Poop
Ok, look. I know that there isn’t a huge demand for random life stories, but maybe a few folks out there will be amused by mine. I have had, so far, an interesting life as I see it.
As is true of most folks who live long enough, I have seen some fairly major changes. Unlike many people, I have had a very broad range of jobs. This has the advantage of forestalling boredom as well as learning a variety of skills. It also has the disadvantage of continually starting a new career at the bottom.
Many of my early jobs were in the poop business. I was an animal technician with rhesus monkeys, a dirty clothes Porter in a hospital laundry, a farm hand on a beef farm, and for a short while I cleaned all the restrooms for a medium sized company. Of course my personal life has also involved a fair amount of poop what with babies, cats, dogs, ferrets, snakes, various rodents and lizards which have lived with me over the years.
Rhesus monkeys save their effluvia for use as weapons against their enemies. When 1100 of them only have 4 or five enemies, each enemy is graced with a substantial amount of this effluvia. Needless to say, I took a lot of my work home with me.
You wouldn’t believe how much of hospital laundry is covered with diarrhea. The surgery linen was also covered with blood and small pieces of body. Each machine load weighed 175 pounds. I found myself wondering what the weight, net of animal products might be.
I next went to work on the farm. The pasture had lots of meadow muffins, but it was easy enough to avoid stepping in them. The feedlot was a whole different thing. It was approximately knee deep in a mixture of manure and urine. The beef critters were inclined to reach their heads through fences where the grass was greener. No shit (literally.) In doing so, they tended to destroy said fence. When it became necessary to repair the fence, I was sent in with boards, a hammer and nails. I nailed the boards to the inside of the posts. When I finished, I had roughly a two inch coating of poop on my jeans from my knees down.
A few years later, while working on my bachelor’s degree , I had a night job cleaning the 10 restrooms at a medium sized computer chip company. This job was less about poop, but I once walked into a restroom to discover that someone had had explosive diarrhea all over the room and left it to dry.
Of course, like most people, I have changed my share of diapers, scooped my share of puppy poop, cleaned my share of cat boxes and tracked down concrete hard ferret poop in random corners. During my time teaching science, I cleaned up snake poop, turtle poop and lizard poop. As recently as today I cleaned up a bunch of packrat poop.
A motengator* of poop. Possibly a poopengator.
*My definition: A whole huge pile
From the Urban Dictionary:
1. Gargantuan, immense (adj.)
2. 10,000 motherfuckers (interjection)
3. A mean-ass swamp monster, specifically a mythical alligator with two heads. (noun)
4. Euphemism for motherfucker (used along the gulf coast by African Americans)
Man, that shit is motengator!
That sumbitch is one fat motengator; he can't even fit through the door.
by Randall Paxton September 4, 2007