For the Love of Turds

I used to have the two most hilarious co-workers in the entire world when I worked at the State Department.

Here's one of them right here... my friend KP...

... who's waving her spider-like little hand with her squished up eyes and frightening, ghoul-like rictus on board some military flight in Kirkusk or Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan or Samarkand or some other similar place that has 13 consonants in a 15-letter name. (Photo courtesy of KP, who enjoys all sorts of deprecating humor.)

I don't have any good (and by good, I mean embarrassingly funny) photos of our other hilarious friend, JM, but I bring both of these women up today because every now and then they send me e-mails, and it makes me miss them greatly.

Last month I got an e-mail from JM that said "Hey, KP and I were out to lunch today, and we saw a dwarf on a bike, and it made us think of you!" And I thought... hmmm, isn't that sad that a dwarf on a bike would trigger a memory of me. What does that say about me? And then I remembered that we were all out to lunch one day a few years ago, and I saw the world's tiniest dwarf in a tiny wheelchair, and I barked out, "Oh look! It's a little person... on a little machine!" And now this is how I am remembered by my co-workers.

There are many funny work stories (usually at my expense) that KP and JM still enjoy... such as the time I ate another co-worker's lunch from the refrigerator and didn't realize until halfway through that it didn't taste anything like the casserole I had brought... or the time I accidentally put my wallet in the refrigerator and then went to a doctor's appointment and needed my insurance card and had to have my co-workers find my wallet in the fridge and fax the card information to me.

So... having been branded the office goof, it came as no surprise when I received this note in my inbox last month from KP...

I think that you're the only person I know who will
truly appreciate this little gem that I've run across.

For background, I've been helping a friend remodel
his house (including 3 bathrooms) and I expressed
concern about the cheap, likely not very efficient,
toilets that he intended to purchase.  As a result of
this, I did quite a bit of research on toilet flush
capabilities and I found this awesome study on how
much "waste" certain brands of toilets will flush.

She attached a link to a Canadian study that had been conducted on the efficiency of toilets... and here are the most scintillating bits...

... in case you can't read this, it discusses a number of fecal tests done on men and women and says that the average maximum fecal size of a male participant was 250g (with a 95th percentile size at 305g... perhaps after a large meal at Outback Steakhouse?) and a woman's size was only 237g. It therefore recommended that a toilet should be able to flush a minimum of 250g of poop.

Better yet, however, they actually did test studies (and with a great amount of seriousness!) on toilet capacity using soybean paste.


And here's what soybean paste looks like formed into human turds...



So if you're looking for affirmation that your job isn't so bad, just think about the man attached to the fat little hand in the picture above (perhaps he is the 305g specimen maker?) and feel better about yourself.

And ultimately, yes, my old co-workers do know me well, for I laughed out loud in the school library upon viewing these photos. True appreciation indeed!