I work in a cubicle. This should come as a surprise to no one who's been reading carefully. Save possibly for the fact that I'm employed at all, or don't work in a place where I wear a paper hat and am forbidden to go near the fry cooker.


At any rate, there's a bathroom down the hall from my cube. It gets a lot of foot traffic -- and ass traffic, too, I suppose. Sometimes, it's out of toilet paper. And somebody's already working on the urinal cakes -- you can see the pockmarks and divots already starting to form.


Two other 'features' of this bathroom you should know, more germane to this story -- every bit of plumbing in the room is automated, and the latches on the doors don't always shut completely.


The first piece of info is important to note, because it means that the toilets flush themselves. The mechanisms are new, too, so they're:

A) on a hair trigger, and

2) extremely, extremely, frighteningly forceful

With the stage set thusly, the story unfolds rather quickly. Yesterday, I strolled down to the bathroom to settle in for a nice afternoon tussle. I made my way to a stall, latched the door, dropped pants, and sat. I'd barely grazed butt to bowl, however, when the door -- she of the sticking, nonreliable latch -- released and swung wide into the stall.


Luckily, there were no witnesses to my ankled-undies dilemma, so I was able to safely lean forward, close the door, secure the latch, and nestle my nethers back on the seat.


Just as the auto-flusher kicked in. The industrial-strength, apparently nuclear-powered, millions o' gallons per minute Firehose-O-Matic brand flusher. With impeccable -- some might even say diabolical timing, the majestic *WHOOSH* of water and air began just as I was lowering fanny onto porcelain.


My ass was plastered to the bowl with the awesome sucking power of a thousand Hoover uprights. I couldn't have stood at that point if I had thighs of steel and a team of oxen pulling me up. Meanwhile, the water -- now in a far more confined space, bounded on one side by my puckered-out posterior -- lapped and sprayed around the bowl, like the dancing waters of a Vegas casino fountain. Only, on my ass.


In ten seconds, it was all over. The suction stopped, the waters receded, and I was left with my pants around my ankles, legs in the air, and my drenched derriere jammed in the toilet. When I was finally able to extricate myself, I looked like I'd received an ass hickey from an overamorous hippopotamus. And given the volume of water involved, I felt like she'd used a little tongue, too.


I cleaned up, did what I had to do, and practically bolted from the stall when I was done, lest I be sucked back into the toiletwater tempest. I've been a bit scared to use the facilities in the building ever since, frankly. And I make damned sure that once my ass is down on the seat now, it's down for the duration. Open doors, fire alarms, alien invasion, I don't give a damn -- you people are gonna have to wait. I'm not going through that again.



You can imagine how I feel now about using the urinals. I haven't been scared of being sucked down the drain since I was six years old. Now, I pee from behind the trash can across the room, just in case. You can't be too careful when it comes to these bathrooms. Safety first, kids.