A million years ago, I was married to someone else. Fortunately, we were married and divorced before the Internet, so Google today finds no evidence connecting the two of us.
Which is great, because I’ve got a story to tell about her. When I told this story in my newspaper column 30+ years ago, she threatened to divorce me and the rules of our marriage changed.
When you’re a newspaper columnist and have to be funny and entertaining on a deadline, everything in your life is grist for the mill. So I told a lot of stories that involved my wife.
Like the time we accidentally spilled an entire gallon of new paint on the floor of our garage and were so poor we couldn’t afford to replace it, so we got down on our knees and scooped up the paint with our bare hands and poured it back into the can. (And that, kids, is how textured paint was invented!)
The problem was that my wife was extremely, almost painfully shy. She came from a genteel family with roots back to the Mayflower and the founding of the Massachusetts colony. And while they were good and kind people, they were still kind of stuck in the 17th century. New Englanders in general don’t care to air their dirty laundry in public, but these were especially private folk.
So it was painful for her, being married to a newspaper columnist. When the bottle of pee came along, I knew that this story was marital dynamite and I should NOT put it in my column. But I couldn’t resist. (Did I mention that I was a real a**hole back then?)
My wife (she needs a name, let’s call her “Laura”) got a new job as an auditor for a company that had offices all over Northern Illinois. She would drive from town to town, making sure their books balanced.
Before she started the new job, a package arrived in the mail. It contained a little plastic bottle in a little cardboard box. An accompanying letter explained that she should fill the bottle with her pee and mail it to a lab in Pittsburgh for drug testing.
Drug testing? She was an auditor, a bookkeeper! What were they afraid of? That she might freak out on PCP and stab somebody with a number two pencil? But this was the Reagan era, and mandatory drug testing was all the rage.
Laura was absolutely mortified at the thought of shipping her personal, private bodily fluids to strangers back East, but rules were rules, so she complied.
A week later, she got a phone call from Human Resources. Her urine sample hadn’t arrived at the laboratory in Pittsburgh and she couldn’t start work until she had been tested. Shaken, Laura swore that she had shipped her pee.
An investigation was launched.
Turned out that her urine sample had made it as far as a regional postal hub in Philadelphia, which recently had installed new, state-of-the-art machinery that applied a barcode to packages by stamping them, good and hard.
You guessed it. Laura’s plastic bottle of pee had ruptured, spraying the new machinery and some nearby postal workers as well.
Laura nearly died of mortification when she heard about this. My readers nearly died of laughter when they read about it. And I nearly died of strangulation a few hours later.
She threatened to divorce me. If only she had. It would have saved us the trouble a few years later.
Instead, we reached an accord: I would never write about Laura again without her permission, and she got to read my columns before they went to print.
So it was a happy ending only for my amused readers. I was annoyed at being censored by my wife. Laura was angry with me for embarrassing her.
But it was those postal workers in Philadelphia who were really pissed.