Neanderpundit

Last week the Oglet and i witnessed a truck almost stuck under a viaduct.

It made me remember a time, working at my first job at the lumberyard in Cedar lake, where I would drive along the North Shore to work every day. One day, though, I saw a truck jammed hard under the viaduct at the Monon tracks.

The sign said clearance to the 12 foot line, but the crappers were stacked to 13’9″.

Actually, it was a box truck, too tall for the viaduct, and the big iron beam had peeled back the top like a can of sardines. The truck (a relatively light truck) had buckled in the middle, now devoid of it’s supporting lid, and it had sprayed toilets all over the road. No way I was going forward, nothing for it but to take the long way around the lake.
So I did, ended up being 11 minutes late. This was a big deal, back then. The Yard foreman Roger asked me what the fuck my problem was, and I said “Crappers”. He looked at me like I had another head, and turned away.

Found out later on that it was a truckload of crappers destined for the yard where I worked.

handicapped crappers. They are like shithouses with rollcages. Of course I never use one when there might be a real need for someone who is actually handicapped.

In the places where I work, there are two basic types of crappers; floor johns, the normal ones all the employees use, and human being johns, that human beings use.

Often, in large manufacturing plants, there are human being johns in disused office areas, and those are the ones I seek out. As often as not, they hardly ever get used, but are still cleaned three times a day.

So I find the clean, disused johns, and use them commonly during normal break times. A union employee will never shit on his own time, he’ll get his shitting out of the way on company time so he can use break time for what he wants. Consequently I’m used to being alone.

So today when I parked my keister on the tall throne, i expected just to take a leisurely shit, and be done with it.

I did not expect to have company. Female company, who came in and yelled “Anyone home?” I stopped to think, yes, there were urinals here, this is a mens room, so it must be a cleaning woman. I was about to speak up when someone else answered.

The next thing I knew, I was a witness- well, my ears were- to a lunchtime quickie by two employees of the company, coming to this room because they figured it was disused and quiet.

THis shit can only happen to me, I swear.

I only have this story secondhand, so unlike the rest of my seen-it-with-my-own-eyes stories, this one could conceivably be conjecture- though I have at least four actual witnesses to the event.

My inlaws have a couple of cottages on Lake Huron. Now, don’t think Matha Stewart cottages. Think sturdy little shelters in the dunes. Lots of them still have outdoor crappers. At the time of the story, my inlaws cottage was one of them. By the time I first saw it, it had indoor plumbing.

Anyway, back in it’s heyday, it saw a lot of parties, a lot of long weekends, a lot of kids sleeping in bunk beds while moms and dads and aunts and uncles played poker, drank rye, and smoked, late into the night.

On one of these nights, one of the combatants had had a little too much to drink, a little too much to party, and had to head out to the outhouse to relieve herself of her stomach’s burden.

In the morning, she discovered she was missing her false teeth.

In those days, the cost of false teeth was prohibitive.

I’ll let you fill in the rest of the story. And let you wonder, as I do, who had it worse; the three of my inlaws that had to don boots, move the outhouse, and wade in to find the teeth, or the person who had to clean them and put them back into her mouth.