Disgusting jobs.

Honestly, I prefer the smell of stale urine over some of the really rank cleaning products I end up using. Then there’s my air freshener on top of that — masking one smell with another, with another. If anything is disgusting, it’s the smell of Glade Plug-ins and bug spray mingled with disinfectant and Lysol, combined with the aroma of slime-like bluing agent, with perhaps the slightest tinge of urine as an afterthought.

Keeping my office clean generally means vacuuming and mopping, keeping my paperwork in neat little stacks, and keeping the water in my toilet as blue as a smurf. Until today.

I can’t sugar-coat this… the guy was fat. There’s no dancing around a thing like this. This man did not have a weight problem, he had a weight catastrophe. That he could manage to walk without a cane or some other kind of support was mind-blowing, though calling his movements “walking” isn’t exactly accurate. He would kind of swivel his hips and swing his arms as hard as he could to gain momentum, and any movement his feet actually made seemed to be incidental. One thing was for sure, when not in motion the man could not stand up on his own. He had to lean on something or fall over.

Please understand that I’m merely describing this man, not mocking him, although mockery was the least of his worries. He couldn’t string a sentence together without gasping for breath halfway through. He was sweating through his sweatpants. His odor was pungent and foul. This was not your average, run-of-the-mill fat man, the kind we all know and love. This was someone with a serious, immediate problem that needs to be remedied. This man, you look at and feel an instant and overwhelming sense of pity, but at the same time you try to avert your eyes and breathe through your mouth.

A quick aside about my waterless urinal: it’s basically just a drain on the wall with a little pocket inside for disinfectant (which, as noted above, smells worse than urine). It’s actually the ideal tool for someone in my field, since it can’t be flushed and puts the donor in a place where he cannot get any water whatsoever, running or otherwise. Furthermore, it reduces the chances of a donor flushing the toilet to exactly zero, which saves me from a lot of headaches. When a man asks to use the regular toilet, however, that’s generally a red flag. Some men are incapable of doing so, and that’s fine, but some simply want to cheat and need a readily avaialble source of water to do so.

I was willing to make an exception in this man’s case, though, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he was going to be able to aim the stream into the waterless urinal. He had seen the two men in front of him use the waterless urinal so he knew it existed, and when I asked if he needed a regular toilet he became embarrassed and said no, he could do it just fine.

This did not turn out to be the case.

While he was in the men’s room working on filling his cup I was in the lobby filling out paperwork for the two donors behind him. Just as I was finishing up the second set of forms I hear a loud crash from the bathroom. I rushed back and asked if he was okay.

“I made a mess,” he said.

It took him a few minutes but he eventually got up, and cracked the door open. He didn’t want to open it all the way and reveal the fruits of his labor, but at the same time he couldn’t fit through the half-opened door. He was beet red, but whether that was because he was completley out of breath or utterly mortified, I have no way of knowing. Probably a combination of the two.

In no uncertain terms, this man had fallen over somehow in the bathroom and lost control of his bowels. Green, murky diarrhea covered the back of his pants and most of one arm, not to mention my bathroom floor. His sample cup was discarded amidst his leavings. It was empty, not because he had spilled it, but because he hadn’t filled it in the first place.

He forced his way past me so he didn’t have to see the look on my face as the mess came into full view. He choked out some apologies on his way out the door. I was left with the task of cleaning up after him. The two people in my lobby had begun to wrinkle their noses, the looks of disgust impossible to hide. The young lady excused herself.

I set about my undesirable task, armed with everything in my cleaning arsenal. Fifteen grisly minutes later my men’s room was back in pristine condition. It was the most horrible mess I’d ever cleaned up in my life.

I still felt extreme amounts of pity for this man, but now I was angry with him as well. It’s rather common for men to not be able to do number one without first doing number two, I’m sure it happens to everyone. But I had offered this guy an out. Had he been sitting on the toilet he would have never slipped and, even if he had somehow, clean-up would have been as easy as flushing. Sure, his drug test would have been ruined. But isn’t that better than the alternative?

I’m aware he was just embarrassed and sensitive about his weight, but I’m betting that after leaving here he went straight through a McDonald’s drive-thru for some comfort food. I sometimes wonder if incidents like these form the catalyst in someone’s life, where they clearly identify a change they need to make and then get motivated enough to change it. But somehow I think that only happens in movies. As it stands this man is in seriously bad health and is at best a horrible inconvenience to the people who have to put up with him. Nobody can help him but himself, and even in situations as silly as drug testing he’s unwilling to do even that.

As for me, for the rest of the day there’s an odor lingering about that drowns out even the disinfectants and Pine Sol. And it’s hard to be excited about that.

When the young lady came back in she blurted out, “I didn’t leave because of the fat — because of the obese guy, I mean — I just wanted a cigarette.” At that point, I would have welcomed the smell of a cigarette.