Panic set in. He zipped up with the speed of a gunslinger. But what now? If he walked away, the next poor soul would walk into a geyser. If he stayed, someone would find him standing guard over a urinal on the brink of Armageddon.
Muscles clenched. A tiny, desperate prayer escaped his lips. He was now locked in a silent war with physics. The clog—some demonic wad of paper towels, a wayward pen lid, the ghost of a hundred dried-out hand soaps—lurked somewhere in the dark plumbing below, refusing to yield.
There are two kinds of men in this world: those who have faced the urinal clog, and those who will. urinal clog
He did the only thing a reasonable man could do. He stopped mid-stream.
Then the water level began to rise.
The urinal was full. Not just full, but gravid . A pale amber meniscus had swelled to the very lip of the porcelain bowl, trembling with each fresh contribution from above. And in that trembling, Greg saw his future: the flood, the smell, the janitor’s knowing glare, the HR memo about “restroom etiquette.”
Greg chose the last one.
He took his position, sighed the sigh of a man who has just subtracted $4,000 from a column that needed to add $12,000, and began to relieve himself. The stream was steady, unremarkable. For ten blissful seconds, all was right with the world.