Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for me to solve all Outkick reader problems with the anonymous mailbag. As always, send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

You guys have been killing it of late with your anonymous mailbag questions. Keep them coming.

Great gambling offer for all of you out there, especially if you live in Louisiana or New York, where sports gambling just went live, you can bet $5 on the Super Bowl winner and if you pick the right winner, you get back $280. That’s a 56-1 payout. Have a friend or family member take the other side and you can bet $10 and guarantee yourselves $280. Do it today.

And with that in mind, here we go with the anonymous mailbag:

“As background, I am a relatively new partner at a large law firm. When I describe my place in my work culture, I tell people that I’m a less attractive/competent/suave version of Don Draper in season 1 of Mad Men – older and more experienced than most of our employees, but still younger than our senior partners who are in charge.

Today, I walked into the bathroom on my floor at the office, and I was followed in by one of our senior partners who is a nice enough guy, but just totally socially incompetent. There are three urinals on our floor, and I take the far one to leave an open urinal between the senior partner and I. He doesn’t take the social clue, posts up at the urinal next to mine, and starts talking to me while we’re peeing. I hate urinal talkers. While he’s talking, I unexpectedly start to rip a fart, and out comes the most horrific mix of cheek-slapping and liquid-squirting noises. Yep, I’ve sharted myself next to the senior partner.

He immediately cuts off the conversation, zips up, washes his hands, and exits the bathroom to escape the fetid stench emanating from the back of my pants. I stand there holding my flaccid, urine-drained member pretending to still be peeing, so that I can escape to a stall to assess the damage as soon as he gets out of the bathroom. After he leaves, I waddle to the stall. By a miracle of God and some thick underwear, the river of poo has been contained in my underwear and not touched my suit pants. I try to gently remove my suit pants, so I can throw the underwear away, but people keep coming in the bathroom. We don’t have floor to ceiling walls on our stalls, and I don’t want people to see my shoeless feet and bare legs under the stall door/walls, giving away that I’m trying to remove soiled underwear.

I make the call to waddle as fast as I can to my office and take off the underwear there. When I get to the office, I get the poo-stained underwear off and my pants back on, but I don’t want to throw the underwear away in my office. I also need something to carry the underwear out in. Generally, I have a million file folders in my office, but today, there isn’t a single one to be found. Here’s where I think I made my only obvious mistake. Our supply room is about 10 feet from my office, but I didn’t want to leave the underwear while I ran to get a file folder. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I’m a panicker and would have died before getting off the landing craft at Omaha Beach. Maybe the poo underwear and I had formed a bond. I don’t know. Rookie sharter mistake.

So, I call a junior associate who sits down the hall and told him to grab a file folder out of the supply room, crack my door the minimum he has to (but absolutely not come in), and throw the file folder in my office. He’s confused, but he follows orders. I put the underwear in the file folder, walk all the way to the bottom floor, and throw the underwear in an outside trash can.

Other than the obvious choice to just leave the underwear in my office and not involve the junior associate in my shart drama, what could I have done better? Please keep this anonymous.”

This is one of the greatest anonymous mailbag emails we’ve ever gotten.

I was legitimately laughing out loud multiple times as I read this. So props on the drafting and the story, it’s a work of anonymous mailbag art.

Here’s where I disagree with your D-Day poop plans, I think you have to get rid of the underwear in the bathroom. Sure, some people may see your bare legs in the stall, but, first, what are the odds they recognize these legs as yours? Second, you could always claim you had a workout scheduled and were changing to work out clothes, which would include shorts. (That’s assuming anyone sees your bare legs and makes the connection and ever brings it up with you, which is a low probability in the first place.)

You also desperately need to clean the pipes here too. You are an adult who just unintentionally pooped yourself in public. You can not, and I think this is important to stress, you absolutely can not trust yourself not to poop yourself anew. You have to sit down on the toilet and poop out whatever else might be there. Otherwise you might have another shart incident.

That’s why you should have never left the scene of the proverbial poo crime in the first place. Especially not with the evidence of your poopocalypse still inside your pants. Leaving the underwear on left a potential poo calamity in place.

Just think about the potential issues here: what if your strong underwear barricade gives way and then stains your suit pants? What if you get hung up in a legal conversation with a colleague on the way to your office and the stench becomes apparent? What if someone leans over close to you and says, “Hey, I think you might have stepped in dog crap.” And then you have to pretend he’s right when it reality he is smelling your own feces on you? What if, god forbid, a client is in the firm, sees you, and calls you in for a meeting? Virtually everything that can happen to you is bad when you choose to voluntarily walk around the office with poop in your pants.

