I don’t know how it is possible that I am still having bathroom-related close calls at the age of 24.

I guess because I sit down the vast majority of the day, I don’t always feel (or at least consciously register) (ahem) the early stages of my urges. So I’m sitting here, it’s 4:00, and I realize, I have to go to the bathroom promptly.  At the exact same moment I had that thought, a student entered the office that needed my help.  Here I’ve been sitting for hours and hours on end, not working, with plenty of time to escape to the ladies, right?  But I didn’t escape to the ladies room, and now I was faced with a tough decision.  Either I needed to stave off my bodily processes for a few minutes and help this student, or I needed to look like a jerk-face work evasion artist by trying to shuck the one tiny bit of work that I’ve had to do all day long.

It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal.  I realized I had to go potty, and I had to help one more student before I got to go.  Simple, right?  And it would have been simple, if I hadn’t apparently missed the first 2,236 signals that my body sent me.  That signal that I finally caught was not a, “hey, sometime in the next hour, you might need to go make some room in here,” kind of a signal.  It was a, “HEY IDIOT FACE.  WE ARE DYING DOWN HERE.  YOUR BRAIN HAS BEEN TOO INVOLVED IN THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN DISTRACTING YOU FROM YOUR NEEEEEDS. GO NOW.”

I was reliving scenes from Austin Powers on the way to the bathroom, with Fat Bastard taunting me the whole way, telling me that I wasn’t going to make it all the way down the hall.  What kind of a working professional has these problems?  I don’t have a backup plan in place for bathroom emergencies.  Would I have had to go home? Go commando? Wash in the sink? Quit my job?  Claim food poisoning? Get airlifted out because of the embarrassment? The answer is yes.  There’s no way you can come back from a potty-in-your-pants-on-the-job experience.  You just have to quit and hope that when your next job calls for a reference, they don’t ask too many questions.

I made it, by the way.  Luckily the bathroom was empty, because I’d gone from a slow-and-steady jostle-free walk (fighting gravity), to a dead stall-sprint (racing gravity) to try to beat the clock.  It totally worked, but it would have looked awfully funny to whomever was there, watching me hike my skirt while wearing heels and dodging flying stall doors.