That's awesome! Destroy THEIR table, and they give YOU free food. Gonna have to try that one sometime. LOL

Okay, so there are three different Walmart stores within range of where I live, and I will go to whichever one I am nearest at the time while I am out. As anybody familiar with the stores knows, each one has its own unique little differences in layout and accommodations in relation to the various sections, check-out areas, and - as will be relevant in this story - bathroom arrangements.

So I strolled into one of the lesser-used Walmarts one day to pick up a few odds-n-ends before going home for the evening. All was going well until...... Uh-oh.... the rumbling in my lower intestinal tract and the sudden cramping in my bowels informed me I had an extremely limited amount of time to find an industrial-strength toilet and park my ass on it pronto. As I happened to be nearer to the back of the store, I quickly did the sphincter-clench-tip-toe-rapid-shuffle walk toward the rear restroom facilities while clenching my teeth and grasping the shopping cart hand bar in a white-knuckle death grip. And as if in some horribly warped dream, it seemed the closer I got to the bathroom area the further it receded away from me. Beads of sweat were quickly forming on my forehead and tunnel-vision was setting in when I finally reached my destination and released the shopping cart in mid-stride, as by this time I was now doing something of a cross between a penguin waddle and bunny hop to move forward. Busting through the bathroom door, I made my way in a blur to an available stall about halfway down the line, and with only nanoseconds to spare I managed to get properly seated prior to the unleashing of hell. The sound alone was almost demonic in nature. I will spare you the details of the smell. I think I may have even been crying a little bit. I know my ears were ringing, at least.

Okay, you may be wondering, "So, what's so embarrassing about that?" Well, allow me to rewind just a little bit and fill in a couple of details I failed to mention initially. First, as with most Walmart stores, the rear bathroom facilities are situated in the same place as the layaway area, meaning there is generally always somebody within the immediate area. As it was, on this occasion I happened to catch a glimpse of an elderly man sitting on a bench located just outside the bathroom doors. (The male and female entry doors were directly across from each other.) For obvious reasons, I really did not pay him very much attention on my way in. Secondly, upon entering the bathroom and while making my way to the stall, there was a distant part of my subconscious that registered something decidedly "not right" about this particular bathroom facility. But, again, my subconscious was being hideously over-ridden by more pressing (literally) conscious matters at that moment. And finally, after entering the stall and during mid-exorcism, I heard the bathroom door open and two different voices reached my ears through the near-deafening ocean-surf poundings of elevated blood pressure due to circumstances. And to my horror, I realized those two voices were DEFINITELY not male voices. And at that point it dawned on me, that odd detail my subconscious noticed upon my entry was the fact there were no urinals along the walls of the bathroom. OH...... FUCKING..... SHIT.... Oh, but wait. It gets better...

This particular bathroom had about 8 or 10 stalls, and I was down toward the end furthest from the door, meaning there were multiple other empty stalls before getting to the one I occupied and was horribly defiling at that moment. Apparently, that did not matter, because in a most surreal moment, I heard the stall door immediately to my right open, and then saw the cutest little pair of pink and purple cartoon character tennis shoes crossing the floor to the toilet less than three feet from where I was summoning Satan from my asshole. And there was absolutely no way I could stop the sounds at that point. It. Was. Horrible. And the whole time I can see beneath the stall barrier the two adorable little tennis shoes, tip-toes barely touching the floor, kicking idly back and forth as children often do. And I hear that teeny-tiny non-male voice calling out to the other (older) non-male voice who appears to be at one of the many sinks over toward the entry door. "Oh-holy-hell! This is SO wrong on SO many different levels! This can't be happening!"

Thankfully, the two non-male voices finished their business fairly quickly (although I am certain if felt like an eternity). And by that time my ass had expelled all of its demons. I cleaned up as best I could, and sat waiting for just a moment to make absolutely certain there was nobody else in the bathroom. When I was as sure as I could be, I quickly exited the stall and made it to the exit door in a speed that would have made The Flash look like a snail. I made it out the door, thankful I had not encountered any other "non-male voices" on my way out. But then I looked over at the bench. And there sat that same elderly man I had glimpsed on my way in, and he was looking at me in such a way as to say, "What the fuck, dude?" I quickly averted my gaze, found my shopping cart, and constantly waited for the firm hand of a security officer to grab my shoulder during the rest of my time in the store. It was awhile before I visited that store again.

When I first went to Japan in the early 1970s, I lived in a small apartment with no bathroom. That was very common in those days, and every suburb had two or three public bathhouses. You find one by looking for the nearest smokestack.

You take your shoes off at the front door and leave them in a locker there. Then you go in through one of two doors, depending your gender. The male and female bathing areas are separated by a long wall about 6 feet high. The manager sits on a raised platform near the entrance, collecting money from people going into both sides. The day I went, an old guy in his 80s was sitting up there.

As I went in I asked him in my halting Japanese what to do. He told me to get undressed and put my clothes in a locker before going through a glass door into the bath area. As I was doing this, I noticed other men slamming the locker doors and taking out the numbered key, which had a rubber band to go on your wrist.

So I slammed my locker door and reached for the key. No key. There I was stark naked, penniless and alone on a strange planet. I asked a guy what I should do, and he pointed toward the manager's seat. So I went back to get a spare key from the old guy, who'd chosen just that moment to go for dinner and left his beautiful 18-year-old granddaughter in charge. There I stood, stammering and mumbling as I tried to remember the Japanese for "key". (It's kagi, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.) Finally I got the message across and she calmly got down and followed me into the men's area to open the locker with a master key.

That's the benchmark, the gold standard of embarrassment. It's the naked at school nightmare in real life.