Backed up.

The toilet is completely backed up.

Fortunately the bowl isn’t filling with water; I don’t have a brown flood on my hands. All this situation really calls for is some handy plunger work.

It’s amazing what you can learn about your workplace even after being the only living being there for two solid years. As it turns out, I don’t have a plunger. Yes, my office exists as a place where the bathroom is (for the most part) the main event, and I am minus one plunger.

There are a lot of little nooks, crannies and hidey-holes in my office. Lots of unused drawers, cabinets, corners and shelves. A systematic search of the entire office is one of the first things I did upon being hired here, of course — this was back when, even with my boss’s blessing, playing Gamecube on the clock somehow felt wrong and instead I opted to clean places in the building that never even see light.

My explorations then turned up lots of neat little knick-knacks: staple-remover, blood draw supplies (including needles and latex gloves), mountains of Post-It notes, lengths of hose, paint, air filters… these things have provided me with endless entertainment on the afternoons before I managed to score internet access. Of course, at the time I was not looking for a plunger so I didn’t make a note that one didn’t exist.

About this time (now after 5:00) my only real course of action is to call my bosses and let them know we have a serious plunger emergency. However, their office doesn’t allow incoming phone calls after 5pm.

The grim reality of it hits me: I have no choice but to let this festering pile of ick sit in my toilet over the weekend.

And, as weekends are wont to do, the memory of Friday’s unpleasantness faded away. The grim reminder didn’t come until about 10am Monday morning, when my first female collection of the day walked in.

I won’t describe in gory detail the contents of the bowl at this point, but suffice it to say that critters were now involved in the process.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I bother to type a post lamenting the existence of poop. After all this blog is for stories about the particulars of my profession, not about the contents of my potty. So, I introduce you to Ms. New York.

Ms. New York is tiny. If she didn’t have crow’s feet, wrinkles and saggy breasts I would have guessed she was fourteen years old, or thereabouts. Did I mention she was from New York? Because she did — at least two or three times per sentence.

I explained to Ms. New York what the situation was. I could not conduct a collection because of… technical difficulties. I called the powers that be immediately and requested plumbing assistance, but for the time being Ms. New York’s only options were to sit and wait, or drive to our other office where they (presumably) had a working commode.

Neither of these options were suitable to Ms. New York. She can’t sit and wait because she’s from New York and has better things to do (her words), and she can’t drive to the main office because she’s from New York and she’d get lost (again, her words). She insists that, since she’s from New York, she can just “tough it out” in the nasty bathroom.

She’s from New York after all. She’s seen worse.

I would like nothing less than to envision this woman locked inside a room with the foulest things imaginable, but alas it is against regulation. I can’t conduct a collection unless the water in the toilet is blued, and while I’m sure there is a trace amount of bluing agent still in the bowl at this point it’s impossible to tell. So I politely turn down her offer.

Ever the master of compromise, I counter with an offer of my own: she could use the men’s toilet. Being a waterless urinal it can’t possibly break; it’s essentially just a porcelain drain stuck to the wall.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard about women from New York but we don’t do that!” she snaps. Except… not really in those words. The words she actually uses are the vocal equivalent of what’s haunting the bathroom right now.

“Then you’ll have to sit and wait, or go to our main office,” I reply, officially out of apologies. I hand her a map and describe how to get there.

“Look, I’m from New York but I’m not a jerk or anything, I just want to get this done. So what can we do?”

Irritating doesn’t begin to describe this person. The only thing I are about when you walk into my office is which company sent you and which test you need. I write your name on a piece of paper but I don’t commit it to memory. The place that spawned you doesn’t even register on the list of things I care about during our transaction. I honestly don’t know what New York has to do with anything at this point; does the woman want special treatment?

Curiosity gets the better of my good sense, and I ask her.

No, of course she doesn’t think she’s entitled to special treatment, it’s just that she’s from New York and people who aren’t from New York have this misconception that people from New York have bad attitudes and she wanted to make sure I knew that she was from New York so New York New York New York.

Eventually she left in a huff. I thought she was going to explode.

I wonder what state she was from…

Twenty minutes later I got to watch my boss attack the toilet with a brand new plunger. Clog removed, I was up and running again. Ms. New York came back the next day to complete her collection.

She came in a taxi on both days.

To be honest I was actually a little proud that my manly log was able to defeat my toilet so easily.