No, what you had to do here was get rid of the underwear in the initial bathroom and free ball it the rest of the day. (Or at least until you could go to a local convenience store and buy underwear. Sidenote, you have to buy something else too, right? A guy in a suit in the middle of the day just buying adult men’s underwear is providing serious evidence that something has really been torn asunder in his day. I mean think about it, is there anything more embarrassing — non medicine or pharmacy related, STD treatment would be pretty humiliating for instance — for a single man to buy alone than just fresh underwear? You have to add some toothpaste, a toothbrush, maybe a couple of tshirts and make it look like you’re traveling and forgot your clothes. I honestly can’t think of anything worse for a man in a suit to be buying in the middle of the day than adult underwear. But this is a fun dinner party debate. What’s the worst thing for a single man to have to buy in the middle of the day in a convenience store by himself? I really think it’s underwear.)

Anyway, back to the bathroom, you wait until the coast is clear and no one else is in the bathroom — even if it takes like four hours — and then immediately take your poo underwear and throw it in the trash. Calmly wash your hands immediately thereafter and then you free ball it right back to your office and pretend this never happened.

As for the senior partner who witnessed the shart, you have to pretend this D-Day never happened. You know how the greatest generation just came back from World War II and barely discussed the atrocities they’d seen? That’s you and this senior partner. He’s clearly pretending it didn’t happen. You have to do the same.

And you have to hope that this doesn’t kill your chances of ever being a partner at the firm.

Because, let’s be honest, if you were in his position and one day the idea of you becoming a partner came up, wouldn’t the first thing you thought about, regardless of the work you’d done, be the time you were standing next to each other and pooped your pants?

You better be damn good at your job going forward.

“I have one young child and just had another born recently. As the now father of two kids (you can relate with your three boys) I find myself periodically drawn to watch movies like Taken, Man on Fire, etc specifically for the thrill of thinking of what I would do to protect my own kids.

I won’t pretend to be Liam Neeson or anything, but I’m about 6’4 200 lbs of very athletic build, quite a bit of martial arts training, and the owner of a jealousy-inducing weapons stash to most red-blooded males to go with enough financial means to “make shit happen”. My question is how many guys watch these movies thinking about their own kids, and how many (obviously insanely less) could actually do anything if we found ourselves in a predicament? I count myself among the most capable of all possible dads, and I still think it’s crazy – not that it would stop me from trying. Interested to hear your dad thoughts.”

I’m fairly lenient when it comes to classifying someone as a “bad ass dad,” and I’d say, at most, ten percent of dads could actually kick serious ass.

The way I think about this, and I do occasionally think about this, is if you had to pick someone to fight for you in a trial by combat, how many dads could you immediately eliminate? I’d say 90%. That is, just based on height, weight and general “are they a pussy?” analysis, you could completely eliminate 90% of all dads from fighting on your behalf. And, just to be clear, I don’t think anyone should put me in the 10% of dad badass categories. (I’d personally put myself, I’m 6 ft 180 and not in awful physical shape, in the 70% dad category for 42 year olds. That is, I think I could win a fight with 70% of 42 year old dads in the country. The other 30% would beat me up, and the top 10% would destroy me.)

But to be a bad ass on movie levels, I think you’d essentially have to be a current Navy Seal, a Green Beret, people of those categorizations. And, at best, that eliminates around 99.9% of dads.

Having said that, my dad hero thoughts mostly run towards two story angles: 1. saving my kids from being hit by cars only to be heroically mowed down myself while saving their lives. (My dad hero move is a throw the kid out of the way of the onrushing car just before being crushed by the vehicle myself.)

Sidenote here, by the way, how many kids would die being hit by cars if adults weren’t involved in raising them? I’ve spent 14 years now telling my kids not to play tag in parking lots or to run and chase each other in parking lots and they still do it. It’s wild. I wonder how much of this is no time for kids to evolve fear of cars from an evolutionary basis because cars are relatively new?

Like every time I see a deer or a dog that got mowed down by a car, I think about how wild this had to be for their evolutionary risk analysis. For like a hundred thousand years deer could pretty much cross any path without fear of getting hit by anything and then, boom, in the last seventy years or so, which is a total eye blink in their species history, suddenly cars are crushing them left and right if they cross a road. (You can also point out the advent of guns, which virtually extinguished the buffalo, for instance, as another modern danger, but they were getting hit by arrows for hundreds or thousands of years, which means they had reason to be afraid of humans. This car phenomenon is still relatively new. This also makes me wonder, by the way, about evolution in general. Let’s say humans live another hundred thousand years. We’ll continue to evolve, what would we evolve out of having? Right now, based on the state of masculinity, I’m afraid the answer is a penis.)

Anyway, I fantasize about rescuing my kids from being hit by cars, that’s prong one, and I also think a ton about saving my kids from alligators, crocodiles or shark attacks, which is prong two of my dad hero daydreams.

I swear I think about saving my kids from animal attack all the time.

And not just for my own kids.

We spend a lot of time down in Florida now and we’re frequently at restaurants with sandy beaches or whatnot, alongside brackish bodies of water in the panhandle area of Florida. There are always toys laid out for kids at places like these so they can play in the sand, sometimes while their parents wait for meals and are drinking nearby.

