Guest Bathroom Toilet Salad Attack

I was at a friend's house. Not just a friend; someone I was a little nervous around and wanted to impress. Not so much "impress," either, as much as "not embarrass myself around."

I did my best to be witty and charming and didn't spill anything on my shirt. Then I excused myself to use the bathroom.

The bathroom was a nice one, with color-coordinated walls and tiles and most of the residents' HABA items hidden in cupboards and drawers. The towels were matched and unrumpled. I was clearly outclassed.

In that frame of mind, it took me a moment to find the toilet. All the fixtures were brushed aluminum, and the toilet was no exception. The part that threw me off was that it was a four foot tall square pillar of brushed aluminum. It looked like a high-end filing cabinet enshrined in the corner of the bathroom.

I really had to use the toilet, though. I didn't just have to change the Water of Life; I had to drown the Little Maker. With a growing urgency, I inspected the obelisk.

As it turned out, the resemblance to a filing cabinet was not superficial; there were two drawers on the front, ready to be pulled out. I opened the lower one - about toilet seat high - and was relieved to find a thick drawer containing a brushed aluminum toilet seat. As I pulled it all the way out, it locked into place and filled with water.

Excellent.

I used the facilities and experienced no abnormality, at least until I got up to flush.

There, floating in the bowl, was what looked like a two-pound bag of precut salad greens. Shredded carrots and all.

That's not the kind of thing that usually comes out of my anus. Still, I figured I had better just flush it and get back to civilization. I could investigate later.

So I flushed the toilet, via a small metal button on the side of the case. A little red light burned on the front and the water whirlpooled, but the salad fixings did not go anywhere. Too buoyant. I have in the past tried to flush bags of pre-washed salad greens (with carrot shreds), or at least parts of those bags, after they have gone off, and encountered the same difficulty. This, however, was not the privacy of my own living unit, and these salad greens did not come from a bag.

What to do? I couldn't flush again. There's nothing like leaving a nervous gathering for the bathroom, then having the toilet ring out once, again, three times, four times - Jesus, five flushes? - while everyone else tries to ignore your absence.

So I decided to pull out the other drawer. If it was also a toilet bowl, I could claim to have used the top one, and not know anything about the rogue salad.

I pulled out the top drawer and did, indeed, find a toilet bowl. As it locked out and started to make filling sounds, the other drawer retracted back into the tower and flushed again. I was a little relieved when I realized I could make some joke about being confused by the indoor privy and how I reckon it done flushed itself. I do that about modern car fixtures (post-1972) enough anyway.

That's when the top bowl started filling up, not with water, but with more salad. It was dry, as dry as lettuce gets, and filled the bowl solidly then started falling off the sides. As more and more lettuce mounded the bowl, the pace picked up and it began to fly out, not violently but certainly with enthusiasm.

I slammed the top drawer closed.

It started to push open again, apparently through force of salad. I grabbed a towel bar and jammed it through both of the handles on the drawers, but that just meant that the top drawer brought the bottom one out with it, both spewing salad. It looked like an early, green and carrot-including autumn in the bathroom.

Attempting to do something, I found the plunger. Then I realized that I had no idea what to do, so I started hitting the toilet with it. Hitting and hitting and hitting. Oddly enough, the brushed aluminum toilet seemed to be taking damage from the rubber and plastic (it was one of the fancy ones) plunger. Big welts and dents were appearing in the top of the cabinet.

I kept hitting it as the lettuce spray slowed to a trickle. I think it was because the drawers were too dented and deformed to let any out. I kept hitting it, though. Hitting and hitting and hitting. After a while the toilet was just a hunk of metal, looking like a garbage can that had had a run-in with a trash compactor.

I stopped, feeling the burn in my palms where I'd been holding the plunger. Forget excessive flushing, the bathroom was covered in salad, I'd been gone for at least ten minutes and my host's toilet was now a useless lump of metal.

Using the plunger, I broke the glass out of the bathroom window and squeezed myself out into the night.

I was the best thing I could do, given the circumstances.