* the massive flush

On our trip back to Madagascar, after having had a year furlough in the US, we stopped in Switzerland. i still remember the lovely red houses, with flowers, shutters and all. the lovely lakes and mountains. it was beautiful!

but i also clearly remember what i think of now as “the massive flush.”

at this point in time my brother and i were curious middle schoolers. so when we came across a bathroom at whichever Swiss airport we were waiting to fly on from, we were quite mystified by something we hadn’t ever seen before–automatic flushing urinals. they were designed to sense a person’s presence and then flush when the person moved away. just a little exploration of this led us to realize there was a red beam of light that, when interrupted, made the device flush. before long we figured out that one could get the urinal to do this by simply breaking the beam with your hand!

and that’s when we got ourselves in trouble. there were about 20 of these urinals in a row and we realized one could run  down by them, breaking one beam after another, in effect getting the whole room to flush almost at the same time! so we did this. what a roar it resulted in! how powerful we felt! so then we decided to try doing this with one of us following the other, running as fast as we could. little did we realize the lady sitting at the little table in front of the bathrooms was actually responsible for these bathrooms, as this was something we’d never seen before, either. so imagine our surprise as we started off down the row of urinals when she lumbered into view, totally blocking our escape from a room that was in the middle of double flushing, yelling at us in a language we’d never heard before, which was probably just as well, as she was not a happy lady. fortunately for us, her strategy was wrong and instead of just blocking the door, she came into the bathroom towards us, waving a mop in one hand and a spray bottle in the other. so i split right, my brother split left and we ran as fast as we could by her and out the door, with the roar of our double massive flush in the background, one of us getting sprayed, the other spanked with the mop (she was good!). safely getting around the corner, we then had to quickly stop running and catch our breath as quickly as possible as our folks were just down the hall. arriving in front of them, both of us a bit winded and wet from our endeavors, our parents looked us over and asked, “What had happened?”

“Oh, nothing” we said.