When Stealing is OK

One day I was shopping at a particularly disgusting grocery store in a particularly sketchy part of St. Paul. Suddenly I had to go pee but my cart was completely full and I realized I couldn't wait for the bathroom at home and I would have to go in their bathroom. ICK!

Careful to not touch anything, I sideways-ed it into the stall and hovered over the seat. Like I said, I was in a hurry, and so I didn't notice until it was too late that there was no toilet paper in the stall. AACK! As you know, I don't like getting wet and part of that aversion means that I am not the kind of woman who can just NOT WIPE. I started to cry. Nay, hyperventilate. 

Panicked, my eyes darted through the stall. Like some sort of weird amazing miracle, I found a stray roll of toilet paper on the flood, under the back corner of the toilet. EW, but YAY! I would simply have to bite the bullet and unroll a few layers, toss those, and then use the inside part for my purposes.

Question for the reader: How do you hold a loose toilet paper roll for dispensing paper? You stick two fingers inside the roll, grab the end and start pulling, right? Right. So that's what I did. But it felt wet. And so I yanked my fingers back out. And looked at them. And saw poop.

Then it was time to cry AND hyperventilate AND flap my clean hand while I simultaneously held the poop hand as far from my body as possible. Finally I somehow managed to use the clean hand for the original task of unrolling the few layers and then wiping. I RAN to the sink to scrub my contaminated hand. You guessed it, NO SOAP. I one-hand washed those fingers as best I could with the hottest water I could get. Then I ran back into the store. The closest aisle was the cleaning supplies aisle. I squirted 409 into my fingers, but didn't feel like that did anything at all. Frantic, I searched every product, continuing to cry and flap and hyperventilate. Duh! "Soap", I thought. I felt justified in stealing a SoftSoap Antibacterial from the soap aisle, and went back into the bathroom to properly wash my hand.

I collected myself, held my head high, paid for my groceries, went home, cut my hand off, poured bleach in the bloody stump and then took a full shower.

The moral of the story: Never EVER stick your finger(s) into an unknown stray roll of toilet paper without at least looking first.  Also, stealing is OK, but ONLY in an emergency and as long as you give the soap right back to the bathroom of the store you stole it from.