A Shitty Day

I had been smelling it all day, but couldn’t pinpoint the location.  My workmate Jim told me it was probably just a particularly foul-smelling customer.  I tried to ignore it, and succeeded, until the end of the day, when I stood in it.

                It was shit.

                Specifically, it was human shit, one or two huge logs of it.  The culprit had evidently tried to defecate into a record crate which was hidden underneath a rack, but it had slid down and was everywhere.  They had wiped themselves on the carpet, and most horrifyingly, picked up chunks and flung them into the racks (something we inadvertently discovered while dusting a week later).

                I shrieked, ‘Jim! It’s… I think it’s… it is! It’s POO!’

                Jim wandered over, and laughed.  He had a calm, macho exterior, but I could hear the terror in his voice.  We stood staring in shock for a while, before shaking our heads and beginning Operation Defecation Clean-Up.  While Jim picked up the more solid chunks from the carpet, I began to furiously scrub the brown matter from the bottom of my shoe.  But, in my frazzled state, I forgot to put on gloves, and some broke through the single-ply tissues, positioning itself underneath my fingernail.

                As we cleaned up, we tried to figure out who it might have been and why, but drew a blank.  Or rather, there were too many possibilities.  It could have been the lady the night before, who had been holding a lengthy conversation with herself, or a revenge poo from any one of the irate customers we seemed to attract like flies on shit, if you’ll pardon the pun.

                In the end, we never did discover its origins, try as we might to envision possible scenarios.  You could say it was a cold case – literally, it had been there for a least a day, so the trail, and substance itself, had gone cold.

                The infamous Black Books sign proclaiming ‘No Mobiles! No Walkmans! None of that! Or any of the others!’ sign comes to mind when I think about that day, and I always consider making my own list of no-nos for the shop, and adding, ‘Absolutely, under no circumstances, is any shitting allowed!’

                Sidebar – as we were picking up poo and placing it in bin bags, a guy in his early twenties approached and asked for a job.

                ‘You are aware that we are cleaning up poo off the carpet, right?’

                ‘Yeah,’ he said. 'But still, it’s gotta be a cool job, right?’