The Stool Sampler

A tinkling bell dangled from the open door at the front of the small shop. A young man stood in the gap letting fresh sky gently spritz into the stale front office, almost washing the teak wood with skimmed clouds.

Mr. Craig Rap--the owner of the company, the proprietor of the location, and the very man who created the business--ambled from the back room. His sizable back and gut wafted hints of old plastic and soapy furniture toward the young man. "Hello?" he asked, before he came into full view.

The young man said nothing, but finally brought the other half of his body into the room and let the door shut. He opted to wait for Mr. Rap to get closer to avoid stretching his voice awake.

Mr. Rap pushed his gut on the counter and leaned onto his hands while he lazily gripped the nearer edge. Because of the expectant, almost critical, look on Rap's face, the young man instinctively took inventory of Rap's appearance: dark hair slicked back and behind his ears with his hairline receding like frost slowly thawing above the windshield of a car; an angular face with skin that glistened like it should be sweaty except the moisture was too complacent to form beads; a mouth that looked like it never realized it was missing a cigar; finally, a cream colored, long-sleeved shirt with a stretched collar, tucked so tightly into taupe, beltless slacks that it formed pleats all along the waist. The young man couldn't see Rap's shoes, but he assumed they smelled like muskrats covered in chocolate.

"Hi," choked the young man. "I'm here for the position. That you have on your window... ...I mean..." In one motion he looked down and cleared his throat, then made the struggle to say, "I'm here to ask about the position you have posted on your window. I mean, in your window."

Because of the timidity of the young man, Rap instinctively dismissed his appearance, entirely. "The job opening, right?" said Rap.

The young man felt the rush of unwanted expectations beckon him out the door, but just said, "Yeah."

"'Yes' is better," replied Rap, as he walked around the counter. He grabbed a piece of paper from a short stack on his way to the young man. Holding out the paper, he asked, "What's your name?"

"David," said the young man. David glanced at the paper just long enough to see it was the application. The abundance of empty lines was enough to suck the energy out of his lungs.

"David whom?" asked Rap, with the entitled attitude of a pre-school scholarship.

This puzzled David, but he responded with, "Udi."

"Ooo-deee?" asked Rap.

"Yes."

"...how do you spell that?"

"U-D-I."

Rap repeated the letters to himself, then said, without skipping a beat, "The reason I'm asking is that, around here, you'll be wearing a name tag that has only your last name and your first initial." He pointed to his own name tag which read: C. Rap. "You see this? This is the most important part of your uniform, you see. You don't want the customer to know your whole name, because you don't want to get too close to the customer. That's the number one rule of customer..."

David waited for the rest of the sentence. Silence. "Customer service?" asked David. It scared him to ask, but he earnestly didn't know what Rap meant.

"What's that?" said Rap.

David hid in that silence.

Rap motioned with two fingers for David to follow, saying, "Come with me."

With every muffled creak of the floor under too many layers of carpet, David scrawled hot notes of suspicion in his mind. The vacancy above each thorny noise shrugged as if to say, "What, did you expect anyone else to be here?"

Two rows of industrial shelves lined opposite sides of the warehouse, with a polished concrete floor reflecting the light from the halogen rods high above their heads. There were pallets of white boxes staggered on both rows of shelves. "This is the warehouse," said Rap. "This is where we store each of the stool samples."

David wasn't sure what position he had decided to inquire about, but now he was certainly at a loss for words.

"Now, I know what you're thinking, and it's not THAT kind of stool," assured Rap. That opened a valve of pressure in David's mind to steam out the rapidly building disgust. "We sample stools for our clients to make sure they're made of good, solid stuff. The stools, I mean. The more compact the material, the better the stool."

David wasn't so sure, again.

"Now, about our clients," continued Rap. "We go through many large, sometimes corporate, entities that push out the stool samples, all of which I simply refer to as 'our system.' So, in my mind, when people keep asking where the samples come from, I just tell them they pass through our system, so I can spare them describing the process in too much detail."

Rap opened a box at the top of the pallet nearest them. He pulled out a small cylindrical container that was clear enough to see a shapeless, dark sample stored in water. "You might notice," said Rap, "that this sample has taken in a lot of the water. That's why it's plumped up a bit." David hadn't paid attention to the finer details of the sample, because it looked one discolored spot away from being nauseating. "Again, I tell folks time to time again, no matter what it looks like, that it's not THAT kind of stool. Lots of folks think it is, with the way it looks," Rap lowered his eyes to the ground and finished saying, almost to himself, "that it is THAT kind of stool. But it isn't, okay. Clearly. Right."

Rap made eye contact with David, then twisted the cap off the container and purposefully grabbed the sample, almost as if to prove to David that he would do it. He held up the sample while soiled water dripped from his fingers. The sample turned spongy as soon as it touched the air and stained Rap's fingertips. David decided to look at Rap's less-stained face, and asked, "What kind of stools are they, exactly?"

Rap snapped his gaze back at David. David's face burned red with shame. "I already told you," said Rap, with a tone so dense it sucked the air out of David's mouth. David decided catch his breath instead of press the issue.

