Missing life lesson

I’ve brought this little anecdote up in conversation a few times this week which means I should share it with you since it’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t see the point in ever publishing anything here that doesn’t make me look at least somewhat silly because I’d hate to be accused of untruthful personal portrayal.

The situation in retrospect is one where you just wouldn’t know what to do because it doesn’t happen much in life, if at all. If it does come up enough that you don’t hesitate in your emergency procedures because you’ve dealt with it multiple times, then you might want to reevaluate your diet. Or fix the plumbing.

I was out with a friend last week, drinking at a pub and chatting about life, as one does. When we’d drunk up and paid up my friend wanted to use the bathroom before leaving, so we went to the basement where the gender-segregated toilets were kept. Upon entering, we noticed that there was some water on the floor; but it seemed clear so we proceeded to use the facilities by attempting to tiptoe around the puddles as much as possible.

I don’t wish to tell you too much detail but I only did Number 1. This is necessary for me to point out so that I show that what happened next wasn’t entirely my fault.

I did my thing, sat up and turned around to notice that the water was rather high in the toilet. Not to the top, certainly with room to spare, and not enough for me to have noticed before sitting down. I only paid attention in this case because I was pondering the reason for the lack of dry floor surrounding the stalls as I was sitting there relieving myself.

At this point I will admit a certain level of blame, since I mentioned the toilet water level to my friend and declared my intent to flush the toilet despite being aware of the danger in doing so. And that I was going to pull the flush tab and immediately jump back, just in case. I could, of course, have decided against doing any of this, but perhaps I was feeling adventurous. And normally, when one flushes, whatever’s in there gets sucked under and is replaced by fresh water in a dull yet satisfactory way.

Unfortunately, not this time. Instead, water was added to the toilet bowl in a rather fast manner and the now quite dilute but still gross on principle urine-laced contents were pouring onto the floor. At this time my friend had walked away from the stalls but another woman, who must’ve really needed to pee since she had to walk around my form and step through the flood to get to the next toilet as I was saying “oh God, it’s overflowing!” Deciding that there was nothing I could do to help the situation, I ran out. Without washing my hands, but I figured the alternative of having my pee all over my shoes was potentially less hygienic in comparison.

I immediately told a waitress about the overflowing toilet. She glared at me, and I wanted to iterate that I wasn’t the one to plug it, but I decided to take the blame in her mind because I was beginning to worry that the basement might now be completely flooded and my friend (who decided to wash her hands) was still down there, and arguing fault wasn’t going to save her life. Luckily she came up a minute later, mostly dry.

The life lesson here may be “don’t flush if you’re unsure” but I remember that I wasn’t even sure what to do after I did flush the toilet. What do you say to get people to quickly evacuate the bathroom? All I can think of now is “ABANDON SHIP!”. I must watch too many movies.