By Georgia Grellier
Welcome back to Story Time With Georgia, where I relay weird stories from members of the CC community and sometimes just me. If you want to be Catalyst-column famous, find my email by stalking me on the internet and send me one.
Who: Yet another anonymous senior
When: First day of class as a first-year (oof)
What:
Like last week’s, this week’s story has a lot to do with the fact that common unrealistic fears do, in fact, become realized for an unlucky few — things like, say, pooping in your pants after the age of five, or pooping your pants in a public space while on a tight schedule.
The senior who shared this deeply personal experience with me had had a smooth first week at Colorado College during NSO. He’d made a few friends to get meals with, his roommate wasn’t so bad, and he knew how to find the building his FYE was in.
Despite the fact that it’s now four years later, every moment of this horror story has, for better or for worse (“for better” being that it is content for this column, and “for worse” being this was a real event that occurred in this person’s life), been permanently burned into his memory.
Where our tale begins, NSO had come to a close and the first day of the actual schooling that is ostensibly the point of college had finally arrived. To prepare for the very first day of learning in college, he and a few of those aforementioned new friends headed over to Rastall for breakfast 45 minutes before the start of class. After they used the swipes that, four years later they would realize they’d taken for granted, they chose a table, grabbed some food, and sat down for a not-frantic-but-still-efficiently-paced meal. This then-freshman had assembled a hearty plate of sausage and eggs for himself, and was maybe eating slightly faster than the average pace of the group.
Now, being on time to your first college class is not only a pretty good idea, but also a source of deep anxiety because absolutely no one wants to walk in and awkwardly stumble around for a seat when the professor has already started talking. With that fear in mind, the whole group was planning to head out 15 minutes before class, and the anonymous now-senior was full of nerves. Already a little type-A as a person, he wanted to leave absolutely nothing to chance when it came to finding a seat with at least a five-minute margin. His gastrointestinal system, however, had other plans.
In a one-plus-one-equals-three synergistic twist of fate, the combination of the speed of his sausage consumption and the preexisting pit in his stomach somehow resulted in him momentarily losing control of his bowels. Without going into excessive detail, he pooped his pants as they were set to leave, and not just a little bit. While it wasn’t immediately visible to anyone, including the people he was with, he didn’t even have to check to know what had happened.
This seems kind of reckless to me because usually when you’re pooping your pants, running doesn’t help, but anyway, he made a quick excuse and sprinted back to his dorm to call his mom, throw his pants in the trash, and make a pit stop in the shower before putting on a new pair, crossing his fingers, and sprinting to class.
Ultimately, he made it with maybe like, two minutes to spare, but he still had to buy new jeans and also live with a dark secret until his friendships had reached at least the two week mark. This kid really started from the bottom.
Takeaway: Personally, I would’ve taken this event as a big middle finger from the universe and especially gravity, which everyone always forgets to blame for these types of things.