Did you ever wonder, “How long would it take somebody to find me if…”
I returned upstairs at work after a small break and, as I rubbed sore spot on my head, asked my coworkers how long before I returned would anyone come looking for me?
Why do I think of such things? Well, I had to visit “the little boy’s room” which is downstairs at the far side of the warehouse. Women don’t have to worry about this next part, but men will know what I mean. Sometimes you lift the seat up by hooking it on the tip of your shoe and pushing it up and backwards – this way you don’t have to actually touch it. As I was doing this I was unbuckling my belt at the same time and – probably because I have the coordination of a garden gnome – I tripped a little sideways on my one grounded foot and the seat slipped off the tip of my other foot. With one foot up towards the toilet reservoir where the seat should have been, belt undone and working on the jeans button, I tried to get both feet back on the ground and catch the toilet seat. Throwing my hands forward from my now mostly open fly threw me even more off-balance and my airborne leg kicked the seat as it was already falling, sending it down at warp speed into the porcelain bowl with a resounding BOOM. My brain, more concerned about coming up with an explanation as to what the heck I was doing to create all this commotion when I walked out of the bathroom, didn’t seem to notice that at this point perhaps catching myself on the wall to stop from falling should have been priority. I did catch myself – with my head – hitting the wall with, not so much a resounding BOOM, but a loud THUD. I was surprised when I emerged that there was nobody in the warehouse to razz me about what exactly was going on with the BOOM and the THUD all alone in the commode.
I should have just quietly taken a couple of Advil and cheered for my intact dignity. Instead, morbidly wondering what would have happened had I knocked myself out and fallen headfirst into the tidy-bowl-blue, I asked the question at the beginning of this story.
To which, of course, my coworkers then asked, “Why exactly do you ask…?”
Luckily my job does not require a lot of dignity.