This is the most recent of my horrific bathroom tales. So recent that I still fume about it. But I got tired of telling people this story and having them laugh about it while I just got more frustrated. So I decided that sharing it will help me to separate from the awful experience and see the humorous side of things.
About a month and a half ago, my inconsiderate roommate (as featured in my poem: “Requiem to My Forced Shared Living Space Counterpart”) redeployed back to America, leaving the room entirely to me, to enjoy in naked, dingle berries-dangling-in-the-breeze happiness.
Of course, since he’s an thoughtless bastard, he left a ridiculous amount of trash that he didn’t feel like throwing away and personal stuff that he didn’t want to take back with him. Took awhile to clean. But at least it felt like my own room.
But this story isn’t about my roommate leaving, it’s about what happened a few days before he vamoosed.
Allow me to set up a little about the trailer in which we lived. It was a pretty decent-sized room with one door for an entrance, one door for a walk-in closet and one door that led to a bathroom that was shared by an adjoining trailer, where two other people lived. Since it was a shared bathroom, with a door leading to each living area, it only made sense that the doors had locks on them so people couldn’t just walk into other rooms and steal all of their precious…whatever (I honestly have no idea what I would steal from the other room. Since they were soldiers, it was very likely that the only things they had were copious amounts of MMA DVDs and Toby Keith albums). However, due to the fact that these trailers were built in Iraq, by the lowest bidder, (somebody who obviously got all of their construction knowledge from episodes of Bob the Builder) the locks were on the wrong side of the door.
At the time, my roommate was working a regular 9 – 5 shift and I was working the 11:30 – 8 pm swing shift. Which meant that I was able to sleep in and shower at my leisure. This allowed me to enjoy hot water and privacy.
One morning, while I was bathing my glorious, Adonis-like body, in what I thought was privacy, my roommate knocked on the bathroom door, yelling that he had to take a piss. I didn’t know why he was back in the room when he should have been at work and I really wasn’t down with him being in the bathroom at the same time as myself, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of an answer. So I didn’t say anything. He came in, did his business and left, closing the door once again behind him. I finished my cleansing ritual, (which is more complex than Patrick Bateman’s) wrapped myself in my towel and proceeded to exit the bathroom so I could get dressed and go to work.
Only, I wasn’t able to exit the bathroom. My roommate had locked the door behind him. I was trapped in the bathroom!
You see, with the locks on the wrong side of the door, it wasn’t possible to lock people out of the bathroom, for privacy’s sake, but it was very possible to lock people in.
At first I wasn’t too worried, I figured he was probably in the room packing to leave, or perhaps watching one of his many, inane skateboarding videos. So I knocked on the door to get his attention. No response. I knocked harder and still no answer. I started banging on the door furiously - all in vain.
I turned my attention to the opposite door, hoping that somebody in the other room was around and would be able to let me out. I knocked in their door, cautiously at first, but with increasing fervor. There was nobody home.
Realizing that I couldn’t depend on others to help me get out, I decided to use my own skills at breaking into buildings to break myself out of my bathroom. I tried prying the door open, I tried removing the hinges, I even tried taking off the doorknob. Nothing worked.
It was at this point that I began to panic. I was trapped in a room with no air conditioning, no clothes and no way to get in touch with anybody. I couldn’t contact people at my job to let them know where I was and it looked like I was going to be a prisoner until the end of the work day, when somebody came home. I wasn’t claustrophobic, just pissed. My anger at my roommate grew by the second.
Fast forward to 40 minutes later. Sitting despondently on the toilet, I suddenly heard a sound. One of the people in the adjoining room had finally returned. I knocked on the door and he opened. I was free! I explained my situation to the guy and thanked him for letting me out. But it wasn’t over yet.
I realized that my roommate had not only locked the bathroom door, but he had locked our trailer door as well. I had gone from being trapped in a bathroom, to being locked out of my room…while wearing nothing but a towel.
The next step was to get a back up key from the billeting people, a five-minute walk to another part of the compound, through heavily trafficked areas. Not an appealing prospect. Fortunately, I was in a bit of luck there. An hour earlier I had taken a load of clothes to the laundry trailer to wash. I only had to make it as far as the laundry trailer in the towel; I could then (as long as nobody was around) change into some clothes and go get the key. So that’s what I did. With each step I grew more and more angry at my roommate, fantasies of vengeance playing in my mind. A speech wrote itself in my head, waiting to be yelled at my roommate in a public place.
I made it to work on time that day, no thanks to him. I encountered him in our work place, but because I’m a sucker who doesn’t like confrontation, I toned down what I said and delivered it with a touch of barely controlled rage. I told him what he did and told him to stay far away from me until he left for America.
Telling other people what had happened only made me madder. Because, honestly, it’s hilarious to hear stories of somebody locked in a bathroom, (unless it happens to you). If it had been a closet or just about any other kind of room, the humor factor wouldn’t exist. But bathrooms are naturally funny. It’s just the way things are.
Now, many people believe in karma. Somebody does something bad to you and something bad will happen to them at some point down the line. You probably won’t be around to see it happen, or get any satisfaction from it, but you just have to believe that it’s going to happen.
I don’t buy it and I don’t outsource my revenge to cosmic forces, I like to take care of business myself. Luckily, I’m an Evil Genius™ so vengeance comes naturally.
I won’t go into details of what I did to the guy. Suffice it to say, I did something to his boots and some of his favorite DVDs. I set up some treats in his baggage for customs to find as he was going through Kuwait. But my favorite part was what I did to his precious, precious lotion. From that day on, each time he applied lotion to his face (which he loved to do at least twice a day) he was applying just a little bit of my own special ingredient to his skin. I hear it’s high in protein, so maybe I did him a favor. Perhaps I should market a brand of “Josh’s Own Baby Batter Lotion.” I think it’ll be a big seller.
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