“Hero,” the man whispered.
In a stroke of mad genius, he grabbed the plunger from the maintenance closet. He approached the urinal as if it were a wounded animal. He inserted the rubber cup, sealed the drain, and pushed .
Greg chose the last one.
He did the only thing a reasonable man could do. He stopped mid-stream.
Greg washed his hands for a full two minutes, straightened his tie, and walked back to his budget meeting. No one knew what he had done. No one ever would.
He plunged again. And again. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His thrift-store tie dangled into the danger zone. On the fifth plunge, a sound emerged: a wet, shuddering schlurrrrp , like a giant drinking the last of a milkshake through a bent straw.
He took his position, sighed the sigh of a man who has just subtracted $4,000 from a column that needed to add $12,000, and began to relieve himself. The stream was steady, unremarkable. For ten blissful seconds, all was right with the world.
But for the rest of the afternoon, whenever he heard a faint gurgle from the building’s walls, he smiled. He had faced the urinal clog—and won.