TMI Thursday: The Kind of Girl Who … conducts business while doing her business (A NTKOG that, thankfully, wasn't)

Intended NTKOG: The kind of girl who, while in a public restroom, makes calls on her cell phone, heedless of public decency, dignity, or her callers’ eardrums.

I am: shy of bladder and faint of heart when it comes to public restrooms. During my two years in the dorms in undergrad, it was my primary goal to be that girl no one ever sees entering or exitin a restroom. I was eerily successful.

I am not:  really big on talking on the phone anyway, let alone in the cavern of bodily shame.

The Scene: The large restroom of the food court in the mall next to my current temp gig. Ideal, I figured, as it’s a) full of people, that b) I will never see again. All morning I chugged iced tea to flood out my bladder’s introversion, and when the moment was right, took my lunchbreak.

It took a while to figure out the perfect victim — er, lucky phone recipient. Finally, I settled on The Ex, because after living together for a few years, I figured the odds were slim that he had not at some point heard me peeing. Heck, he could probably pick the sound of me peeing out of some sort of terrible, dystopian auditory line-up just from my particular bladular cadence. (You can see I’m campaigning hard for the role in his wistful reveries as The One That Got Away…)

After pacing anxiously outside the restroom doors, I finally girded my (aching) loins and stormed the nearest stall like the Bastille. Snag: I was alone in there. So I crouched on the toilet for five or six minutes, clutching my cell phone, before, mercifully, a group of eight or nine women entered en masse. The time had come! 

I started to loosen my muscles, but then — TWIST! As I scrolled urgently through my contacts, I remembered: I deleted his number out of my phone a few weeks ago in the throes of break-up pique. Frantically I scrambled to remember his number, and right as my bladder was slipping, I hit the send button.

Only to find that the mall architects had apparently pre-empted this particular social dysfunction by rendering the restroom I was in as the only thirty square feet in the whole friggin’ mall with no. cell. reception.

For a moment I considered just faking the call, to at least give my fellow restroom compatriots the awk-talk treatment, but no, I decided. It would be against the spirit of the NTKOG project. It would be ignoble. It would be another twenty seconds at least until I was finally able to pee, and that just wasn’t an option.

So What Went Wrong? Ultimately, I decided to wait on this, the NTKOG I have been dreading since the conception of this project. Not to discard it altogether, mind, but merely to postpone it. And like the deferral of all dreaded tasks, this greatest mortification looms before me even more horrifying than before.

On the bright side, this massive TMI moment does suit nicely for the lovely LiLu‘s weekly TMI Thursday roundup – if only because no blog I know of features a WAAAAAAAAY TMI Wednesday.

But, as a cautionary note for everyone other than The Ex, who is now off the hook because all of the surprise will be gone (much like the magic in our relationship after he reads about my pee travails), beware any calls from TKOG. Because you might be next.

Tagged as: awkward, bathroom, embarrassing story, etiquette, pet peeves, public restroom, restroom, shy bladder, technology has in some ways made the world a terrible place, TMI Thursday