Rubbers Down the Drain Will Only Cause Pain

There are specific learning moments we all experienced growing up. Those times when we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the exact situation we are facing will forever hold firm in our memory if only to provide us with insight as to how not to do things in the future.

As I hovered over my bathroom sink, which was triple bagged with plastic grocery carriers and proceeded to explode with diarrhea, I realized that this was one of those moments.

But I suppose I should start from the beginning and explain just how I came to be pooping into the sink while reflecting upon how disastrous my life had suddenly become.

I had been living in my new pad for about six months and was loving the freedom that living alone offered. Until this point, I had only had the opportunity to live with roommates but finally found a cheap enough place to rent on my own. Granted, the apartment was just one large room with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen that held a refrigerator not much bigger than those beer fridges you sometimes see in man caves—I was still happy with my setup.

The greatest thing about living on your own is the newfound privacy. This meant having the ability to walk around naked and no more hanging a bra on the door handle if you’re getting busy with a new beau.

And that was precisely my plans for the evening. A guy I had been seeing was coming over, and I was going to make him dinner. My idea of making dinner was a large bowl of buttered air-popped popcorn and some beers on the side. It was going to be perfect.

I’ll spare you the gritty deets, but let’s just say the popcorn acted as an aphrodisiac.

Afterwards, he promptly got up and made his way to the bathroom to dispose of the condom. I headed that way after he was done and had a fleeting thought of “huh, that’s weird, I wonder where he tossed the rubber,” when glancing at the empty trash can but disregarded the idea immediately because he had told me he was going to take me out for sushi.

Cool, cool, cool. If there’s one thing that can distract me from any train of thought, it’s the idea of shoving sushi down my pie hole.

After the sushi, we departed ways, and I headed home.

I fell into the kind of sleep that one gets when they know they are about to embark on a great adventure. I, of course, thought the adventure was going to be a new relationship. The universe had something else in mind.

At about 3 AM, I woke to a foul smell and the sound of gurgling drain pipes. I slowly made my way to the bathroom and found that my entire tub had backed up with poo. Human poo. The smell was unbearable. The realization that this couldn’t be all of my shit and was probably that of the entire second floor of the apartment building made me cry out in horror.

Then the most unfortunate rumbling began in my own stomach. It seemed that the sushi wasn’t sitting well.

I weighed my options.

Should I go and knock on one of the doors of the neighbours I hardly knew? Both apartments on either side of mine did not particularly like me because I constantly had parties that would keep them up at night.

Nowadays, this would not deter me from asking to use someone's shitter, but back then, being young, shy and quite frankly mortified at the hard decisions that I was facing, I knew that knocking on my neighbour’s door was going to have to be a hard no.

The rumbling, tumbling awfulness of stomach cramps got worse, and I knew I had to figure out a plan fast lest I shit myself right then and there in my bathroom that was already filled to the brim with human fecal matter.

And that’s how I ended up blowing up my sink with the explosive kind of poops that only come from too much beer combined with some bad sushi in the middle of the night.

After I was done my business, I felt marginally better—physically at least, so I called my landlord and told them we had a problem.

He had already gotten calls from both my neighbours on that floor as they too had poop travelling up their drains at an exceptional rate.

I disposed of my secret bag of feces by sleuthing through the dead of night to the dumpster located on the building's backside. All the while hoping fervently that no one caught on to the biohazardous materials I was so covertly disposing of.

My mind whirred with the constant mantra of “nooooooooooo, this can’t be happening!” as I watched fully suited-up plumbers fix the issue by snaking the drains of all the apartments.

Finally, after a long, disparaging night of too many indignities to count, a used condom was found to have been the issue.

Of course, I played dumb and asked, who would be stupid enough to flush a condom down the drain? But I knew. I knew in my heart of hearts what had happened.

I gave my months’ notice not long after that and skipped the province in hopes of outrunning the mortification of that fateful night. I never spoke to the guy again either. And looking back on this incident, 15 years later, I realize that this was the moment that I stopped dating stupid hot people and started looking more inward in respect to my potential love interests.