It started like any regular day. I was done with my business meetings in Singapore and next was an investor roadshow in Hong Kong. So I found myself in Singapore airport, one of my favorite airports in the world. Why shouldn’t it be? It has everything and is so well run I wish all airports in the world were just like it.
I was walking towards my gate when I made that fateful decision.
Before you understand the logic of my stupid decision, you have to know first that I have a bladder the size of a pea. Yes a regular green pea. This problem is also compounded by the fact that I drink more water than a blue whale.
So every hour I drink enough water to power Niagara falls and all this water is stored in a bladder the size of a pea. Well okay maybe not a pea but maybe a bottle cap.
Being the best airport in the world, Changi airport had restrooms everywhere and right next to every single gate. I walked into the one right next to my gate and it was like how you would expect any restroom in Singapore. Clean like a laboratory and bright like a Yankee stadium.
The next few things happened very very quickly and in the following order:
1) After having verified that the restroom was clean, my eyes sent a signal to my brain to tell my brain that the coast was clear.
2) My brain then sent a memo to my nose to stand down. Any foul smell that would normally come along with public restrooms do not appear to be present. The memo read “Breathe normally. No breath holding required”.
3) On a separate line my brain communicated to the buff muscled crew of my legs to walk towards the closest urinal right next to the cubicles and my bladder was told to prep for unloading.
4) As the crew manning my nose were having water cooler conversations after being told to stand down, a red alert went off. The nose had picked up the smell of shit from a nearby cubical. This shit was no normal shit. The offensive, pungent and vomit-inducing smell indicated that a fully formed turd the approximate size of the USS Enterprise Aircraft Carrier sat floating majestically above the water of one of the nearby cubicles.
5) The well trained crew of my nose hit the red alert and the fail-safe system kicked in. The fail safe system is meant to automatically hold any breathing temporarily when a foul smell was detected. Apparently when you smell shit in the air, it’s somewhat because shit particles are floating around.
6) The trained crew of my nose did a stellar job. They held off any other entry of gas from the invisible to the eye brown turd cloud. What they didn’t account for was that the nose and the throat were connected and the shit particles that had already gone in through the nose was so strong, so gloriously despicable that it punched the throat into irritation.
7) The throat reacted as it naturally would in a situation like this. It initiated a coughing sequence to expel the shit particles from going further down the throat and into the unsuspecting lungs.
8) This is when the shit hits the fan (pun not intended). In order to cough, the body requires air to cough out. So when a cough is initiated, the mouth and nose automatically take a deep breath. Because the dark brown floating cloud of shit existed in the air right outside the body, the nose and mouth ended taking a huge gush of “shit air” right before the cough.
9) At that moment the brain stored the memory of a totally new feeling. In the past years, the body of Timothy Tiah has felt the brunt of taking all sorts of shots. There were vodka shots, tequila shots, whiskey shots and even flu shots. Never ever before though, has the body ever absorbed or taken in a package of air to pungent, so rude and so densely packed that it felt like taking a shot of shit.
10) For a short few seconds the body shut down as it recovered from the shock. The reactions to this crisis were mixed throughout the different parts of the body.
i) The brain screamed and swore that heads will roll for this.
ii) The crew in the eyes, nose and throat all shook fearfully, not knowing which one of them was to be blamed and would get the boot.
iii) The tongue was just recovering from having shouted enough curse words to make the movie Reservoir Dogs look like Sesame Street.
iv) The hands were busy covering the nose.
v) And the crew in the large intestine and anus were thinking that everyone else was totally overreacting. They deal with shit every day and a little shit never killed anyone.
11) The aftermath was not pretty. The shit shot was so strong that it lingered in the throat some 20 minutes later. In that 20 minutes the brain was able to do a damage assessment. 32,000 brain cells, 50,000 lung cells and 48,100 cells in the throat were killed in the attack. Blood that ran across the body had been contaminated and temporarily turned brown but fortunately the crew in the kidneys have been working over time to cleanse it all.
It was a rough day for the organs running the body. But they lived yet again. The only bright side is that the tongue and lips can now proudly communicate to other human beings that he knows what shit tastes like. Because he has eaten shit before.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space