach the porcelain. I washed my hands and stepped over to the paper towel dispenser to dry them. Of course the dispenser is always filled to bursting so that you struggle to get one paper towel out, and then end up pulling down about twenty at once. On this occasion, however, I looked down into the bin and noticed, sitting on top of the used paper, a styrofoam clamshell box and a white plastic fork.

This is something you don't expect to see in the context of an office toilet. In fact I wouldn't expect to notice anything at all in the waste bin except paper towels (especially since it's never emptied, resulting in a constant minor avalanche of grey paper onto the normally piss-soaked floor). Why would someone bring their lunch into the bog? Toilet activities are clearly broken down into three very distinct categories:

ACCEPTABLE
Taking a piss
Adjusting your tie in the mirror
Washing your hands
Receiving a text message, provided it's done discreetly behind a door

UNACCEPTABLE
Making a phone call
Squeezing a spot in the mirror
Having a conversation with someone, especially if one of you is taking a crap
Standing next to someone at the urinal when there's more spaces available

DISTURBING, CARRYING A SENTENCE OF DEATH
Eating your lunch on the throne
Playing with yourself
Looking over at someone else's weezer
Loudly scoring your stools for length and firmness

The only possibility that I could offer in the defence of the perpetrator in this case is that they may have bought their clamshell box of lunch in our office cafeteria. The explosive colon-clearing effects of their cuisine have been well documented; perhaps a previous victim decided that they may as well have their pants down ready if they were going to attempt the Cajun spiced meat substance lunch special. If you eat that shit I'm betting that you don't need Mountain Dew to keep you awake in the afternoon...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison