The Whizometer Olympics

“Did you just pee?”

I can honestly say that I’ve never shown such excited interest in the urinary habits of perfect strangers before Saturday evening. That’s when I walked into the gay bar where we were singing karaoke and discovered that the night before, the owners had installed a Whizometer in the men’s room.

The Whizometer is a device that, when installed onto the back of a urinal, uses a rotor set spinning by—well, you can visualize it yourself, I suppose—to measure in miles per hour the velocity of one’s flow. It then displays the result in glowing LED numbers atop the device. I noticed it first when I was washing my hands after dinner, attracted by the laminated sign over the flush handle explaining its use. Then I rushed out to tell everyone in my party exactly what I’d discovered.

“You’re lying,” they all told me. Luckily, I’d anticipated this Negative Nancy response and had snapped some photos with my phone. My best friend immediately went in to investigate. A few minutes later he came out, his mouth pulled into an amazed expression. “It works,” he said.

“What’d you get?” I asked.

“Sixty,” he said. I was suitably impressed. Actually, I thought it would be more, considering that my best friend is the king of the Austin Powers pee. You might remember the scene from that movie, in which it sounds as if Austin is done with his business, but then keeps on going for a ridiculously long period of time, over and over again.

“Hey, go pee,” I ordered one of the bar’s patrons that I knew, kind of. He looked at me strangely. “I want to see what your Whizometer score is. I could take a picture of it if you want. Oh hey! I can do video!” I said, brandishing my phone. When he recoiled and gave me the look one might give a sunglasses-wearing stranger standing at the edge of a school playground sporting a pair of naked, hairy legs protruding from the bottom of a grimy trenchcoat, I realized that although I’d meant to say I’d take a photo of his Whizometer score, he might have thought I implied something else entirely.

So for the rest of the night as informal scorekeeper of the Whizometer Olympics, whenever I noticed someone walking back in the direction of the men’s room and then returning a suitable time later, I would call out to the guy and ask, “Did you just pee?” If they had, I didn’t have to explain myself. I’d get a surprised, sheepish grin, followed by an answer like, Yeah, forty! Is that good?, or Well, I didn't really have to go, so it was only ten. . . .

My best friend had to go again later in the evening, so I figured if there was anyone who wouldn’t mind me watching the Whizometer in use, it was him. “See?” he said, crowing with pleasure as he deftly managed to set the rotor churning. “Fifty-six . . . fifty-eight. You try it.”

“I haven't had much to drink,” I said. But I was game. I unzipped and gave it a go. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the accuracy necessary to pinpoint my flow into the exact spot necessary to make the thing light up. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was making the wheel travel backwards.

My friend doubled over in silent laughter, and then on tippy-toes ran out of the restroom and back to the table, so he could giggle about my failure to everyone I knew. In fact, I was still adjusting my fly when I dashed out after him with the goal of trying to contain the damage he might do. “. . . Four!” I heard him crowing as I caught up, at our table.

With all the dignity I could muster, I cut into his lying liar’s lies. “It was a six,” I said coldly. “Not a four. And anyway,” I continued, cutting short anything anyone could said. “When some of us have so many handfuls that we have to haul out and arrange before proceeding, it’s difficult to aim with the simple precision of a peashooter.”

“Wait,” said another friend. “Which one of you is the peashooter?”

“It takes several able-bodied and trained professionals to manage a firehose,” I finished, inspired by metaphor. Sadly, no one was buying it. They all smirked behind their hands. I decided to change the subject. “I wonder how they’d make something that measured number twos.”

“Or what they’d call it,” said one friend. “A Poopometer.”

“Scatometer,” said another. A moment later, he added, “I don’t think you’d want to hit the velocity records on that one.”

The five of us standing around the table simultaneously clenched, winced, and made similar pained expressions. “Nuh-uh,” we all said as one.