I’m like a hawk at these places because I always assume an alligator is going to come roaring out of the water and grab a kid. And that I’m then going to react immediately and fight the alligator, all while attempting to save my kids. It’s not even just my own kids, I’m watching theirs too, because most other parents are just totally oblivious to what’s going on.

Inevitably I’ve got a beer in my hand, or whatever, but I’m totally locked in on the idea that I might have to fight an alligator at any moment. And I’m analyzing how long I could hold my breath, would I be able to hang on during a gator roll, how big of an alligator could I rescue a kid from, what would I say in television interviews after I heroically saved a kid from an alligator, crocodile or shark attack? I mean, I’m ready for this moment to happen.

So much so that every now and then as I’m prowling the beach of a brackish body of water as kids are playing in the sand at water’s edge, I’m thinking to myself, “I wish a motherfucking alligator would just try me right now. Because I would whip his ass.”

Like, I’m really thinking this.

I don’t know if other dads think like this about either issue, but I definitely do.

All the time.

I can’t even remember if I thought about things like this before I had kids, but if I did I only did it because of the resulting amount of single women who would immediately try and bang me for saving a kid from an alligator. You save a kid from an alligator attack and you’re sleeping with ten women over the next decade, minimum, just based on this fact. I would walk up to women all the time at Florida bars and just say, “I may not be the best looking guy you’ve ever seen, but I saved a kid from an alligator the other day.”

I’d keep the video of my post alligator save on my phone, pull it out to show them at bars, I mean every single woman right now reading this answer is thinking to themselves, “You know what, I would totally go home with a guy who approached me at a bar by talking about the kid he saved from an alligator attack.”

Of course you would.

That’s a chick goldmine.

But I’ve been married for 17 years now. If I saved one of our kids from an alligator attack, 100% chance when we eventually got home and I was laying there all covered up in bandages from my alligator attack wounds and rolled over and tried to sleep with my wife, the first thing she’d say would be, “How many times have I told you not to let the kids play that close to the water?”

“Long-time, first-time here. I work in finance, in a pretty upscale office that has very, very clean restrooms. Over the last few months, my restroom breaks have coincided enough with a coworkers to notice a very vexing habit… he clips his fingernails while on the shitter. Now, I don’t hear it EVERY time but I’ve probably heard it three or four times in the last few months since we’ve been back in the office.

So tell me is clipping your nails in an office bathroom socially acceptable? My instinct is “no” because you leave behind personal detritus. However I could argue that because we have good (and thorough!) janitors, it really shouldn’t matter since it gets mopped up nightly. That argument, though, would subsequently justify someone jerking off in the toilets as well, so it’s a slippery moral slope.”

It’s possible I’m totally in the minority here, but I have never clipped my fingernails or my toenails in my life. Not once.

I always just rip them off when they get too long. (“Too long” is a totally arbitrary standard, by the way. I just look down at my fingernails or toenails and decide when to tear them down. As I read this now I realize I may be in a tremendous minority here, but I’ve never in my life ever touched a toenail or fingernail clipper. Now I’m not a total savage, however, I take those extra fingernail trimmings and put them in the trash can, I don’t leave them laying around somewhere.)

I’ve also never had a manicure or pedicure either.

When it comes to fingernails and toenails, I’m like a baseball batter wearing with no gloves, I’m old school. I’m taking care of my fingernails and toenails like the pioneers did, just ripping them right off. (I also never bite my fingernails, which is a much grosser habit. Because then you end up cutting your fingers too and you always have hang nails and honestly, I’m getting sick just thinking about you neanderthals who bite your nails).

Having given you that background, I’ve got to say, you can’t just clip your fingernails — or toenails — and leave them on the ground in a public or private venue. That’s unacceptable behavior, great janitorial staff or not.

It’s also, frankly, weird behavior.

Now is it weird or unacceptable enough behavior that I’d say something to the guy? No way. Because it seems, to be quite honest, like kind of a neurotic behavior. I don’t want this guy as an enemy because he’s got some deep seated angst issues and I feel like he’d definitely torpedo your career over this battle. This seems like the kind of guy who has an enemies list he’s constantly revising and updating.

So I’d just deal with it.

If, however, you really feel strongly about it, you could mention it to the janitor and see if he’s bothered by the fingernail clean up situation. (It would also let you know how common this is). Then the janitor could raise the issue with floor management for a potential email to be sent around forbidding behavior like this. But this seems like a lot of work on your behalf. Plus, you’re then engaging in regular discussions with the janitorial staff about cleaning issues and I don’t know that you want to be their go to office source on their cleaning issues.

Because next thing you know you’re getting a knock on the door and the janitor is asking for your help on upperdecking toilets or dribbly urinators and that’s just a bridge too far.

So I’d probably keep quiet on this issue.

…

Keep the great emails coming to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed and hope you guys have great Tuesdays.