Rap continued as though he forgot David ever existed. "Now, you want a stool sample to be good and hard. If you've got something that's soft, almost squishy, that's when you've got a problem." He pinched a wet flake off the bottom of the sample, then put the bigger piece back into the lidless container. "See this?" he asked, as he rubbed his fingertips in front of David's face. "This is a bad sample. It rolls up like child's playtime dough in our fingertips." Rap then wiped his fingers on his slacks. The marks resembled what one might find on the street after a car has skidded to a start. He twisted the cap back on the container, placed it back in the box, and they moved on.

"People tend to have stools that are variations of brown," said Rap, "That's just the type of material that's used to make each stool as it passes through our system. Also, it seems people much prefer to have a more earthy stool for their homes. But, like I say," he patted his hand on a stack of boxes, "I always say that it doesn't matter what color your stool is, so long as it can go flush and leave room for everything else." He gave the stack of boxes a couple of harder pats and continued, "Now, some stools are black. That's no fault of our system, it just means it's stayed in there for a little to long. Either that or the client painted it, somehow." Then, he took a couple steps backward and lazily patted another stack of boxes. "And," he continued, "some are green. That just means the opposite of black--they didn't stay in the system long enough to be rid of that original dye used to start the stool."

A primal defense mechanism in David's mind kicked in and caused it to go blank.

After Rap pointed out the fire extinguisher, the back exit, and the loading dock, they walked all the way back to Rap's office.

There were paper bags with notes stapled on them scattered around behind the desk and on the floor. Rap offered David a little-used seat, which was taken quite readily. Rap sat in his faux-leather executive chair behind the desk. He rolled a drawer out of the desk and grabbed a yellow sheet of paper, then slid the paper to David. "When you get a client who wants us to analyze a sample of their stool--now, I'll emphasize again: we have nothing to do with THAT kind of stool, right?--we give them a container, a brown paper bag, and that note for them to fill out with their name and the date the sample was taken." 

David picked up the note with no intention of reading it. He indicated to the paper bags and asked, "Do you get a lot of work to do, around here?"

Rap looked to where David had indicated and said, "Oh, these? No, I just like to practice stapling the notes when I get a free minute. Just to see where the best place is to put the note, right?"

David nodded like he could relate. He couldn't relate.

"Anyway, then we tell the client to follow the steps of a simple procedure," Rap said, then held up a one finger, ready to number a list from his mouth as it passed his hand. "First: gather; next: refrigerate overnight; finally: attach note." He turned to grab a paper bag and a container to present on the table, but was struggling to find a container that wasn't already in one of the bags.

David didn't notice what Rap was doing, and didn't know what was on the note, even though he was looking at it, but he did notice there was something interesting about what Rap had just said. He said, "Hey, if you turned that into an acronym, it would spell 'groan'. You could just tell clients to remember to GROAN when they collect their sample."

"What's that, now?" replied Rap without looking at David.

David decided to keep his thoughts quiet for the rest of the time, even though the words 'refrigerate overnight' had just caught up with him.

Rap had found a container and slapped it onto the desk along with a paper bag. "Now," he began, "the reason I started this business is 'cause, to me, there's nothing better than having a good, solid stool between your seat and your feet. That's why I started this business, and that's why I take so many samples, especially samples of my own stools--and I've got a lot of 'em. To put it simply: I think everyone deserves to have a good stool."

David stifled a reaction. He wanted to skip to the moment where he forgot any of this happened.

Rap continued, "I talk with clients all the time, and when they get their sample, they usually put too much effort into it. And I tell them, 'Don't strain to take your sample. Just take your sharpest knife, get a good squat, and let the sample come off on its own.'" He took a moment to breath in and sigh out. Then, he grabbed the three materials from the desk and set them back where they came from with long, awkward purpose. He stood up silently, and motioned with the same two fingers for David to stand and follow him.

They walked across the hall, and through the open door of the lab. Inside was dark except for a translucent blanket of blue light resting on the wall. Rap's voice suddenly took on a tone that was meant to play behind the ball, like he was expecting a generator to growl awake at any moment. He patted an empty white machine with small windows on either side and a white platform in the middle. "Now, some samples float, like this one here," he said. "That means that they've come from a stool that floats. Some stools float. Don't be alarmed by that. It usually happens when there's too many little air pockets that gather in the stool while it's being pushed through the system." David looked all throughout the container, but saw no sample, no container, and no reason to stay. David was done.

He motioned that he was going to go, like it was too loud in the room to talk, but realized it wasn't loud at all. "I think I'm just going to go," he said.

"What?" called Rap.

David stepped out of the room and started toward the door. Rap quickly followed, confused.

"I don't think this'll work out," David explained, still walking without turning his head.

"Oh, I see," said Rap. "Now, I'll get your name tag. We keep out our first name and just use our last because we don't want to get too close to the customer, considering it can be real jarring for someone to get negative results about their stools. I know I always take it hard." He started to walk into his office. Within one step, he said, "So, you'll have to be D. Udi--'oodee', right?--" and by his next step, David had already gone out the door, letting the bell say goodbye on his behalf.