a story i wrote about working as a shipper at the first DLX

i worked as a shipper at the first dlx, small place unit #4 i think. everything was just starting.. real, spitfire, thunder... they had been around but jeff was really starting to give it a push. my boss, the shipping manager was a guy named sperry, it was just me and him. He wanted to be Rollins and so did Jim at the time. Both of them had the Rollins mantra of being a writer, being  physically fit, black clothes, and the blackest coffee. Sperry had inquired about my  coffee consumption... i had told him i dabbled in the area of coffee. He immediately  runs off and brews up some coffee that had the consistency of roofing tar. He pulls down  a mug and hands me a hot cup of his brew. I figured I'd just kind of sip at for the next bit, we went back to shipping and he's got his Rollins band playing and were loading up boxes, i take a few more pulls on the coffee and then suddenly i start to sweat, my heads spins a bit,  and i feel so weird. Faking my way at normalcy for about 5 minutes until my stomach lets out a grumble that gives the 1989 earthquake a run for its money. DLX was very small then, just a couple of rooms and the bathroom was pretty much dead center. Discretion was not much of a possibility when it came to bathroom blow outs... as was the case in this particular moment when 3/4 of the staff saw the new shipper (me) hot footing down the hallway with my eyes locked on the bathroom door. The toilet and i went to Vietnam together and the silence after the battle was one in which you could hear a cotton ball drop on the ground. Maybe no one noticed???..... This soldier exited the employee bathroom with a cold sweat and a red face to the welcoming  applause and cheers of my new co-workers. I wanted to crawl inside one of the board boxes, I'm a sensitive creature and at 18 in a new environment the sensitivity was peaking. I was pretty sure at the time someone was already on the phone to Thrasher feeding them the story of the  new DLX shipper that just exploded their facilities for the latest Trash column. I returned to the shipping room and Sperry was packing a box totally unaware of my last ten minutes, looking over his shoulder and shouting "good stuff huh!" in reference to the coffee.

 *warning the photo below has nothing to do with this story, please make no correlation between the above story and the below photo