Toilet terror

Today I was chased across the room by the toilet. When I told my workmates about this, they suggested that I lay off the LSD on Mondays, which I thought was a little bit unkind.

I don't want to bother anyone with the details of my ablutions, but suffice it to say that a toilet that is blocked and a toilet equipped with an infra-red based automatic flushing sensor is not the best combination if you don't want to be hopping panicked out of the cubicle, trousers around your ankles as a tide of filthy water spurts towards you.

I like to think of myself as a man of courage and steely nerve, and it's hard to square this with a chap reduced to crouching on the seat of the disabled toilet as waves of sewage swept towards him. Mysterious tides, indeed. Johnny Depp never had to deal with a backed-up bog in the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Thankfully I'd overestimated things, and rather than being drowned in effluvia, I got to exit the toilets without drowning, and a plumber was summoned to do his business with everyone's business. But that can't have been a happy ending for him, and it certainly wasn't a pleasant start to the day for me.

Should we be suspicious of toilets that have a drain hole right next to them? Does that suggest some sort of pessimism about the water closet's efficiency that means we should take care when it's time to flush?

Anyway, eight hours' later it was time to leave the office: today was the fifteenth anniversary of the company (and that means I've been with them for a third of their existence) so we were sent to the 33rd floor of the Standard Chartered building, to drink beer and eat food.

The Standard Chartered building is one of the best places to drink in Singapore, as you get a much better view of the Marina Bay Sands than you would standing in the Marina Bay Sands. On the downside, they would only serve you a drink if you already had a glass, some sort of insane catch-22 puzzle for alcoholics. Plus there's a microbrewery on the 33rd floor, and there are few sillier places to put a vat of beer than 33 stories above the ground.

But the toilets at Level 33 didn't explode or attempt to spray me with the contents of a cloaca, so I've absolutely no complaints.