A good sold out gig in Leamington tonight, though I was tired and had a headache, which made it a bit tougher for me. To be honest I was still a bit shaken up from something that had happened to me earlier in the day, and worried that I might be coming down with cholera or something.
I had been to the gym and was having a shower. So far, so normal. Whoever had been in it last was one of those annoying twats who turns both taps back to zero meaning the next person gets a freezing cold burst of water all over them if they only turn the on off tap. I always forget to check. I don't know if people do this accidentally or as a little practical joke or maybe they want a cold shower and are too inconsiderate to think of adjusting the controls.
The gym I usually go to has two dispensers on the walls, one with liquid soaps that doubles up as shampoo and one with conditioner. They are placed fairly high up the wall, filled from the top, with a button at the bottom to release a small squidge of the contents. They are sealed, but not particularly efficiently. The conditioner dispensers are particularly inefficient and often give out an impractically small dollop and I, and I presume many others have discovered that if you hit the dispenser at the top the lid will pop off and you can get a sufficient quantity of conditioner with your hand.
Today though as I squeezed the button I thought I had been lucky because a fair sized squodge of conditioner came out into my hand. I started massaging it into my hair.
Suddenly I became aware of an awful smell which was almost overpowering in its stenchiness. It smelled very much like the contents of an ill man's intestines. For the moment I had no idea where it was coming from. My intial assumption was that someone in a neighbouring cubicle had just released their bowels and was possibly suffering from dysentery. The smell seemed to be all around me. I couldn't escape it. And I couldn't leave the cubicle as I had conditioner in my hair. The smell got worse.
It took a while for the cogs in my brain to put this together, partly I suppose because it seems unlikely that a gym would change their regular conditioner to one that smelled of shit, but slowly I began to wonder if somehow the shitty smell was coming from my hair. I couldn't quite believe that it would be. That made no sense. I discounted the possibility for a second, but then tested my theory by squeezing out another splurt of the stuff that was meant to give my hair body and fragrance. I sniffed it. Sure enough it smelled like liquid sewage. What the fuck?
I noticed that the dispenser seemed to have a small brown smear inside it about halfway down and it didn't take much imagination to put two and two together and made the most obvious, yet almost unthinkable conclusion. Had someone put shit in the conditioner dispenser?
People are disgusting and we've already known in the past that the patrons of this gym are not averse to
showering with the door open or possibly faking diseases to get you to touch them. Is it possible that someone gets their kicks by placing various bodily fluids into the soap dispensers, knowing that other patrons will end up washing in their spunk and filth? It seemed kind of unlikely. To do this the person would have had to shit in their own hand and then reached up to smear the faecal matter into the dispenser, which would seem to make the joke as much on them as anyone else. Or they could have brought the shit in with them.
But what other alternatives were there? What would make conditioner smell like shit, other than shit?
Whatever the truth I was now worried that I not only had shit in my hair, but also that my hair was going to be smelling like this for the rest of the day. I was about to get in a car with Reliable Pete. If I smelled of shit would he believe the story that it was conditioner that had made me smell this way? For the moment though the main issue was to try and get the shit (either literal or metaphorical) out of my hair. I washed it and my hand over and over again with the shampoo (and yes, the realpoo pun was not escaping me here) before I started to worry about what the phantom shitsmearingintheconditioner-er might have put in there. The shampoo was white and gloopy and I think we all know what might easily have been hidden in there. And if you were the kind of person who got off in putting shit in conditioner knowing it would soon be in a stranger's hair, then where would you deposit the result of your excitement?
I moved to another cubicle, though nowhere was safe, but I hoped that a smell free environment might at least help me get an idea of whether my hair was stink-free. I felt a bit sick and more than a little psychologically scarred. I was also worried that someone else might go into the cubicle of doom and suffer this same, awful fate. But concerned too of the health implications of rubbing faeces into my scalp.
Once I was out of the shower I tried to track down a member of staff, though I was naked aside from my towel and my faecal hat so couldn't yet go out of the changing rooms. I saw a man in staff uniform at the hairdryers and told him what had happened. He told me that this was not his area and I needed to talk to someone from a different department. I thought this was a little slack of him, especially if there was any kind of danger from whatever was lurking in the soap dispensers. I think he realised that he was maybe being a bit lax as he went off to find someone from the right team to look into it. I think he might even have been smirking a little. Like a man putting conditioner with faeces in it into his own hair was somehow amusing.
By the time I was dressed, feeling a bit freaked out and worried, I went to the front desk to tell them about what had happened. The man from the changing room was standing there chatting to them, but when asked told me he hadn't informed them, though had mentioned it to someone at the pool. I expressed my concern to the people behind the desk and gave them my number saying that I would really like to get a call from them when they had looked into it, so they could tell me what was in the dispenser.
It was probably psychosomatic but my scalp felt itchy and the smell from the cubicle felt like it was hanging around me in a stink cloud. Although when I got home my girlfriend couldn't smell anything.
The gym left me a message later to say that they had looked into the cubicle and found nothing sinister in the dispenser, though acknowledging that this was an unpleasant experience for me and that the smell was pretty awful. They said they didn't know what had caused the incident, but suspected it was a chemical reaction between the conditioner and the cleaning fluids used to clean the dispenser. In a way this seemed worse than it being shit (which wouldn't have really been their fault), and it also seemed a bit unlikely. How could two things designed to make stuff clean and fragrant combine to make the smell of shit. Perhaps I should have taken a sample for my lawyers. But I didn't really want to walk around with turd filled conditioner in my pocket. A couple of people with knowledge of chemistry on Twitter felt that their explanation was unlikely, so the mystery remains. I feel a little traumatised by the whole episode and if I was the kind of person to ring no-win no-fee lawyers I wonder if they gym might be forced to make recompense. It's certainly not very good publicity for them. It's good that they provide complimentary hair prodcuts at their gyms, but not sure that it's so great that occasionally these products smell of sewage.
Although I was not the only one to wonder if this was an act of God. I have been saying how unwilling I would be to worship a God who is short tempered enough to kill you for mocking him, but if he played Balls of Steel style tricks on you if you mocked him, like setting up calls with rude journalists and putting shit in your conditioner, then I would have a lot more respect for Him. I told the story at the start of the second half of the show and it went pretty well, so there might at least be a routine in it, though a lifetime free membership to the gym would be enough to stop me revealing the name of the company that has shit flavoured conditioner!
Why does this stuff always happen to me?
Lucky it does really, I suppose, given my chosen profession.
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