Torture

I’ve seen the film ‘Saw’, you know the one. People find themselves in bad situations. They have to escape or they die a slow death. Well let me tell you. That’s nothing.

It’s a three hour meeting. A chance to meet the new big cheese boss of the department. It’s a working lunch. A selection of frilly sandwich platters, crinkle chips and crusty bread. Your standard bottles of water, fizzy and still. The token silver coffee flask, albeit with two missing cups. Good to share I guess. The paper plates, as if it was a six year old birthday party.

Well, it could have been a six year old birthday party. That because precisely twenty minutes into the three hour meeting, I felt like saying “But I want to go to the toilet!”. But, in attempt not to completely scare the big boss cheese man, I decided to wait. Wait for an opportunity to slip out of the door. It’s just it never happened.

Whilst I was mentally debating the pros and cons of the ‘putting my hand up’ technique against the just ‘getting up and walking out’ technique, I started to hear my bladder telling me “I don’t care if you use the ‘piss on the floor’ technique, just do something about it now.

It was like someone standing on my stomach. I realised I had been a bit too premature in going up one belt notch that morning. My morning joy at tightning another belly belt notch was now coming back to haunt me. Whatever way I moved, the belt dug into my bladder like a bad blister on badly fitted shoes.

As I wriggled around in my chair, I started to become conscious that I probably looked more like mentalist in a straight jacket then a sensible employee. The torture was not only belt induced. It was mental. As I looked around the room for distractions, all I could hear was the flowing of water from the ice blue bottles around me. It was as if everyone else knew my level of pain, after all, the sound of running water on an inflated bladder is like putting vinegar on a fresh wound.

As well as the flowing water, the torture was completed by the clock sitting opposite me. It had stopped. I had no idea when this meeting was going to break, if at all. The pain was getting worse. To distract my mind I tried to justify why this multi billion dollar company that I was working for had banned the supply of sticky notepads for phone messages. Because they cost too much money. I thought about the instinctive laugh that morning when the new boss in the department asked for some sticky pads.
And got that response.

But it wasn’t working. I broke after fifty five minutes. By then it was too painful to think of the exit plan. I just got up and left. After my most pleasant break for a long time, I sneaked back into my seat. “Right everyone, time for a break, shall we take a fifteen minute toilet break?”. My timing had been as good as that clock in front of me.
All pain, no gain.



(Why do we call it Toilet? The literal meaning is ‘A covering of linen, silk, or tapestry, spread over a table in a chamber or a dressing room’ makes it seem odd that we use it to describe a W.C.

The word was adapted as a genteel euphemism for water-closet, perhaps following the French usage cabinet de toilette, much as powder-room may be coyly used today. This has been linked to the introduction of public toilets, for example on railway trains, which required a plaque on the door. The old trains had two rooms, a W.C and a toilet (to prepare yourself). With more space been required, the two rest rooms had to merged into one, and the word ‘toilet’ was used for some reason instead of ‘W.C’). As a result since the mid nineteenth century, the word toilet has been used.