The Gundecker

As an enlisted member of the United States military, one of the first things you’re trained to do from the moment you set foot in boot camp or basic training is how to be expeditious in your use of a bathroom, head, commode, whatever your branch decides to call it.

Well, congratulations, you graduated boot camp, now it’s time to un-train. The military will get theirs, ladies and gentlemen. Now it’s time to get yours.

The military is often characterized by the term “hurry up and wait.” In between tasking, you often end up with wide swaths of your day that involve sitting on your poorly-paid enlisted ass and waiting for someone higher ranking than you to walk in, get upset that you’re sitting idle, and then assign you busywork to ensure that someone higher ranking than them doesn’t see that their poor planning as a leader has resulted in junior enlisted members (read: grease monkeys, grunts, et al.) sitting around doing nothing.

A good leader will tell you “If you’re not doing anything, don’t do it here.” You’ll meet about four of those guys total, and the statistics imply that he or she isn’t going to be in charge of you.

So how do you break the cycle? How do you ensure that you don’t get assigned to blow sweet fairy kisses on a freshly-painted office door to make it dry faster?

By taking gigantic, time-consuming shits in the middle of your workday.

You will probably meet people who will tell you “the bathrooms at work are nasty, I shit at home.” These people are fucking chumps. Drop your doo-doo while at work. You hold that thing in like your life counts on it. Make yourself uncomfortable, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and costs the military man-hours.

If you play your cards right, you’re looking at a solid 30-minute break, right in the middle of the workday, possibly multiple times a day, depending on your diet.

Why not just hide somewhere?

Oh of course, you can do that. On a warship, for example, you can find an angle iron nobody looks in, a space nobody wants to climb down to, anywhere to post up and dick around on your phone.

The repercussions, however, are far more dire when you get caught. Consider, for a moment, the following scenario:

Scenario A:
Your supervisor catches you skating off, let’s say whole-hog taking a nap while you’re supposed to be at least available during the workday for additional tasking. When you’re being reprimanded, the words “dereliction of duty” get thrown around a lot, because you knowingly hid when somebody needed a body to brush the fake grass in front of the Admiral’s office.

Well, now you’re fucked, because you were in actual violation of an article of the UCMJ.

Meanwhile, consider:

Scenario B:
Your supervisor desperately needs someone to sweep rainwater in the parking lot. Eventually, he finds you, waltzing back into your workspace thirty minutes later.

“Where the fuck were you?” he or she will ask.
“Why, I was flogging out a fudge monster down in the berthing,” you can respond.

Is that going to absolve you? Of course not, but consider if the issue is pressed. Let’s say someone desperately has it in for you, and they (briefly) consider NJP. Can they prove you weren’t actively committed to anti-deuce warfare? Absolutely not, and if they want to take it to even one person above themselves, they’re going to have to explain that they needed someone for nonsense tasking, and that you were shitting, and unavailable. They’re going to have to explain that several times. To their bosses.

And what happens if they really need your ass, and find you gritting your teeth and thinking of England in a bathroom stall? That makes the scenario even worse. They honestly kind of come off like a goddamn creep bombing in on you while you’re trying to release a brown sewersnake back into the wild.

Hell, you should hope they lack the introspection to make an issue of it, because now they have to tell their bosses “Well, I really needed someone, and this guy was doing a poopoo!”

At worst, you’re going to get chided and told to stop taking power-shits in the middle of the day. They can’t tell you to do that. Your gastrointestinal tract is not required to follow the laws of men or gods.

As always, there are some ground rules to follow to ensure you don’t fuck this racket up for everbody.

The Rules

Rule 1. If you’re actively, gainfully employed, don’t just dip out and pretend you’re shitting when you’re not. The work won’t go away if it needs to be done, and you’re only screwing yourself.

Rule 2. Don’t make more work for other people. If someone else has been working all day, and then they’re the ones that eat the turdburger because you skated off to go take a shit, you owe that dude.

Rule 3. Similarly, and a combination of rule 1 and 2, if there’s something going on that requires a group effort, don’t dip out on your fellow troops just because you don’t want to do it.

Rule 4. Don’t take your shit-breaks right after meal hours. There’s often a line waiting to use a stall, and if you take one up for more than a few minutes, you’re an asshole asking to have a fresh, hot turd chucked over the stall door and into your lap.

Rule 5. If it’s a port-a-potty, don’t take your time. That shit’s gross, you fucking weirdo.

Follow the rules, and you’re in for a solid unsanctioned break that rivals those of the smokers. But for real, nothing rivals the amount of breaks a smoker gets in the middle of the workday.

What have you gotten out of because you were dropping a deuce at work? Let us know in the comments!