Times I Shat My Pants #9

Shit-Job Interview

I’d just got the job, and the short walk home was fast becoming a strut. The kind of temp job anyone aware of shirts can get, but a job.

I exhibit the kind of confidence a 100% interview success rate gives you, the confidence of never challenging yourself, not even slightly. With a quick toothy snap for my ID card, I was on my way.

“Maybe, I’ll treat myself to a bottle of wine, tonight,” I thought. The wine I had rewarded myself with the night before, just because, gurgled an objection. Seconded by the bucketful of cookie dough ice cream I’d matched it with. All the sadness liquefied into that Facebook-dinner-for-1 had stewed and curdled into something darker. It needed to vent.

Now, I can’t speak for those unversed in the hasty steps of the Damp Pants Dance, nor will I. But, I guess when perennial toilet-users find themselves caught short in public, they are sure their undies’ good reputation will not be soiled, that day or ever. My tainted legacy is part of me.

“Look, you are not going to shit yourself,” I muttered to the same self that’s all too aware it’s crapped itself a listicle-memoir’s worth of times. This was happening. I was really talking myself into a self-fulfilling pant-ful. It was a cautionary post-modern tale for the internet age, and I was ‘The Boy Who Blogged Shits.’ 

Somehow, half a click from home, I just accepted that this poop’s conclusion was foregone. A veteran of 10+ poops in the field, I thought I knew what it was to shit pants. I would take this dump in my stride. But the torrent cared little for my experience. It flowed over me with the indifference of a tsunami. That familiar coldest of warmths spread as far down as the backs of my knees. The tides didn’t stop, and neither did I.

Head down, hamstrings damp, I walked the lonely brown mile. From the front, I looked like a churchgoing man; from the back, I looked like a churchgoing man, who’d shit his pants. The odd car honked, but they didn’t seem like honks acknowledged with a matey salute. “They can’t see shit,” I told myself. But, I could feel the itch of eyes on the back of my neck, and lower.  

Not until my front door was shut behind me, did I face the demon my past had set free.

My worst-case scenario was mere child’s shit compared. A brilliant yellow sheen was smeared from arse to calf of my Sunday best. This infernal eggnog had eaten through the layers of cheap polyester. My little brother has a high gross-out threshold, so I gave him a twirl. He left to console himself in the garden. This wasn’t a laughing matter. 

Now, when I look at the big smiling head taking up the entire available square of my old ID Card photo, it’s a portal to a time of innocence. I see the face of a go-getter; a wide-eyed company man; a man safe in the knowledge he knows all there is to know about shitting pants, a man about to be proved wrong.

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